5 ms·

So enlighten us with some examples of useful things you found.

by rnk 4y ago

polygamous_bat 4y ago
My partner is looking for a new job, and ChatGPT has been an amazing help in writing the cover letters that recruiters can't stop asking for. Previously, she would spend hours molding her previous cover letter to the job description. Now she can just give the job description and a bullet point list of her relevant experiences, and spend 15 minutes on the ChatGPT output to polish it a little bit and correct any potential misstatements.
- lemmiwinks 4y ago
  You know how many minutes I "spend molding [my] previous cover letter to the job description"? 15 minutes. If you spend more than that, you are clearly doing it wrong.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  You realize if this becomes the norm cover letters will simply be made meaningless. One could argue they already are.
  - polygamous_bat 4y ago
    As they should be! I do not know why they are not already, but as I said recruiters can't seem to stop asking for them. But be assured that I won't mourn them once they are gone, and if ChatGPT gets us there faster then I am grateful for it. Edit: on second thought, I believe "Editing ChatGPT output" might be a valuable job skill in the future, and maybe a good cover letter would give recruiters some signals in that way.
  - shrimp_emoji 4y ago
    Win-win!
  - ams92 4y ago
    Cover letters already are meaningless.
- UncleOxidant 4y ago
  I tried using chatGPT to write me a cover letter and targeted resume given my full resume and the job description. It gave me the cover letter and the resume - but it made stuff up to match the job description. I have a masters degree but it gave me a PhD, for example (I'm not sure why it did this as the job requirements were Masters of PhD, I guess it figured a PhD was better). I'm pretty sure I would have easily gotten an interview for the position based on that cover letter + resume as it was essentially a perfect fit to the job description, but the interview would've gone badly.
  - polygamous_bat 4y ago
    That's why the 15 minute review process afterwards, at least for a cover letter the factual errors are glaring enough that they can be caught easily, and simple enough that they can be edited out in that time. It's not at the stage where I can write my partner a job application bot that scrapes job boards and fires off 50,000 applications per second, but the productivity gain is obvious.
    - ajmurmann 4y ago
      This to me is what I see want to see as the fallacy in the anti-ChatGPT argument, but at the same time have to acknowledge as the real danger. I think AI paired with a human, as you are describing, can be more effective and efficient than either on their own. However, I've never seen it stay that way in commercial applications. So I'm afraid that the smallest drive towards cost-cutting will lead to removal of the human in the loop or at least tighten throughout expectations so much that the human intervention is in practice more often missing than not. Not sure what to do about this. I want ChatGPT as a tool available to me, but I don't want any service provider I interact with to use it because I know they'll fuck it up eventually and I'll get worse service.
      - morelisp 4y ago
        > I want ChatGPT as a tool available to me, but I don't want any service provider I interact with to use it because I know they'll fuck it up eventually and I'll get worse service. This is just straightforward selfishness and narcissism. No software developer should be so naive to assume they'll always do the right thing with a powerful but incomprehensibly dangerous tool.
- cpach 4y ago
  This is actually a perfect use-case IMHO.
shaunsingh 4y ago
If you treat it as a surpercharged search engine on a compressed snapshot of the internet in 2021, then its quite useful. If theres ever a function I forgot, but I know how to explain what it does in natural language, chatGPT most of the time can find me what I'm looking for. On some more obscure bugs or if I'm sorting through a new codebase, chatGPT can help me out from time to time to understand new topics. Of course, we shouldn't rely on chatGPT. It has give me wrong and insecure code before. However, its a nice tool to have around
- skwirl 4y ago
  >Of course, we shouldn't rely on chatGPT. It has give me wrong and insecure code before. However, its a nice tool to have around You 100% should verify any code generated by ChatGPT - but this goes for any code found off the internet. I have come across bad Stack Overflow code committed to codebases before.
  - furyofantares 4y ago
    I think what's making these hyperinformed hallucinators useful for coding right now is that fact checking is fundamentally a big part of our work. There's a bare minimum that must be done to even think anything has been accomplished at all, that it runs and does what we expected on the most basic input, but then we are also used to writing tests and reading code critically.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      I wonder what a learning model with the ability to test feedback from executing its code in an interpreter would look like? I know there are different groups testing things like integrating the ability for LLMs to use tools, wondering how this will pan out in the end.
