Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#321

Post by pmoriarty » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 12:24 PM UTC

travisgriggs wrote: post #65

I use it for coding, with mixed results, for getting me going in the right direction. I take everything it says with a grain of salt. Through some original queries about some people, I came to realize that a GPT is a stochastic parrot optimized for plausibility. Given a Venn diagram of plausible and reality, they have a large overlap. Our ideas of plausibility are informed by common repetitive observations of reality…

"Many of its elixir answers are very dated."

The library/language versioning problem is going to be a tough one to overcome, because most of the training data available doesn't specify the version of either, so an AI's response will be in an unpredictable version or even mix of versions.

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#322

Post by alchemist1e9 » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 12:24 PM UTC

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #220

barbarr wrote: post #40

For coding, I've been using it like Stack Overflow. It really decreases my barrier to doing work because I can ask lazy follow-up questions. For example, I might start out by asking it a question about a problem with Pandas like "How do I select rows of a dataframe where a column of lists of strings contains a string?". After that, GPT realizes I'm talking about Pandas, and I'm allowed to ask lazy prompts like "how d…

Exactly how I’m using it as well. It’s absolutely incredible as a coding productivity tool.

Same here and GPT-4 was definitely a noticeable improvement.

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#323

Post by re-thc » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 12:25 PM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #266

imiric wrote: post #242

I might be in the minority here, but I'm not using any AI tools so far, probably to my detriment. I don't trust it with my data, and won't rely on such tools until I can self-host them, and they can be entirely offline. There is some progress in this space, but they're not great yet, and I don't have the resources to run them. I'm hoping that the requirements will go down, or I might just host it on a cloud provider.…

Me neither, but I think before long people like us are going to be left behind. We're like people who insist on continuing to ride horses in the age of the automobile.

Automobile were faster or equivalent to horses (even early 1s). At the moment GPT isn't.

Well I hope... I've definitely seen teams and codebases with worse output than GPT so...

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#324

Post by Karunamon » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 12:26 PM UTC

dizhn wrote: post #293

bennysonething wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what my employer is doing, they pay so that our internal data (from employee queries) does not become part of the model. They've blocked the public chat gpt etc.

openAI claims that user data is not being used for training since March 1st.

Only for the API. If you are using the chatGPT website, that is fair game.

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/5722486-how-your-data-is...

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#325

Post by rajnathani » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 12:27 PM UTC

jwally wrote: post #288

I just asked it to make an itinerary for a 45 minute long 6 year old boy's soccer practice. It was almost perfect. It needs to be tweaked (3 minutes for cool down?) but it did 95% of the heavy lifting. I also asked it for vacation ideas with nice cabins and trailer hookups with outdoor activities for kids and nice cabins within 200 miles of where I live - it was almost perfect in its response. I have trouble starting…

> I have trouble starting things from scratch, but once a framework exists I'm usually solid and can refine it to where I want it.

This is so true for GPT’s benefit. As an anecdote here: We wrote some C++ code involving multiple HTTP servers, where while we ultimately wrote the exact code we wanted ourselves, but the starting code provided to us by ChatGPT really helped speed up the process to having finished off the C++ code’s core feature down in one small coding session.

I think the “starting things from scratch” in cases like these can be partially mentally exhausting when having to search the web.

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#326

Post by sillysaurusx » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 12:27 PM UTC

imiric wrote: post #314

sillysaurusx wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't trust it with my data, and won't rely on such tools until I can self-host them, and they can be entirely offline. Interestingly, my point to The Verge was exactly that. https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1633456289639542789 Me: > So, imagine it. You'll have a ChatGPT on your laptop -- your very own, that you can use for whatever purposes you want. Personally, I'll be hooking it up to read my emails and le…

That's an interesting interview, thanks for sharing. Though I draw the line with using these tools at helping me out with the drudgery of daily work. I don't want them to impersonate me, or write emails on my behalf. I cringe whenever Gmail suggests the next phrase it thinks I want to write. It's akin to someone trying to end your sentences for you. Stop putting words in my mouth! The recent Microsoft 365 Copilot pre…

> The amount of resources required to run this on personal machines is still prohibitively high. I saw in one of your posts you mentioned you use 8xA100s. That's a crazy amount of compute unreachable by most people

FWIW LLaMA 65B can run on a single MacBook Pro now. Things move crazy fast. (Or did, before Facebook started DMCA'ing everyone.)

