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After a few weeks playing around with ChatGPT, my workflow with it has become: 0. Try to sign in, see the system is over capacity, leave. Maybe I’ll try again

After a few weeks playing around with ChatGPT, my workflow with it has become: 0. Try to sign in, see the system is over capacity, leave. Maybe I’ll try again in 10 minutes. 1. Ask my question, get an answer. I’ll have no idea if what I got is real or not. 2. Google for the answer, since I can’t trust the answer 3. Realize I wasted 20 minutes trying to converse with a computer, and resolve that next time I’ll just type 3 words into Google. As amazing as the GPTs are, the speed and ease of Google is still unmatched for 95% of knowledge lookup tasks.

travisjungroth 4y ago
If you expect ChatGPT to give you information or direct you to it (like Wikipedia or Google) you will be frequently disappointed. You may also be frequently pleased, but you often won’t be sure which and that’s a problem. ChatGPT is very good at transforming information. You need to show up with stuff and then have it change that stuff for you somehow. You will be disappointed less often.
- Capricorn2481 4y ago
  It has been surprisingly terrible at this for me, lately. I had a pretty simple list, which was a list of monthly expenses in a separate list, like this. Groceries - 200 Phone bill - 70 I just wanted it to add these expenses up. Exactly the type of thing it should be good at. New conversation with no context. It could not do it. I wrestled with it for a long time. It kept "correcting" itself to another wrong answer. Eventually I reported it and the report recommended the correct answer.
  - travisjungroth 4y ago
    It’s not good at math. It can do stuff sometimes, and you can easily teach it to use a calculator. What’s similar that it would be good at is extracting what you bought and turn it into a list and formula. [Me] Extract the list of things that I bought and their prices. Write a shell command to figure out how much I spent. I spent 200 on groceries and paid my 70 phone bill. I was going to buy three pairs of pants that were $40 each. I didn’t like the colors. I bought a t shirt for thirty. And I did end up buying one pair of pants. But it was 5 dollars more than those other ones. And I bought bag of tea for every day next year, they were a quarter each. [ChatGPT] List of things bought and their prices: Groceries: $200 Phone bill: $70 T-shirt: $30 One pair of pants: $45 Bag of tea: $0.25 To figure out how much was spent, you can use the following shell command: echo $((200 + 70 + 30 + 45 + 365*0.25)) This command will add up the prices of all the items, including the bag of tea for every day next year. The output will be the total amount spent.
simonw 4y ago
I pay for ChatGPT Plus, and use it with no delays at all dozens of times a day. The more I use it the better I get at predicting if it can be useful for a specific question or not.
- thewataccount 4y ago
  What do you use it for? I'm assuming code related? I've found it useful for some boilerplate + writing tests and making some script and some documentation. I'm curious what you or others that use it all day use it for especially if it's not for programming?
  - japhyr 4y ago
    I was just working on a small exploratory project in Python. I used sys.argv because it's so quick to prototype with. When I started refining the project for longer term development, I wanted to convert the CLI to use argparse, so I could build a more nuanced CLI. I gave GPT a couple example commands I wanted to use, and in less than a minute I had a fully converted CLI that did exactly what I wanted, with more consistent help settings. I can do that work, but it would have been 30-45 minutes because there was one setting in argparse I hadn't used before. That alone was worth this month's $20. For more complex and mature projects I could see having to give GPT a minimum working example of what I need instead of the whole project, but I can already see how it will enhance my current workflows, not replace them.
    - cultureswitch 4y ago
      See, a better LLM or an experienced human would have told you to use docopt instead of argparse and saved you more time in the long run.
  - simonw 4y ago
    There are some examples of code things I've done with it here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/7/chatgpt-lies/#warn-off-or-help-on https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/7/chatgpt-lies/#warn-off-... In terms of non-code things, here are a few from the past couple of days: - Coming up with potential analogies to explain why it's OK to call something a "language" model even though it doesn't have actual understanding of language - Exploring outliers in a CSV file (I was playing with the new alpha code interpreter, where you can upload a file and have it run and execute Python to evaluate that file) - Asking some basic questions about GDPR cookie banners - Figuring out if there are any languages worldwide where "Artificial Intelligence" translates to something that doesn't include the word "Intelligence" (found some good ones: Finnish translates to "Artificial wit", Swahili to "Artificial cunning") - Understanding jargon in a tweet about payment services - I wanted to know the difference between a "payment aggregator" and a "merchant acquirer" - As a thesaurus, finding alternatives to "sanctity" in the sentence "the sanctity of your training data" - Fun: "Pretend to be human in a mocking way", then "Again but meaner and funnier" - "What should I be aware of when designing the file and directory layout in an S3 bucket that could grow to host millions of files?"
gwd 4y ago
Sign up for the API and use the playground. You don't get the plugins, but you pay per usage. GPT-3.5 is super cheap, and even GPT-4 isn't that expensive. My first month, when I had only access to GPT-3.5, I didn't even break $1.00; and now that I've gotten access to GPT-4, I'm at about $3. I've only once had it tell me that it was too busy for the request; I tried again 30 seconds later and it worked.

