Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 593 posts

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#191

Post by keithnz »

rcme wrote: post #14

Sometimes I wonder if I'm using the same ChatGPT as everyone else. I pay for GPT4 access in ChatGPT, and it is a really terrible writer. I also pay for Copilot, and I think a can count the number of times it has been helpful with one hand. I'm trying to get on this hype train, but I'm left with an empty feeling every time I try to seriously spend some time with these new tools.

they are tools, you have to learn how to use them.

I use chatgpt everyday and am getting better and better at asking questions to get the answers I want.

I used copilot when it was free, and it was best at boilerplate, and sometimes not bad at auto completing the next few lines, I didn't think it was worth paying for at the time. I use Codeium now, that works in a similar way, probably not quite as good as copilot in that it doesn't understand as many languages, but still does a reasonable job with boilerplate type code.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#192

Post by Kim_Bruning »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #27
rcme wrote: post #14

Sometimes I wonder if I'm using the same ChatGPT as everyone else. I pay for GPT4 access in ChatGPT, and it is a really terrible writer. I also pay for Copilot, and I think a can count the number of times it has been helpful with one hand. I'm trying to get on this hype train, but I'm left with an empty feeling every time I try to seriously spend some time with these new tools.

How impressed or unimpressed you are by it is a direct reflection of yourself and what you are trying to achieve with it. I find zero value in it. Others are very impressed by it, but I'm not very impressed by what they hold up as an example of its output. Sometimes I can only laugh when it's horribly wrong, but they herald it as amazing. The whole thing reminds me of the blockchain hype train. Still using and loving…

It might depend on your workflow. In many workflows (mine included), you tend to start out with a bunch of messy ideas and then slowly polish them into something usable. ChatGPT is a very powerful tool along the way here. It can help organize things, it can help rephrase your thoughts, and it can help solve minor issues along the way. Sometimes it can even do some fairly fancy things that previously could only be done by a human.

For now I'd treat it more like a sparring partner who can help you with your ideas and support you throughout your process, rather than a magical genie that can magically solve your problem for you. And in this manner I find it to be very useful indeed.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#194

Post by neodypsis »

weinzierl wrote: post #18
rcme wrote: post #14

Sometimes I wonder if I'm using the same ChatGPT as everyone else. I pay for GPT4 access in ChatGPT, and it is a really terrible writer. I also pay for Copilot, and I think a can count the number of times it has been helpful with one hand. I'm trying to get on this hype train, but I'm left with an empty feeling every time I try to seriously spend some time with these new tools.

There is also a huge difference between code generation (be it Copilot or ChatGPT). With Code you still have the compiler that rejects the utter nonsense and then you hopefully have tests to check if what was generated makes sense. With prose it's all your manual work again to check. If your text is mundane it might be trivial but for anything a pg would write I guess an AI is pretty useless in its current state.

I wonder if someone has tried to chain ChatGPT's output with static analyzers/compilers/linters in a loop to improve the final response.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#195

Post by hammyhavoc »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #192
hammyhavoc wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How impressed or unimpressed you are by it is a direct reflection of yourself and what you are trying to achieve with it. I find zero value in it. Others are very impressed by it, but I'm not very impressed by what they hold up as an example of its output. Sometimes I can only laugh when it's horribly wrong, but they herald it as amazing. The whole thing reminds me of the blockchain hype train. Still using and loving…

It might depend on your workflow. In many workflows (mine included), you tend to start out with a bunch of messy ideas and then slowly polish them into something usable. ChatGPT is a very powerful tool along the way here. It can help organize things, it can help rephrase your thoughts, and it can help solve minor issues along the way. Sometimes it can even do some fairly fancy things that previously could only be don…

Can you give an example on how you organize via ChatGPT? Keep in mind that this is a term I associate with project management systems like Active Collab, note-taking systems like Obsidian.md and OneNote, task managers like MyLifeOrganized, so your idea of what that entails might be quite different.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#196

Post by whoami_nr »

passion__desire wrote: post #108
hammyhavoc wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks very similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35898426

In how many different ways can a simple phrase "I love writing" can be expanded so that the variations don't resemble each other?

