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That sounds like a cool use case, but... how can you bring yourself to trust anything at all that it tells you? This feels like it's just begging to contaminate

That sounds like a cool use case, but... how can you bring yourself to trust anything at all that it tells you? This feels like it's just begging to contaminate your understanding with sparse, unpredictable errors, and personally I find the thought of that unexpectedly dismaying.

nr2x 4y ago
Personally Ive been coding long enough I’ve forgotten more than most junior people know. So I use ChatGPT to refresh my memory more than anything else. Like yesterday couldn’t remember how to open some ports on a Postgres server. ChatGPT gave me a 95% accurate answer and based on my own knowledge base I fixed the mistake. This took all of a few seconds. Whereas with normal web search it would take an order of magnitude longer and likely be not much more accurate.
crazygringo 4y ago
It's a lot easier to verify whether something is correct once you know what the thing is. Half the time when I'm googling something I don't even know what subfield the term belongs to. I don't know what related terms I can use to narrow it down. Or I keep getting papers on a related but different question from what I'm trying to ask. But if ChatGPT gives me an answer in context of a bunch of related terminology, it's so much easier to then plug those additional terms into Google and find a/the authoritative source. For comparison, a lot of my (non-ChatGPT) initial searches will result in random blog entries or something that are often just flat-out wrong or else ignoring competing viewpoints. But they still might point me to better context and search terms. The value of ChatGPT is that it gets you to information you can verify so much faster. But you still need to verify it the same way you need to verify stuff you find on blogs or Quora or Reddit or HN.
taink 4y ago
No need to trust it -- that's the best part. I tend to trust blogs or conversations with other people more than I should. The benefit of a tool like ChatGPT is that I already distrust it, and I tend to double-check more often what it responds. I agree with you, but the comparison and fine-tuning GP mentioned are really areas where it's an unparalleled tool right now. Dismissing it in fear of "contaminating your understanding" is missing out on what the tool may offer to you. It's not really that much worse than a search query.

nr2x 4y ago

Personally Ive been coding long enough I’ve forgotten more than most junior people know. So I use ChatGPT to refresh my memory more than anything else. Like yesterday couldn’t remember how to open some ports on a Postgres server. ChatGPT gave me a 95% accurate answer and based on my own knowledge base I fixed the mistake. This took all of a few seconds. Whereas with normal web search it would take an order of magnitude longer and likely be not much more accurate.

crazygringo 4y ago

It's a lot easier to verify whether something is correct once you know what the thing is. Half the time when I'm googling something I don't even know what subfield the term belongs to. I don't know what related terms I can use to narrow it down. Or I keep getting papers on a related but different question from what I'm trying to ask. But if ChatGPT gives me an answer in context of a bunch of related terminology, it's so much easier to then plug those additional terms into Google and find a/the authoritative source. For comparison, a lot of my (non-ChatGPT) initial searches will result in random blog entries or something that are often just flat-out wrong or else ignoring competing viewpoints. But they still might point me to better context and search terms. The value of ChatGPT is that it gets you to information you can verify so much faster. But you still need to verify it the same way you need to verify stuff you find on blogs or Quora or Reddit or HN.

taink 4y ago

No need to trust it -- that's the best part. I tend to trust blogs or conversations with other people more than I should. The benefit of a tool like ChatGPT is that I already distrust it, and I tend to double-check more often what it responds. I agree with you, but the comparison and fine-tuning GP mentioned are really areas where it's an unparalleled tool right now. Dismissing it in fear of "contaminating your understanding" is missing out on what the tool may offer to you. It's not really that much worse than a search query.