LordDragonfang 4y ago
Not them, but a short list based on my chat history: - Explained why a python variable in a closure was saying it was not assigned, after several minutes of googling/SO failed me (needed the nonlocal keyword, different from js) - Explained the difference in several slightly-different C++ lists, which I couldn't google because the differences were mostly special chars - Wrote working powershell code to output a list that has every string in $list1 that is not in $list2, on the first try, after I struggled for over an hour to do the same (and google/SO failed me). - Explained the difference between two batfiles for the Intel Fortran compiler after google failed me - Generated some really cool D&D statblocks -Unbeknownst to us players, generated a really creative heist dungeon that our DM ran us through (he thanked ChatGPT as his "co-DM" at the end). This one is particularly notable because the man works at a hiring agency, he's not exactly a techie.
- orwin 4y ago
  +1 for the DMing. I mostly use it to generate data for my dev/test tables, but the two times I used it for DMing, I gained hours. Also live when the player go somewhere really unexpected (it wasn't my campaign). Tangent: Google is less and less useful (as is SO for 'old' languages). I look into a mix of reddit, github issues, github code and SO depending on the issue. Hopefully this advice helps you if Chatgpt/copilot can't.
- bnralt 4y ago
  > after several minutes of googling/SO failed me ** > and google/SO failed me This is what I've been noticing as well. There have been many times when I spend 5-10 minutes trying to figure something out with Stack Overflow and Google, not getting anywhere, and then ChatGPT immediately gives me the answer. I'm not sure how anyone who considers Stack Overflow useful would think that ChatGPT is useless. Do I need to verify the answers? Sure. But I have to do the same thing with answers on Stack Overflow. Even if I'm using official documentation, I need to verify that what I think it's saying is what it's actually saying (particularly when it's as unclear as it often is). What's even more interesting is that I keep running into people who are finding completely different uses for it. The critique here is like a lot of other critiques I've seen. They seem to come from people who haven't spent much if any time working with it, but have read some articles about how it's not infallible and decided that meant it was junk (though this piece goes the extra mile when it hints that big GPU is behind it all). What's striking to me is the lack of intellectual curiosity on display.
skwirl 4y ago
Sure, it's an unending stream of things, but here are some recent examples from my history: -Had it extract some gnarly string manipulation logic in a MySQL where clause into a function. It wrote clean, well commented code, and even explained what a regex did in a comment. -Had it explain to me how macOS plist files worked, how to view them, how to edit them -Asked it what some lines in an ssh config file did and it clearly explained it to me -Dropped in some XML from a spring applicationcontext file that was doing something I didn't quite understand and it explained it to me. Asked how I would change something about it and it told me how, explained how it worked, and provided example xml -Gave it a SQL Server CREATE TABLE statement and asked it to create the equivalent CREATE TABLE statement for MySQL 8, which it successfully did My only complaint has been how sometimes the system has been unavailable. I now pay for the $20/month subscription and that has been resolved.
- incrudible 4y ago
  If you ask it something that you do not know yourself, how do you know what it is telling you is not bullshit?
  - mpoteat 4y ago
    There exist problems where finding the solution is hard but verifying the solution is easy. example in the general case: prime-factoring numbers. Are you claiming that for all possible problems posed, verifying the correctness of the output of an LLM is equal or higher difficulty than solving the problem itself? If so, that seems like a claim more arising from emotion than reason. In the general case, you can have it generate code in a proof based language that "proves" the code is correct against formal specification. Unless you consider math itself to be "bullshit" too.
    - hnfong 4y ago
      The people who are skeptical that it can be easier to verify correctness than to produce a correct work might as well try to prove P=NP (which is the theoretical and formal statement of such). They also probably never asked people to work on a task either (hint: people can get things wildly wrong, even generally competent ones)

So enlighten us with some examples of useful things you found.

by rnk 4y ago

So enlighten us with some examples of useful things you found.