Maybe then, you will like playing this game based on GPT: https://gpt.43z.one/

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#197

Post by AverageDude »

AltruisticGapHN wrote: post #185

It's not just writing. The big problem with the chat interface is it pretends to be acting and reasoning like a human - but it's more like a person with a half brain chopped off (cf> McGilchrist The Divided Brain), and even then, it has no embodied awareness. And so I wonder how it will affect people and their relationships. If you already have eg. anxiety and often times a little bit of frustration in trying to get…

Yup. I personally have to spend a lot of energy to concentrate in team meetings because my brain keep telling me that I can ignore some information here and there and get back to it whenever I need it using the replay and rewind. Most of the meetings are not recorded. I actively have to keep check on this reflex of my brain learned from Youtube and Netflix.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#198

Post by dumpsterdiver »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #93
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #50

This reads like Plato's warning (through Socrates' words) 2,400 years ago that writing will make people forgetful: "For this invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have inven…

Plato's criticism is very true on an individual basis. What he didn't consider was the effect the written word had on a social scale in terms of being able to exchange ideas over physical and temporal distances. It turns out that was a greater benefit that to some extent makes up for losing the exceptionally well trained memory of scholars from a verbal tradition. Not that that last part isn't a loss though, and his…

> You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding;

> What he didn't consider was the effect the written word had on a social scale in terms of being able to exchange ideas over physical and temporal distances.

Why would his words be less potent when applied to billions of people, as opposed to only a few? Are those billions not just as susceptible to fallacy as the elite few?

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#199

Post by jiggawatts »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #188
jiggawatts wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not impressed!? Here on HN, a few days ago, there was a post about Microsoft publishing a GitHub repo that contained a "table recognizer AI". Basically, you feed it PDFs that contain horrible scanned images of finance records, and it spits out Excel spreadsheets. For some reason, Microsoft had just "thrown this over the fence" and released it to the public for free. This, despite man-years of effort developing…

I mean, sure, I guess that's neat, but Kofax OmniPage Ultimate has been a thing for years at this point and does the whole OCR from a crappy scan thing, including reformatting it into whatever format you want. Can even take data from forms and digitize it into editable text or stick it into a database. Goes back to the '80s. Sure, different methodology, but it's not something we haven't already been doing for yonks.…

Neat? Neat!?

Generally speaking, Kofax -- or any other off-the-shelf OCR tool -- can't process tables properly. They get confused by headings, total rows, and the like. Hence the R&D effort by that Microsoft team to develop a purpose-built AI-driven tool that can specifically identify these elements and then output the result not just as ASCII text, but as a spreadsheet.

Either way, whether you are talking about the Microsoft AI or the Kofax tool, the effort is measured in man-years, man-decades, or perhaps even man-centuries.

You can just ask ChatGPT to do similar tasks for you in seconds.

A real-world use case I had for GPT is to fix up the formatting of badly copy-pasted tables. E.g.: I had created a cloud VM and pasted the summary tab into text editor, and only then noticed that the cells ended up on individual rows, interleaved with the headings. Even if I had used a regex to undo the damage, the headings mess up the alternating row interleave. E.g.:

    Overview
    Hardware
    SKU
    A2
    Zone
    2
    Software
    Operating System
    Windows
    Image
    Licensed
    Yes
Chat GPT can "undo the damage" because it understands not only what text is likely to be a heading, property, or value... but it has also seen specifically the properties of the type of cloud VM I was working on! It understands these things to the same level as I do, and can fix up the formatting the same way I would.

Sit down for a second, and ask yourself: How much time and effort would you have to invest to solve this style of problem, in general. E.g.: given some random, broken table formatting for an arbitrary but well-known subject, fix up the formatting.

Years of effort?

Decades?

Post reply on HN