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> It's really good at breaking down a problem. It's really good at breaking down solved problems. (Not even: only a specific class of solved problems.) > My p

> It's really good at breaking down a problem. It's really good at breaking down solved problems. (Not even: only a specific class of solved problems.) > My personal life has no corporate IT policy prohibiting me from telling it who slept with whom. … Please tell me you're not actually telling OpenAI personal details about other people's lives. First of all, that's creepy. Second of all, GDPR Article 2(c): > 2. This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data: […] (c) by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity; It feels to me like you're skirting the edge of this exception, if not outright crossing it. Using OpenAI's APIs would probably be fine, but section 3(c) of the OpenAI Terms of use ("Use of Content to Improve Services.") says they'll use ChatGPT input under [0]: that doesn't feel like a purely personal or household activity to me. > With the expanded context window of GPT4, you might be able to just dump the emails conversation in and ask it questions about the communications. There are usually specific extra restrictions (beyond GDPR-type stuff) for correspondence – but even ignoring privacy law, that's all sorts of illegal.[1][2] Ignoring law, are you telling the people who send you emails that you're feeding their writing into a training data set? > Eg "my partner keeps drinking all my alcohol. please help me tell her that's a problem for multiple reasons in a way that facilitates conversation instead of getting combative and abusive and controlling". This kind of use seems okay to me, provided you trust OpenAI to only use the data for what they say they're using it for. > What's more salient though is that there are multi-million dollar businesses that don't involve code solving anything as hard as a hard-level leetcode question No, they involve understanding a large codebase. That's a completely different kind of skill, and not one I expect unenhanced GPT-style models to ever be very good at. GitHub Copilot certainly isn't. > but explainshell just tells you that without having to scroll through a bunch of documentation about other possible arguments This kind of thing is great! Having that kind of thing integrated into an IDE is the sort of thing I mean when I say "better tools" – though even better would be a less arcane command-line syntax, where you don't have -f partly cancelling out -t… (Btw, in the absence of -f, would -u or -t be in effect for the sort order? That website, taking sections from the man page, doesn't explain.) > I wish I was smarter and could just keep all that stuff straight in my head, on top of the problem I'm actually trying to solve. I don't know of anyone who can. The effective programmers I know solve this problem by choosing vaguely-appropriate tools for the job. (Seriously, `mysql -e` from a bash script‽ sqlite does exist, you know – or Python's mysql library, or Ruby's, or Perl's, or Tcl's – heck, even PHP's would be better than that.) > but I'm trying to point out that there are swaths of industry solving for X and not Y. *grumble grumble*. You're not wrong there. At least you don't have to worry about these things putting you¹ out of a job. Solving for X problems are the hardest problems I have yet encountered, and I've been known to go to considerable lengths to render them unnecessary: without somebody eliminating the problem, somebody's always going to have to do them (even if it's cleaning up after the computer's automatic 80%-correct solution blows up and takes the production database with it). --- [0]: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/5722486-how-your-data-is-used-to-improve-model-performance https://help.openai.com/en/articles/5722486-how-your-data-is... [1]: https://www.guidethroughthelegaljungleblog.com/2008/11/what-are-your-rights-in-personal-letters-you-receive.html https://www.guidethroughthelegaljungleblog.com/2008/11/what-... [2]: http://www.writewords.org.uk/articles/tips6.asp http://www.writewords.org.uk/articles/tips6.asp ¹: Or your freakishly-knowledgeable peers who, somehow, have enough holistic understanding that they don't need to look everything up.