I did a bad job of explaining that personal GPUs will be sufficient in the near future. Thanks for pointing that out.

> thanks for leading the way, and spreading the word about why self-hosting these tools is important. I hope that our vision becomes a reality for many soon.

Thanks for talking about the issue at all. The whole reason I got into AI was to run these myself. It'll be a shame if only massive corporations can run models anyone cares about.

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#327

Post by Adrig » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 12:29 PM UTC

I recently started a newsletter [1] where I highlight and interview artists. I'm often using ChatGPT to help me come up with interesting questions. To be honest the output quality is average and I rarely use it as is. But I found that this is a great tool to nurture ideas, like a rubber duck talking back to you. It's good to throw a lot of ideas and explore new angles. The process of writing the prompts also helps me put into words what I want, which is really helpful in and of itself.

[1] https://arterald.com

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#328

Post by applesauce004 » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 12:29 PM UTC

fooker wrote: post #306

imiric wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really doubt it would be faster to write code manually, even with the state of AI tools today. Even with very sophisticated keyboard macros and traditional autocompletion, someone using GPT would outperform anyone who doesn't. Think of the amount of boilerplate and tests you write, and tedious API documentation lookups you do daily; that all goes away with GPT. The amount of work to double check whether the generat…

People who are downvoting this: please set up and use GitHub copilot once, maybe for some auxiliary thing not connected to your main task. It is not just a tool for students to write assignments. In experienced hands it can easily double your productivity.

I agree with this statement a lot. Using Copilot saves you a lot of tedium if you are comfortable with the language already. If you are new to the language, then it might trip you up a bit (at least in its current incarnation).

Here is an example where it helps. I tried to initiate a connection to a Mongodb server using Python. While i have used many databases before, I have never used Python and MongoDB together. So, i knew i would have to have some kind of MongoDB library, a connection Factory and a connection string. I could have googled all of these things.

I did the following in VS Code using CoPilot. def get_db():

   """Initialise a MongoDB connection to a local database"""

It then automatically filled in the rest.

   db = getattr(g, '_database', None)

   if db is None:

       db = g._database =

MongoClient('mongodb://localhost:27017/')

   return db

Notice above, that it knew i was using a flask environment and added the line getattr.

Why this is a productivity boost is that i did not have to alt-tab to a browser, search for "pythong mongodb tutorial example" and then type it out. I was able to do the whole thing from VS Code and since i use vsvim, i could do this without taking my fingers off of the keyboard.

This is the next jump since autocompletion. I like it.

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#329

Post by itsuka » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 12:30 PM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #290

itsuka wrote: post #123

Since I use ChatGPT regularly, I decided to create my own client. I prefer to avoid third-party services that require privilege escalation like Grammarly and Copilot. I have developed distinct profiles for different tasks, each with its own system prompt and input method. After getting the hang of it, I plan to tweak the parameters as well. Here are some of the profiles: Explainer: a default, general purpose Q&A. The…

"I prefer to avoid third-party services that require privilege escalation like Grammarly and Copilot" How do they require privilege escalation?

I'm sorry, I think I might have used "privilege escalation" in a confusing way here. To clarify, these services sometimes need access to the surrounding environment to enhance the AI's context and prevent misuse. For example, according to the Chrome Web Store, Grammarly may need to monitor network, mouse, and keystrokes (from non-sensitive input fields), as well as location data. Meanwhile, Copilot may require access to adjacent code or open tabs, which I believe is now configurable. As I'm not a security researcher or user of these products, I may get these details wrong.

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#330

Post by VoodooJuJu » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 12:30 PM UTC

Useful things:

- As a thesaurus

- What's the name of that "thing" that does "something" - kind of like fuzzy matching

- A starting point for writing particular functions. For example, I wanted a certain string-manipulation function written in C, and it gave me a decent skeleton. However they're almost always very inefficient, so I have to optimize them.

Things I've tried, that others seem to be blown away by, that I find useless:

- Rewriting emails or documentation: I see no clarity improvement from ChatGPT rewording what I say, and sometimes information is lost in the process.

- Outliner or idea prompter: I don't see an improvement over just traditional internet search and reading over various articles and books.

For me, its capabilities do not match the marketing and hype. It's basically just a slightly better search engine. All of the above use-cases can be accomplished with some Google-fu. For people who don't know any programming or about using search engine operators, I could see why they might be impressed by it.