Earlier quoted context omitted.
This could mean the future goes one of the two ways. Engineers get lazy and converge on using only programming languages which AIs understand or have been trained on, or we forget about this waste of time and work on more important problems to solve in society other than the lack of an AI to be our crutch. Sadly, I think the former is more likely.
Programmers are per se lazy, at least that is, what i always thought, that it is mostly about automation. With spending little time on survival, we get the time to work on more important problems. Whatever those are. It is not an either or, that is what i try to say! :)
Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
511–520 of 752 posts
Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#512I 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…
Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#513I 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.
These are partly the same reasons I don't voluntarily use proprietary services at all. I don't want to train someone else's model, nor help them build a profile on me. Even if they're not involved in adtech—a rarity nowadays—you have no guarantees of how this data will be used in the future.
For AI tools, there's currently no alternative. Large corporations are building silos around their models, and by using their services you're giving them perpetual access to your inputs. Even if they later comply with data protection laws and allow you to delete your profile, they won't "untrain" their models, so your data is still in there somewhere. Considering that we're currently talking about 32,000 tokens worth of input, and soon people uploading their whole codebases to it, that's an unprecedented amount of data they can learn from, instead of what they can gather from web search terms. No wonder adtech is salivating at opening up the firehose for you to feed them even more data.
The use cases of AI tools are also different, and more personal. While we use search engines for looking things up on the web, and some personal information can be extracted from that, LLMs are used in a conversational way, and often involve much more personal information. It's an entirely different ballpark of privacy concerns.
Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#514Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just wait until sponsors start paying to have ChatGPT incept ideas into your mind. "Crucial next step is to buy some Rogaine", but significantly less obvious. Or other less obvious but highly impactful behavior modification like the algorithms used by TikTok/Instagram that push you in a certain direction or reinforce existing beliefs.
Or the ones already used by Google. Sarcasm aside, at least there’sa fighting chance chatgpt will remain a paid and ad free service. There’s likely to be a lot of competition soon
Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for your well written response. I found it informative as I'm also currently exploring ways to leverage ChatGPT in my daily workflow. I also found it interesting that your answer kind of mirrors the writing style of ChatGPT, especially at the end there. I'm not saying you used it to write that response by the way, just that it may become more and more common for people to adopt this style the more ChatGPT's…
I suppose it was part of the "joke", but YOUR answer is the one written in ChatGPT style, not OP. I was thinking that maybe in the near future it will be "better" to write with a couple of mistakes here and there just to prove your humanity. Like the common "loose" instead of "lose" mistake, it will be like a stamp proving that you are a human writing.
Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#516Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can I just say that Im actually become scared reading your comment? Personally I would never ask chatGPT these questions because for me these questions are hard to verify, and knowing how often AI likes to hallucinate.. I just can't trust it. You mentioned 50/50 correctness in domain questions. I can't be sure that other hard to verify questions do not follow these percentage..
It IS dangerous. You must apply critical thinking to what’s in front of you. You can’t blindly believe what this thing generates! Much like heavy machinery, it’s a game changer when used correctly, and likewise it can be extremely damaging if you use it without appropriate care.
Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#518Writing: Use GPT to help you write articles, reports, essays, or any other type of text. You can provide GPT with a topic, and it will generate a coherent piece of writing that you can use as a starting point. However, it's important to note that the output from GPT should be used as a tool for inspiration and should always be reviewed and edited by a human to ensure accuracy and readability.
Content Creation: Use GPT to generate ideas for social media posts, blog titles, headlines, and email subject lines. This can save you a lot of time and help you come up with catchy and engaging content.
Language Translation: GPT can be used for translation of text from one language to another. You can input the text in the source language, and GPT will generate the translation in the target language. However, it's important to note that the quality of the translation may not be perfect and may require further human review.
Personalization: GPT can be used to personalize content for customers by generating personalized emails, recommendations or marketing messages based on their previous interactions and behavior.
Research: Use GPT to help you with research by generating summaries or insights on a given topic. You can input a research question or a keyword, and GPT will generate relevant insights based on the available data.
It's important to note that while GPT can be a helpful tool for productivity, it should be used with caution and always reviewed by a human to ensure accuracy and clarity.
Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#519Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What's the name of that "thing" that does "something" I could remember the name of one adult entertainment star. I thought this is where I can finally put this ChatGPT to use. It told me anything adult is off-limits. I’m glad that OpenAI can decide what’s good and bad for us.
They are not deciding what is good for us, they decide what is good for their public image, and that kind of controversy is certainly not something they'd like to venture into.
Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#520Instead, I plug in certain paragraphs and ask “Does the following paragraph about file descriptors / environment vs. shell variables / fork vs. exec contain any technical errors? If so, please tell me what errors there are, and also provide a more correct alternative statement.” I take what I learn from the output and verify it on a site like StackOverflow.
This has proven to be an effective alternative to starting directly with StackOverflow. Oftentimes I find that “I don’t know what I don’t know”, and am therefore unable to phrase a certain question in a way which is suitable for StackOverflow’s (very specific) expectations. Usually that’s because the question I want to ask is predicated on a series of assumptions, any one of which could be incorrect (and would therefore result in my question being downvoted and/or closed, since it makes the question itself less-broadly applicable to the average user).
But I can ask ChatGPT that same question, and get a correction in my understanding without the loss of those sweet, sweet internet points. At the very least, what I learn from ChatGPT can help me phrase a question which is more suitable for a public forum like SO.