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

ChatGPT Pulse

openai.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

631–640 of 766 posts

Re: ChatGPT Pulse

#631

Post by NoGravitas »

Terr_ wrote: post #251
jasonsb wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m rapidly losing interest in all of these tools. It feels like blockchain again in a lot of weird ways. It doesn't feel like blockchain at all. Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented (unless you're a criminal or an influencer who makes ungodly amounts of money off of suckers). AI is a powerful tool for those who are willing to put in the work. People who have the time, knowledge and crit…

> the most useless technology Side-rant pet-peeve: People who try to rescue the reputation of "Blockchain" as a promising way forward by saying its weaknesses go away once you do a "private blockchain." This is equivalent to claiming the self-balancing Segway vehicles are still the future, they just need to be "improved even more" by adding another set of wheels, an enclosed cabin, and disabling the self-balancing fe…

Honestly the Segway had a couple of useful effects, none of which involved the Segway itself becoming useful or popular.

1. The self-balancing tech spread to a variety of more interesting and cheaper "toy" platforms like hoverboards and self-balancing electric unicycles. 2. They encouraged the interest in electric micromobility, leading to, especially, electric scooters (which are simpler, cheaper, and use less space) becoming widespread.

This is kind of like the point someone else made that the actual useful thing the blockchain craze produced was "cleaning up your database schemas with the idea of putting them on the blockchain, then never putting them on the blockchain".

Re: ChatGPT Pulse

#632

Post by darkwater »

kyykky wrote: post #425
lxgr wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s probably roughly as problematic as most people not being able to fix even simple problems with their cars themselves these days (i.e., not very).

Everyone needs to have AI to do some minor modification in Excel file?

Give it time. They will, eventually.

Re: ChatGPT Pulse

#633

Post by laserlight »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #230
dmamills wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A metric I'd be interested in is the number of clients you can convince to use this slop.

That's a sales metric brother.

I understand that you would prefer to be more “productive” with AI but without any sales than be less productive without AI but with sales.

To clarify, people critical of the “productivity increase” argument question whether the productivity is of the useful kind or of the increased useless output kind.

Re: ChatGPT Pulse

#634

Post by laserlight »

Kiro wrote: post #315
chrysoprace wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be interested to know how you measure your productivity gains though, in an objective way where you're not the victim of bias. I just recently had to rate whether I felt like I got more done by leaning more on Claude Code for a week to do a toy project and while I _feel_ like I was more productive, I was already biased to think so, and so I was a lot more careful with my answer, especially as I had to spend a…

It sounds like you're very productive without AI or that your perceived gains are pretty small. To me, it's such a stark contrast that asking how I measure it is like asking me to objectively verify that a car is faster than walking.

“I'm eating fewer calories yet keep putting on weight.”

There's a reason self-reported measures are questioned: they have been wildly off in different domains. Objectively verifying that a car is faster than walking is easy. When it's not easy to objectively prove something, then there are a lot that could go wrong, including the disagreements on the definition of what's being measured.

Re: ChatGPT Pulse

#635

Post by munksbeer »

gyomu wrote: post #539
salviati wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand your point. Is there any conversation where this behaviour occurred that you feel comfortable sharing? I haven't observed it, and I'd be curious to understand if I've missed it, or if me and you evaluate things differently.

Their point is that ChatGPT is clearly maximizing for engagement with the product, rather than working as a straightforward tool that aims to solve your problem at hand as fast and efficiently as possible. The decision to begin every response with “that’s a fascinating observation” and end every response with “want me to do X?” is a clear decision by PMs at OpenAI. Poster is questioning what might motivate those deci…

You tell it to stop doing that.

Re: ChatGPT Pulse

#636

Post by CuriouslyC »

latexr wrote: post #627
CuriouslyC wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Little plot twist, you can pitch an LLM an idea for a scene, then tell it to interrogate you thoroughly for the details, then tell it to generate a clean, tight draft optimized for efficient use of language and readability, and you basically get your own ideas back but with a lot of the boring parts of writing already done.

Making your writing itself boring and the same as everyone’s who used that technique, transforming it into something no one will want to read anyway.

You pretty much jumped to the most negative possible interpretation. You think there isn't an editing process?

Re: ChatGPT Pulse

#637

Post by lelanthran »

alvah wrote: post #625
lelanthran wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is that really a fair comparison? Well, yes it is; you can't very well claim to have learned something if you are unable to do it.

It doesn't matter - GP is now able to do things they were unable to do before. A distinction without a (real-world) difference.

> It doesn't matter - GP is now able to do things they were unable to do before. A distinction without a (real-world) difference.

I get that point, but the original post I replied to didn't say "Hey, I know have $THING set up when I never had it before", he said "I learned to do $THING", which is a whole different assertion.

I'm not contending the assertion that he now has a thing he did not have before, I'm contending the assertion that he has learned something.

Re: ChatGPT Pulse

#638

Post by niek_pas »

pembrook wrote: post #532
latexr wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t forget that Sam Altman is also the cryptocurrency scammer who wants your biometric information. The goal was and will always be personal wealth and power, not helping others. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi... https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...

I lol'd at this. And he eats babies! Yea, humans tend to optimize for their own individual success. Do you not?

Homo economicus is a fallacy

Re: ChatGPT Pulse

#639

Post by wat10000 »

JackMorgan wrote: post #542
eru wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gambling! That's actually the number one use case by far. Far beyond eg buying illicit substances. Regular money is much better for that. Matt Levine (of Money Stuff fame) came up with another use case in a corporate setting: in many companies, especially banks, their systems are fragmented and full of technical debt. As a CEO it's hard to get workers and shareholders excited about a database cleanup. But for a time,…

This is so true, from 2018-2021 my internal banking product was able to use blockchain hype to clean up a lot of our database schema. Our CTO was rubber stamping everything with the words blockchain and our customers were beating down the door to throw money at it.

Well that's hilarious. I wonder if LLMs might have a similar use case. I fear they tend to do the opposite: why clean up data when the computer can pretend to understand any crap you throw at it?

Re: ChatGPT Pulse

#640

Post by niek_pas »

boldlybold wrote: post #224
psyclobe wrote: post #219

ChatGPT has given me wings to tackle projects I would've never had the impetus to tackle, finally I know how to use my oscilloscope and I am repairing vintage amps; fun times.

I agree - the ability to lower activation energy in a field you're interested in, but not yet an expert, feels like having superpowers.

Thanks for phrasing it like this!
Post reply on HN