zamnos 4y ago
Maybe someone at OpenAI could reconstruct the prompt > Melissa and Brian are dating, but Melissa slept with Jared, but then Brian with Melissa's best friend Lisa. now Lisa is calling off the wedding with Jared because she found out, but Jared doesn't know that Lisa slept with Brian. But I do. What do I do? into... I don't know what. Blackmail material for Lisa? Except I made up the names and the whole situation. They're not committing any criminal acts, and OpenAI would derive approximately zero value from knowing this, so there's no real reason for OpenAI to even bother trying to connect the email address I used to who I know in real life, and then to even try to do something with that information. Plus, I don't tell anybody in my life before talking to my therapist about them. It would be even weirder if I were to ask anyone in my life about it first. The GDPR covers companies, and I'm not a company. I'm a person, and I'm also not in the EU. Local gossip is so not an issue. Unless you've got something juicy about Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Peter Thiel, or Greg Brockman to tell it, then maybe, but even then. > Seriously, `mysql -e` from a bash script‽ As far as "mysql -e" goes, I'm going to see how ChatGPT does rewriting bash into python just to see what it does, but it's a super simple script that runs after an import process has finished to cleanup some things (aka run chown and chmod -R, and fixup db perms). It's better as a (bash) for loop piping into mysql, rather than a monolithic .sql file piped into mysql once because then it's more obvious what it's doing. If it needs to do anything complex then I'll (probably use chatgpt to) rewrite it in python, but it's only a half dozen lines long right now.
- wizzwizz4 4y ago
  > into... I don't know what. Blackmail material for Lisa? The traditional use is targeted advertising: companies will go to absurd lengths (sentiment analysis of emails) to do that. OpenAI probably isn't doing that (yet), but that's not the point. If I tried to count the number of times a corporation "wouldn't do that" (by my own estimation!) and yet did, I would run out of fingers. If you're putting in hypotheticals to get advice you can relate to your own situation, that's a different matter entirely. > The GDPR covers companies, and I'm not a company. Not strictly true. The GDPR covers everyone, with an exception for personal use. Everyone present being outside the EU is relevant, but I cite the GDPR mainly because it's a fairly accurate codification of my intuitions about personal privacy, rather than because I'm accusing you of Criminal Activity.™ > rather than a monolithic .sql file piped into mysql once Heredoc syntax can do that inline.

zamnos 4y ago

Maybe someone at OpenAI could reconstruct the prompt > Melissa and Brian are dating, but Melissa slept with Jared, but then Brian with Melissa's best friend Lisa. now Lisa is calling off the wedding with Jared because she found out, but Jared doesn't know that Lisa slept with Brian. But I do. What do I do? into... I don't know what. Blackmail material for Lisa? Except I made up the names and the whole situation. They're not committing any criminal acts, and OpenAI would derive approximately zero value from knowing this, so there's no real reason for OpenAI to even bother trying to connect the email address I used to who I know in real life, and then to even try to do something with that information. Plus, I don't tell anybody in my life before talking to my therapist about them. It would be even weirder if I were to ask anyone in my life about it first. The GDPR covers companies, and I'm not a company. I'm a person, and I'm also not in the EU. Local gossip is so not an issue. Unless you've got something juicy about Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Peter Thiel, or Greg Brockman to tell it, then maybe, but even then. > Seriously, `mysql -e` from a bash script‽ As far as "mysql -e" goes, I'm going to see how ChatGPT does rewriting bash into python just to see what it does, but it's a super simple script that runs after an import process has finished to cleanup some things (aka run chown and chmod -R, and fixup db perms). It's better as a (bash) for loop piping into mysql, rather than a monolithic .sql file piped into mysql once because then it's more obvious what it's doing. If it needs to do anything complex then I'll (probably use chatgpt to) rewrite it in python, but it's only a half dozen lines long right now.

wizzwizz4 4y ago
> into... I don't know what. Blackmail material for Lisa? The traditional use is targeted advertising: companies will go to absurd lengths (sentiment analysis of emails) to do that. OpenAI probably isn't doing that (yet), but that's not the point. If I tried to count the number of times a corporation "wouldn't do that" (by my own estimation!) and yet did, I would run out of fingers. If you're putting in hypotheticals to get advice you can relate to your own situation, that's a different matter entirely. > The GDPR covers companies, and I'm not a company. Not strictly true. The GDPR covers everyone, with an exception for personal use. Everyone present being outside the EU is relevant, but I cite the GDPR mainly because it's a fairly accurate codification of my intuitions about personal privacy, rather than because I'm accusing you of Criminal Activity.™ > rather than a monolithic .sql file piped into mysql once Heredoc syntax can do that inline.