My partner is looking for a new job, and ChatGPT has been an amazing help in writing the cover letters that recruiters can't stop asking for. Previously, she would spend hours molding her previous cover letter to the job description. Now she can just give the job description and a bullet point list of her relevant experiences, and spend 15 minutes on the ChatGPT output to polish it a little bit and correct any potential misstatements.

lemmiwinks 4y ago
You know how many minutes I "spend molding [my] previous cover letter to the job description"? 15 minutes. If you spend more than that, you are clearly doing it wrong.
endisneigh 4y ago
You realize if this becomes the norm cover letters will simply be made meaningless. One could argue they already are.
- polygamous_bat 4y ago
  As they should be! I do not know why they are not already, but as I said recruiters can't seem to stop asking for them. But be assured that I won't mourn them once they are gone, and if ChatGPT gets us there faster then I am grateful for it. Edit: on second thought, I believe "Editing ChatGPT output" might be a valuable job skill in the future, and maybe a good cover letter would give recruiters some signals in that way.
- shrimp_emoji 4y ago
  Win-win!
- ams92 4y ago
  Cover letters already are meaningless.
UncleOxidant 4y ago
I tried using chatGPT to write me a cover letter and targeted resume given my full resume and the job description. It gave me the cover letter and the resume - but it made stuff up to match the job description. I have a masters degree but it gave me a PhD, for example (I'm not sure why it did this as the job requirements were Masters of PhD, I guess it figured a PhD was better). I'm pretty sure I would have easily gotten an interview for the position based on that cover letter + resume as it was essentially a perfect fit to the job description, but the interview would've gone badly.
- polygamous_bat 4y ago
  That's why the 15 minute review process afterwards, at least for a cover letter the factual errors are glaring enough that they can be caught easily, and simple enough that they can be edited out in that time. It's not at the stage where I can write my partner a job application bot that scrapes job boards and fires off 50,000 applications per second, but the productivity gain is obvious.
  - ajmurmann 4y ago
    This to me is what I see want to see as the fallacy in the anti-ChatGPT argument, but at the same time have to acknowledge as the real danger. I think AI paired with a human, as you are describing, can be more effective and efficient than either on their own. However, I've never seen it stay that way in commercial applications. So I'm afraid that the smallest drive towards cost-cutting will lead to removal of the human in the loop or at least tighten throughout expectations so much that the human intervention is in practice more often missing than not. Not sure what to do about this. I want ChatGPT as a tool available to me, but I don't want any service provider I interact with to use it because I know they'll fuck it up eventually and I'll get worse service.
    - morelisp 4y ago
      > I want ChatGPT as a tool available to me, but I don't want any service provider I interact with to use it because I know they'll fuck it up eventually and I'll get worse service. This is just straightforward selfishness and narcissism. No software developer should be so naive to assume they'll always do the right thing with a powerful but incomprehensibly dangerous tool.
cpach 4y ago
This is actually a perfect use-case IMHO.

shaunsingh 4y ago

If you treat it as a surpercharged search engine on a compressed snapshot of the internet in 2021, then its quite useful. If theres ever a function I forgot, but I know how to explain what it does in natural language, chatGPT most of the time can find me what I'm looking for. On some more obscure bugs or if I'm sorting through a new codebase, chatGPT can help me out from time to time to understand new topics. Of course, we shouldn't rely on chatGPT. It has give me wrong and insecure code before. However, its a nice tool to have around

skwirl 4y ago
>Of course, we shouldn't rely on chatGPT. It has give me wrong and insecure code before. However, its a nice tool to have around You 100% should verify any code generated by ChatGPT - but this goes for any code found off the internet. I have come across bad Stack Overflow code committed to codebases before.
- furyofantares 4y ago
  I think what's making these hyperinformed hallucinators useful for coding right now is that fact checking is fundamentally a big part of our work. There's a bare minimum that must be done to even think anything has been accomplished at all, that it runs and does what we expected on the most basic input, but then we are also used to writing tests and reading code critically.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    I wonder what a learning model with the ability to test feedback from executing its code in an interpreter would look like? I know there are different groups testing things like integrating the ability for LLMs to use tools, wondering how this will pan out in the end.

