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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?

#541

Post by hermannj314 »

danecjensen wrote: post #508
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…

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 testing, etc. If I don't like what it does I give it a rule to not do that anymore by saying "Please don't [ ] when you reply to me."

There is almost definitely a better way, but I'm just chatting with it. Asking it to roleplay or play a game seems to work. It loves to follow rules inside the context of "just playing a game".

This is probably too abstract to be meaningful though.

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

#542

Post by hsjqllzlfkf »

ornornor wrote: post #461
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not expressing that the concerns are invalid, they are expressing that one is held onto a higher standard than the other.

Agree to disagree then.

> They are not expressing that the concerns are invalid

> Agree to disagree then

Since you're discussing what I was expressing, I can tell you who's correct, since I know what I was expressing. And you're wrong. I wasn't expressing that the concerns are invalid. They're very valid.

Instead, what I was expressing was that OP doesn't actually have those concerns, not that they're invalid.

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

#543

Post by rajatsx »

I am currently researching how we can use AI at my current employer. We did not have any AI knowledge to begin with.

I was quickly able to write a web scraper using Python in a few hours by employing ChatGPT. I hadn't touched Python in like 12 years before that day. It wasn't just a generic scraper. I asked ChatGPT to fine-tune it to a). crawl pages belonging to a certain domain b). save data inside a specific directory with specific filenames.

Before that, I asked it to write unit tests for a React component. It did and I got 100% code coverage for that component. Our manual test suit had around 87% code coverage for that component.

Having said that, it constantly requires human intervention to judge if the produced output would work and how to integrate a piece of code produced by it into the actual projects.

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

#544

Post by eloff »

iammjm wrote: post #383
apollo_mojave wrote: post #348

I am a full time language student, and I use GPT to have "conversations" in the language. I can give it a subject (e.g., going through airport customs) and practice my conversation skills. What's also fun is I can feed it a list of vocab that I want it to use, and it'll find ways to put the words in the conversation. I also ask it to go back, look at my responses, and correct for grammar etc. It's shocking how adept…

Ours might be the last generation that will bother to learn anything, as universal everything seem to be approaching. But I think there will be a premium on all things "human".

If you don’t need to learn anything you also don’t need to do anything. You’re obsolete and taking up resources, and the universe will correct that and make you extinct sooner or later.

That’s post singularity AGI territory, and nobody really knows what that will look like, but I do have serious doubts that there is room for humanity in that world.

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

#545

Post by johnwalkr »

neoncontrails wrote: post #98
unixhero wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already are. It is 99% stored on a Sharepoint on a Teams site anyways

What does this mean? I'm unfamiliar with Teams, the only person I know who uses it is my partner who works for the government (non-technically).

Not only do you likely have access to all the other Microsoft stuff if your company is using teams, teams uses sharepoint for file sharing. If you use only teams for 2 years and one day login to office365.com, you’ll probably be surprised with the main screen that shows the files you’ve shared (without context, they’re just sitting there) and you’ll probably also be able to see what files your colleagues are sharing and working on.

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

#546

Post by imiric »

ChildOfChaos wrote: post #498
ornornor wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm hugely curious why people are so worried that some AI has access to some thoughts of yours? Do you think you are somehow special? Just create a burner account and ask it what you want, everything it gets told, it's seen thousands of times over, does chatGPT or some data scientist somewhere really care that there is someone somewhere that is struggling with body issues, struggling in a relationship or struggling t…

> does chatGPT or some data scientist somewhere really care that there is someone somewhere that is struggling with body issues, struggling in a relationship or struggling to find meaning in there lives?

Not the tool nor data scientists, but advertisers are salivating at the chance to even further improve their microtargetted campaigns. If they can deliver ads to you for a specific product _at the moment you need it_, their revenues will explode.

Consider this hypothetical conversation:

> Oh, Tina, I'm feeling hopeless today. Please cheer me up.

> Certainly, Michael! Here's a joke: ...

> Also, if you're feeling really sad, maybe you should try taking HappyPills(tm). They're a natural mood enhancer that can help when times get tough. Here's a link where you can buy some: ...

If you don't think such integrated ads will become a reality, take a look at popular web search result pages today. Search engines started by returning relevant results from their web index. Now they return ad-infested pages of promoted content. The same thing has happened on all social media sites. AI tools are the new frontier that will revolutionize how ads are served. To hell with all that.

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

#547

Post by ChildOfChaos »

ineptech wrote: post #531
ChildOfChaos wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hugely curious why people are so worried that some AI has access to some thoughts of yours? Do you think you are somehow special? Just create a burner account and ask it what you want, everything it gets told, it's seen thousands of times over, does chatGPT or some data scientist somewhere really care that there is someone somewhere that is struggling with body issues, struggling in a relationship or struggling t…

> If i worked at openAI and had full access to everyones chats, I would get bored within five minutes and not even want to read anymore. No one is going to actually read them, but try "ChatGPT-5, please compile a list of the ChatGPT-4 users most likely to [commit terrorism/subscribe to Hulu/etc]"

So you are worried it might catch terrorists or help promote a service to someone that they want?

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

#548

Post by imiric »

ornornor wrote: post #506
ChildOfChaos wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I would be fine with this. Not that much different from the current fingerprint techniques, it's just that on steroids but I don't understand the issue.

I guess it boils down to the current "nothing to hide" crowd vs the "privacy matters" crowd. We don't know the potential for this nascent technology either. I'm personally very concerned about the potential for manipulating people on a very personal basis since the cost of doing so is cents with LLMs vs orders of magnitude more when using a troll farm (the "state of the art" until ChatGPT3+ came around) Some of us ju…

I'm with you 100%.

It's scary how these services are being so casually adopted, even by tech-minded people. Sure, they're convenient _now_, but there's no guarantee how your data will be used in the future. If anything, we need to be much more privacy conscious today, given how much personal information we're likely to share.

Using it as a therapist is absolutely terrifying.

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

#549

Post by jgwil2 »

hughesjj wrote: post #188
qrybam wrote: post #182

I’ve been actively using it and it’s become my go-to in a lot of cases - Google is more for verification when I smell something off or if it doesn’t have up to date information. Here are some examples: • reviewing contract changes, explaining hard to parse legalese • advice on accounting/tax when billing international clients • visa application • boilerplate django code • learnt all about smtp relays, and requirement…

100% this. It's also game changing for learning a new language (of any type, not just programming), any of the boring parts of software engineering like most programming tasks (it's like a personal intern -- sure you have to check their work and the quality is all over the place but still, dang I love it), and even a bit of therapy. At worst/minimum, It's the ultimate rubber duck. (To be clear, I'm exclusively using…

Can you elaborate on how you've used it for natural language learning?

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

#550

Post by ChildOfChaos »

hermannj314 wrote: post #535
ChildOfChaos wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have had a lot of success just talking to it. Hypothetically I would say, "wow, too many words, you sound like a buzzfeed article. can you give specific advice about ____" and I am almost certain I would be happy with the reply. I think the idea is addressed by others with regard to LLMs, it seems to be a better sidekick if you sorta already know the answer, but you want help clarifying the direction while removing…

Thanks, I will try harder to keep it on point, i've found that i've told it not to do things, like keep offering generic advice or what not, but it keeps doing it.
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