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Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

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Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#151

Post by sim7c00 »

sim7c00 wrote: post #144

i LOVE this despite feeling for the impacted devs and service. love me some good guitar tabs, and honestly id totally beleive the chatgpt here hah.. what a wonderful incident / bug report my god. totally sorry for the trouble and amazing find and fix honestly. sorry i am more amazed than sorry :D. thanks for sharing this !!

oh, and yeah. totally the guy who plays guitar 20+ years now and cant read musical notation. why? we got tabs for 20+ years.

so i am happy you implemented this, and will now look at using your service. thx chatgpt, and you.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#152

Post by andrewljohnson »

croes wrote: post #129
suzzer99 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of. IMO this has always been the killer use case for AI—from Google Maps to Grammarly. I discovered Grammarly at the very last phase of writing my book. I accepted maybe 1/3 of its suggestions, which is pretty damn good considering my book had already been edited by me dozens of times AND professionally copy-edited. But if I'd have accepted all of Gram…

And that’s how everything gets flattened to same style/voice/etc. That’s like getting rid of all languages and accents and switch to the same language

The same could be said for books about writing, like Williams or Strunk and White. The trick is to not apply what you learn indiscriminately.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#153

Post by kragen »

b112 wrote: post #134
kragen wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. So far it seems to be a lot better at creative idea generation than at writing correct code, though apparently these "agentic" modes can often get close enough after enough iteration. (I haven't tried things like Cursor yet.) I agree that it's also not currently capable of judging those creative ideas, so I have to do that.

This sort of discourse really grinds my gears. The framing of it, the conceptualization. It's not creative at all, any more than taking the sum of text on a topic, and throwing a dart at it. It's a mild, short step beyond a weighted random, and certainly not capable of any real creativity. Myriads of HN enthusiasts often chime in here "Are humans any more creative" and other blather. Well, that's a whataboutism, and…

I understand. I share the foreboding, but I try to subscribe to the converse of Hume's guillotine.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#154

Post by bryanlarsen »

croes wrote: post #129
suzzer99 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of. IMO this has always been the killer use case for AI—from Google Maps to Grammarly. I discovered Grammarly at the very last phase of writing my book. I accepted maybe 1/3 of its suggestions, which is pretty damn good considering my book had already been edited by me dozens of times AND professionally copy-edited. But if I'd have accepted all of Gram…

And that’s how everything gets flattened to same style/voice/etc. That’s like getting rid of all languages and accents and switch to the same language

Refusing 2/3rds of grammarly's suggestions flattens everything to the same style/voice?

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#155

Post by kragen »

Veen wrote: post #109
plemer wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Passive voice often adds length, impedes flow, and subtracts the useful info of who is doing something. Examples: * Active - concise, complete info: The manager approved the proposal. * Passive - wordy, awkward: The proposal was approved by the manager. * Passive - missing info: The proposal was approved. [by who?] Most experienced writers will use active unless they have a specific reason not to, e.g., to emphasize…

I always like to share this when the passive voice comes up: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNRhI4Cc_QmsihIjUtqro3uBk...

Pullum is fantastic, thanks! I didn't know he'd recorded video lectures on this topic.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#156

Post by kragen »

joshmarinacci wrote: post #147
kragen wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's boring. It's easy to come up with examples of the passive voice that aren't boring at all. It's everywhere in the best writing up to the 19th century. You just don't notice it when it's used well unless you're looking for it. Consider: > Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. This would not be improved by r…

I think what you were saying is that it depends entirely on the type of writing you’re doing and who your audience is.

I think those are important considerations, but it depends even more on what you are attempting to express in the sentence in question. There's plenty of active-voice phrasing in the Gettysburg Address and Ecclesiastes that would not be improved by rewriting it in the passive voice.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#157

Post by kragen »

brookst wrote: post #126
School-Cotton wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You used passive voice in the very first sentence of your comment. Rewriting “the points already made” to “the points people have already made” would not have improved it.

Thats not passive voice. Passive voice is painfully boring to read is active. The preamble can be read like “however”, and is unnecessary; what a former editor of mine called “throat-clearing words”.

Yes, the verb "is" in "Passive voice is painfully boring to read" is in the active voice, not the passive voice. But umanwizard was not saying that "is" was in the passive voice. Rather, they were saying that the past participle "made", in the phrase "the points already made", is a passive-voice use of the verb "make".

I don't know enough about English grammar to know whether this is correct, but it's not the assertion you took issue with.

Why am I not sure it's correct? If I say, "In addition to the blood so red," I am quite sure that "red" is not in the passive voice, because it's not even a verb. It's an adjective. Past participles are commonly used as adjectives in English in contexts that are unambiguously not passive-voice verbs; for example, in "Vito is a made man now," the past participle "made" is being used as an attributive adjective. And this is structurally different from the attributive-verb examples of "truly verbal adjectives" in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attributive_verb#English, such as "The cat sitting on the fence is mine," and "The actor given the prize is not my favorite;" we could grammatically say "Vito is a man made whole now". That page calls the "made man" use of participles "deverbal adjectives", a term I don't think I've ever heard before:

> Deverbal adjectives often have the same form as (and similar meaning to) the participles, but behave grammatically purely as adjectives — they do not take objects, for example, as a verb might. For example: (...) Interested parties should apply to the office.

So, is "made" in "the points already made" really in passive voice as it would be in "the points that are already made", is it deverbal as it would be in "the already-made points" despite its positioning after the noun (occasionally valid for adjectives, as in "the blood so red"), or is it something else? I don't know. The smoothness of the transition to "the points already made by those numbskulls" (clearly passive voice) suggests that it is a passive-voice verb, but I'm not sure.

In sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44493969 jcranmer says it's something called a "bare passive", but I'm not sure.

It's certainly a hilarious thing to put in a comment deploring the passive voice, at least.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#159

Post by dataflow »

suzzer99 wrote: post #53
kragen wrote: post #30

I've found this to be one of the most useful ways to use (at least) GPT-4 for programming. Instead of telling it how an API works, I make it guess, maybe starting with some example code to which a feature needs to be added. Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of. Then I change the API so that its code works. Conversely, I sometimes present it with some existing code and ask it what it does…

> Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of. IMO this has always been the killer use case for AI—from Google Maps to Grammarly. I discovered Grammarly at the very last phase of writing my book. I accepted maybe 1/3 of its suggestions, which is pretty damn good considering my book had already been edited by me dozens of times AND professionally copy-edited. But if I'd have accepted all of Gram…

Hasn't Microsoft Word has style checkers for things like passive voice for decades?

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#160

Post by scubbo »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #154
croes wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that’s how everything gets flattened to same style/voice/etc. That’s like getting rid of all languages and accents and switch to the same language

Refusing 2/3rds of grammarly's suggestions flattens everything to the same style/voice?

No - that was implicitly in response to the sentence:

> The problem is executives want to completely remove humans from the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous results.

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