LordDragonfang 4y ago

Not them, but a short list based on my chat history: - Explained why a python variable in a closure was saying it was not assigned, after several minutes of googling/SO failed me (needed the nonlocal keyword, different from js) - Explained the difference in several slightly-different C++ lists, which I couldn't google because the differences were mostly special chars - Wrote working powershell code to output a list that has every string in $list1 that is not in $list2, on the first try, after I struggled for over an hour to do the same (and google/SO failed me). - Explained the difference between two batfiles for the Intel Fortran compiler after google failed me - Generated some really cool D&D statblocks -Unbeknownst to us players, generated a really creative heist dungeon that our DM ran us through (he thanked ChatGPT as his "co-DM" at the end). This one is particularly notable because the man works at a hiring agency, he's not exactly a techie.

orwin 4y ago
+1 for the DMing. I mostly use it to generate data for my dev/test tables, but the two times I used it for DMing, I gained hours. Also live when the player go somewhere really unexpected (it wasn't my campaign). Tangent: Google is less and less useful (as is SO for 'old' languages). I look into a mix of reddit, github issues, github code and SO depending on the issue. Hopefully this advice helps you if Chatgpt/copilot can't.
bnralt 4y ago
> after several minutes of googling/SO failed me ** > and google/SO failed me This is what I've been noticing as well. There have been many times when I spend 5-10 minutes trying to figure something out with Stack Overflow and Google, not getting anywhere, and then ChatGPT immediately gives me the answer. I'm not sure how anyone who considers Stack Overflow useful would think that ChatGPT is useless. Do I need to verify the answers? Sure. But I have to do the same thing with answers on Stack Overflow. Even if I'm using official documentation, I need to verify that what I think it's saying is what it's actually saying (particularly when it's as unclear as it often is). What's even more interesting is that I keep running into people who are finding completely different uses for it. The critique here is like a lot of other critiques I've seen. They seem to come from people who haven't spent much if any time working with it, but have read some articles about how it's not infallible and decided that meant it was junk (though this piece goes the extra mile when it hints that big GPU is behind it all). What's striking to me is the lack of intellectual curiosity on display.

skwirl 4y ago

Sure, it's an unending stream of things, but here are some recent examples from my history: -Had it extract some gnarly string manipulation logic in a MySQL where clause into a function. It wrote clean, well commented code, and even explained what a regex did in a comment. -Had it explain to me how macOS plist files worked, how to view them, how to edit them -Asked it what some lines in an ssh config file did and it clearly explained it to me -Dropped in some XML from a spring applicationcontext file that was doing something I didn't quite understand and it explained it to me. Asked how I would change something about it and it told me how, explained how it worked, and provided example xml -Gave it a SQL Server CREATE TABLE statement and asked it to create the equivalent CREATE TABLE statement for MySQL 8, which it successfully did My only complaint has been how sometimes the system has been unavailable. I now pay for the $20/month subscription and that has been resolved.

incrudible 4y ago
If you ask it something that you do not know yourself, how do you know what it is telling you is not bullshit?
- mpoteat 4y ago
  There exist problems where finding the solution is hard but verifying the solution is easy. example in the general case: prime-factoring numbers. Are you claiming that for all possible problems posed, verifying the correctness of the output of an LLM is equal or higher difficulty than solving the problem itself? If so, that seems like a claim more arising from emotion than reason. In the general case, you can have it generate code in a proof based language that "proves" the code is correct against formal specification. Unless you consider math itself to be "bullshit" too.
  - hnfong 4y ago
    The people who are skeptical that it can be easier to verify correctness than to produce a correct work might as well try to prove P=NP (which is the theoretical and formal statement of such). They also probably never asked people to work on a task either (hint: people can get things wildly wrong, even generally competent ones)