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

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421–430 of 752 posts

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

#421
I used it to write a regular expression to find some strings (I can never remember the syntax). I used it to double check some logic that I wrote “here is my input data, is this what my output should look like based on these rules.” I guess it could’ve written the code too. I used it to figure out what bike chain I needed. Asked a tax question, and the rest has been f-ing around. gpt-3 is very bad at chess, comes up w banal fiction, but is good at synthesizing non-fiction.

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

#422
post #402

I have a few conversations going. My most productive is a therapy session with ChatGPT as therapist. I told it my values, my short term goals, and some areas in my life where I'd like to have more focus and areas where I would like to spend less time. Some days we are retrospective and some days we are planning. My therapist gets me back on track, never judges, and has lots of motivational ideas for me. All aligned w…

The robots are even coming for therapists. Yikes!

I mean, is it really so surprising that ChatGPT is replacing jobs whose primary function is.. to chat with people?

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

#424

I have a few conversations going. My most productive is a therapy session with ChatGPT as therapist. I told it my values, my short term goals, and some areas in my life where I'd like to have more focus and areas where I would like to spend less time. Some days we are retrospective and some days we are planning. My therapist gets me back on track, never judges, and has lots of motivational ideas for me. All aligned w…

I’d be terrified to do this: - the insight into your mind that a private for profit company gets is immense and potentially very damaging when weaponized (either through a “whoops we got hacked” moment or intentionally for the next level of adtech) - chatgpt and other LLMs are known to hallucinate. What if it’s advice is wrong or makes you worse in the long term because it’s just regurgitating whatever at you?

> chatgpt and other LLMs are known to hallucinate. What if it’s advice is wrong or makes you worse in the long term because it’s just regurgitating whatever at you?

Therapy isn't magic always-correct advice either. It's about shifting your focus, attitudes, thought patterns through social influence, not giving you the right advice on each and every step.

Even if it's just whatever, being heard out in a nonjudgmental manner, acknowledged, prompted to reflect, does a lot of good.

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

#425
post #402

I have a few conversations going. My most productive is a therapy session with ChatGPT as therapist. I told it my values, my short term goals, and some areas in my life where I'd like to have more focus and areas where I would like to spend less time. Some days we are retrospective and some days we are planning. My therapist gets me back on track, never judges, and has lots of motivational ideas for me. All aligned w…

The robots are even coming for therapists. Yikes!

I can see it as a reasonable supplement for people who have already been to therapy, are not suffering anything too serious and just need a little boost.

I think one could look at it as an augmented journaling technique

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

#426
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…

I find it is like having a brilliant intern that is not super consistent in taking their antipsychotic medication

> I find it is like having a brilliant intern that is not super consistent in taking their antipsychotic medication

This is fantastic.

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

#427
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.…

So, are you using Google search? Your argument of "I don't trust it with my data and won't until you can self host" should apply to google search as well, no? And alternative take is that for whatever reason you've decided you didn't want to use new tools, a posteriori created an argument to justify that, and haven't realized the same argument applies to your old tools.

I think it's more about personal data being used for training.

I may use Google to look up if that slight itch I feel is a symptom of cancer (I'm exaggerating), and I store mails with personal details, my calendar, and messages on Google. But I also assume they're not using those texts to train an AI.

When you enter a code snippet or a personal question in ChatGPT, and press the little thumbs up/down next to the answer, you're adding your data to a training set. The next generation of the model might regurgitate that text verbatim.

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

#428
post #402

I have a few conversations going. My most productive is a therapy session with ChatGPT as therapist. I told it my values, my short term goals, and some areas in my life where I'd like to have more focus and areas where I would like to spend less time. Some days we are retrospective and some days we are planning. My therapist gets me back on track, never judges, and has lots of motivational ideas for me. All aligned w…

The robots are even coming for therapists. Yikes!

https://www.zachtronics.com/eliza/

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

#429
post #102

The past week I used GPT for about 80% of my commit messages. I put it in a terminal command so all I type is 'commit' and that's equivalent to: git add . && git commit -m "message" && git push. The message is generated automatically via the GPT API. I made it public in case anyone else wants to try/use/fork it: https://github.com/stevecondylios/gpt-generated-commit-messa... It's very convenient for README and docs c…

Seems rather costly to do it this way. Why not just leave an effectively empty commit message and then use GPT to generate a summary based on the diff only when you need one?

> GPT 3.5 turbo engine is 1/5th of a cent per 1000 tokens

Diffs vary in length, small ones might be a few dozen words (tokens); large ones can be much more. GPT 3.5 Turbo's limit is 4096 tokens per question [1], meaning the most it can cost is 4/5ths of a cent per commit.

I average less than 10 commits per day, so if all my diffs are large, that will cost $0.08/day, or about $2.50/month.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/o...

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

#430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, are you using Google search? Your argument of "I don't trust it with my data and won't until you can self host" should apply to google search as well, no? And alternative take is that for whatever reason you've decided you didn't want to use new tools, a posteriori created an argument to justify that, and haven't realized the same argument applies to your old tools.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

This is not whataboutism.

GP identifies an action that analogous and holds certain properties as the original action, in the process illuminating how the issues of approach A exist in approach B.

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