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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?

#571

Post by telchior »

gbro3n wrote: post #567
Thorentis wrote: post #175

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.

I wonder if as more and more online content is AI generated, it will be harder to find human generated content to train the AI's on? Like a cumulative echo effect.

I've actually wondered if a job may exist in the future that's effectively just AI documentation. That's already what you have with power users on, say, Stack Overflow providing a ton of content that ChatGPT basically reprints; they don't even get paid for it.

The cool and interesting thing about that theoretical job is that the writers of it wouldn't have to write well; they could just slop out a ton of information and ChatGPT could clean it up and make it consumable.

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

#572

Post by hypertele-Xii »

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…

> "How do I select rows of a dataframe where a column of lists of strings contains a string?"

Literally just googled that and the first result:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53342715/pandas-datafram...

You're not using it like Stack Overflow. It's actually regurgitating Stack Overflow, except with errors hallucinated in.

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

#574

Post by mvaliente2001 »

yosito wrote: post #367
TigeriusKirk wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bing in creative mode really struggled with this task, and I don't think I could have successfully forced it. Bing in precise mode had no trouble at all. Me - Let's generate an acrostic sentence for "jack and jill went up the hill" Bing - Sure! Here’s an acrostic sentence for the phrase “jack and jill went up the hill”: Just as children know and never doubt, joyfully in love, laughing while enjoying nature together u…

A truly "intelligent" AI would probably have told me that the name for this is an acrostic sentence. Now that I know, I tried a few more prompts. Me: "Can you generate an acrostic sentence for "hello"?" GPT-4: "Happy elephants love leaping over obstacles." Me: "Can you pick a secret word and generate an acrostic sentence for it?" GPT: "Secret word: KANGAROO. Kindly assisting neighbors, generous animals roam openly ou…

Another evidence is to ask GPT for a link with a reference for the answers it gives: it'll generate them instead of copying them.

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

#575

Post by sorokod »

xkcd1963 wrote: post #566
sorokod wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that computers could return wrong answers to appear human, is as old as the Turing Test.

Maybe this is somehow underlyingly correlated with Spammers writting purposefully in wrong English

You probably mean scammers. As I remember it, in that case the scammers pretend to have their responders to self select for gullabilit.

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

#576

Post by cyrialize »

mindcrime wrote: post #56

For being productive? Not at all for the most part. I haven't really found anything that I do that I can punt to ChatGPT. I guess I could have used it to help me write this response, but what would have been the point? The little bit of time I spend messing with it (and Bard now that I have access) is mostly just for fun; trying different jailbreaks and creating ridiculous scenarios and seeing what kind of reaction I…

I agree with what you're saying about writing a response. I don't quite see the point of using ChatGPT to write comments on Hacker News, Reddit, etc.

If you're reaching to ChatGPT to write a response for you, did you really want to write a response in the first place?

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

#577

Post by koheripbal »

HervalFreire wrote: post #486
utopcell wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the three laws of robotics are already weaved into the LLM. Seems like a necessary step for this kind of usage.

Those rules weren't meant to generate societal harmony. They were made to have a contradiction which in turn could generate a good plot. Remember what happened in Isaac Asimov's iRobot?

It's also important to note that with modern LLMs, they wouldn't even work. It's too easy to convince the LLM to violate its own rules.

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

#578

Post by ativzzz »

gabrieledarrigo wrote: post #477
chrbr wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, and for things like cognitive behavioral therapy, where the "rules" are well-known and well-represented in its training corpus, it's amazing.

Guys, you are really crazy. Please find a real therapist with experience.

Personally I wouldn't use gpt as a therapist but I've seen enough bad or useless therapists in my time to say that it's worth a shot for most people, especially if you need help now

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

#579

Post by haha69 »

ChildOfChaos wrote: post #496
hermannj314 wrote: post #349

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…

Really? I've seen a few people say this, but every time I have tried it, it's been awful, everything it says is so generic and annoying, like it's from a buzzfeed self help article, I would love to use it to help me figure out what I need, what I Can do better, how I can grow etc, I feel kinda stuck in life and i'd love to have some method to figure out what i need to focus on and improve, so that is one of the thing…

You can ask it to give you specific guidance.

"Give me something I can do for X minutes a day and I'll check back with you every Y days and you can give me the next steps"

"Give me the next concrete step I can take"

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

#580

Post by gwd »

hermannj314 wrote: post #541
danecjensen wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share the outline of your prompt. Obviously not anything personal but I'd like to see an example of how you give it your values and goals.

I don't understand the nuances of prompting. I literally talk to it like I would a person. I say "My values are [ ], and I want to make sure when I do things they are aligned." And then later, I will say "I did this today, how does that align with the values I mentioned earlier?" [and we talk] I am most definitely not qualified for one of those prompt engineering jobs. Lol. I am typing English into a chat box. No A/B…

> I say "My values are [ ], and I want to make sure when I do things they are aligned."

> And then later, I will say "I did this today, how does that align with the values I mentioned earlier?" [and we talk]

That's a prompt; and one I don't think I would have tried, even from your first post.

Prompting overall is still quite experimental. There are patterns that generally work, but you often have to just try several different approaches. If you find a prompt works well, it's worth sharing.

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