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

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

#331

Post by wizzwizz4 »

yadingus wrote: post #316
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…

> And I have no idea why things are like this. Propaganda. These tools are not for the people, and I'm convinced the idea of how much better our lives could be if technology was thoughtfully designed to truly serve the user is purposely and subtly filtered from the collective conversation.

The idea is discussed quite a lot on the Fediverse. It's a relatively small movement, but so's the digital accessibility movement, and look where that's going.

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

#332

Post by Eliezer »

Plain old Bing Chat - which I feel a bit better about using because I'm not paying for it and not contributing to the problem that way - used for its original intended purpose of search. Compared to trying out keywords and reading through the results myself, it's faster to ask the question, let Bing read the pages, and let Bing summarize the results to me.

I recently got access to Anthropic Claude, which I don't feel as squeamish about using as I'd feel about paying $20/month to OpenAI and helping them destroy the world, so if there's more that can be done that way maybe I'll find it out soon.

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

#333

Post by safety1st »

nibbleshifter wrote: post #267
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.…

I don't use them either. I've played around with ChatGPT and Copilot a little, and found that they often are subtly, but very confidently wrong in their output when asked to perform a programming task. Sure you could spend ages refining the prompt etc, but its going to be faster to just write the fucking code yourself in the first place most of the time. Then there's the privacy/security concerns...

I've only toyed with ChatGPT, but what I like is that it knows about stuff I don't. I'm reasonably informed about the tools, practices etc. in my field, but I don't know everything, and it's been trained on all kinds of stuff I've never heard of.

In practice the stuff it will suggest to me is sort of random, it may or may not be the best choice for the task at hand, but it's a form of discovery I didn't have previously. The fact that when it tells me about e.g. a new library it can also mock up some sample code that might or might not work is a pleasant bonus.

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

#335

Post by plagiarist »

jmann99999 wrote: post #72
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Generally rewriting emails for clarity... This is the sort of thing that will force a lot of legal teams to shutdown access to GPT-4 api/gui from internal networks. Ppl never think of unintended consequences. Ask it a prompt fine but don't provide internal information as an input.

Yeah, I have found I need to be careful. When I have used it, there is no confidential information in the email. I do pay attention to that. That said,I think it will be interesting as Microsoft introduces this into Office 365. You bring up a great point. Most people will not realize they are sending potentially confidential information to Microsoft. Perhaps it's no different than Grammarly... But I think you are rig…

I think companies are fine with sending confidential data to Microsoft (Office, GitHub, Azure...). It's just so far unclear with ChatGPT if that data can come back out. It has apparently already leaked some user queries, so that was a very reasonable concern.

If they put it in Office and guarantee siloing information the legal departments will just have a regular contract to review and approve.

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

#336

Post by rr808 »

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…

Are there any good open source clients you recommend? At work we're not allowed to use chatgpt so having our own would be nice.

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

#337

Post by amolgupta »

yosito wrote: post #190
qrybam wrote: post #182

I’ve been actively using it and it’s become my go-to in a lot of cases - Google is more for verification when I smell something off or if it doesn’t have up to date information. Here are some examples: • reviewing contract changes, explaining hard to parse legalese • advice on accounting/tax when billing international clients • visa application • boilerplate django code • learnt all about smtp relays, and requirement…

I'm excited about the potential of travel itineraries once extensions are available. What if I can tell it where I want to go, and it could just handle picking the best flights and accomodations for me and I didn't have to spend any time searching airline or hotel websites. I'm curious to know more detail about how you're using it for travel itineraries now.

I have used it to build travel itineraries and was tempted to write a travel app around that. Until I realized that some of the hotels and places it recommends do not actually exist or have existed in the past. It overconfidently also publishes broken booking links to these fake hotels. I am hoping that with chatGPT plugins, it would get better.

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

#338

Post by ericpauley »

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…

GPT/Codex is truly the pandas master. Much of my productivity boost from using these tools has just been not having to sift through pandas docs or SO.

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

#339

Post by doublespanner »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #310
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…

Can you explain how ChatGPT's soccer itinerary is any different from the top google search [1] for the subject? Is ChatGPT's response any more useful or meaningfully different from the practice routines at the link? [1] https://www.soccerhelp.com/soccer-practice-plans.shtml

In practice probably not; with google results there is an increasing feeling that it's entirely bullshit designed to sell something or get clicks...

A response from ChatGPT seems somehow more honest, even though it's just an aggregate of the former.

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

#340

Post by dizhn »

Karunamon wrote: post #324
dizhn wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Thanks for the clarification. It seems I misremembered it.
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