travisjungroth 4y ago

If you expect ChatGPT to give you information or direct you to it (like Wikipedia or Google) you will be frequently disappointed. You may also be frequently pleased, but you often won’t be sure which and that’s a problem. ChatGPT is very good at transforming information. You need to show up with stuff and then have it change that stuff for you somehow. You will be disappointed less often.

Capricorn2481 4y ago
It has been surprisingly terrible at this for me, lately. I had a pretty simple list, which was a list of monthly expenses in a separate list, like this. Groceries - 200 Phone bill - 70 I just wanted it to add these expenses up. Exactly the type of thing it should be good at. New conversation with no context. It could not do it. I wrestled with it for a long time. It kept "correcting" itself to another wrong answer. Eventually I reported it and the report recommended the correct answer.
- travisjungroth 4y ago
  It’s not good at math. It can do stuff sometimes, and you can easily teach it to use a calculator. What’s similar that it would be good at is extracting what you bought and turn it into a list and formula. [Me] Extract the list of things that I bought and their prices. Write a shell command to figure out how much I spent. I spent 200 on groceries and paid my 70 phone bill. I was going to buy three pairs of pants that were $40 each. I didn’t like the colors. I bought a t shirt for thirty. And I did end up buying one pair of pants. But it was 5 dollars more than those other ones. And I bought bag of tea for every day next year, they were a quarter each. [ChatGPT] List of things bought and their prices: Groceries: $200 Phone bill: $70 T-shirt: $30 One pair of pants: $45 Bag of tea: $0.25 To figure out how much was spent, you can use the following shell command: echo $((200 + 70 + 30 + 45 + 365*0.25)) This command will add up the prices of all the items, including the bag of tea for every day next year. The output will be the total amount spent.

simonw 4y ago

I pay for ChatGPT Plus, and use it with no delays at all dozens of times a day. The more I use it the better I get at predicting if it can be useful for a specific question or not.

thewataccount 4y ago
What do you use it for? I'm assuming code related? I've found it useful for some boilerplate + writing tests and making some script and some documentation. I'm curious what you or others that use it all day use it for especially if it's not for programming?
- japhyr 4y ago
  I was just working on a small exploratory project in Python. I used sys.argv because it's so quick to prototype with. When I started refining the project for longer term development, I wanted to convert the CLI to use argparse, so I could build a more nuanced CLI. I gave GPT a couple example commands I wanted to use, and in less than a minute I had a fully converted CLI that did exactly what I wanted, with more consistent help settings. I can do that work, but it would have been 30-45 minutes because there was one setting in argparse I hadn't used before. That alone was worth this month's $20. For more complex and mature projects I could see having to give GPT a minimum working example of what I need instead of the whole project, but I can already see how it will enhance my current workflows, not replace them.
  - cultureswitch 4y ago
    See, a better LLM or an experienced human would have told you to use docopt instead of argparse and saved you more time in the long run.
- simonw 4y ago
  There are some examples of code things I've done with it here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/7/chatgpt-lies/#warn-off-or-help-on https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/7/chatgpt-lies/#warn-off-... In terms of non-code things, here are a few from the past couple of days: - Coming up with potential analogies to explain why it's OK to call something a "language" model even though it doesn't have actual understanding of language - Exploring outliers in a CSV file (I was playing with the new alpha code interpreter, where you can upload a file and have it run and execute Python to evaluate that file) - Asking some basic questions about GDPR cookie banners - Figuring out if there are any languages worldwide where "Artificial Intelligence" translates to something that doesn't include the word "Intelligence" (found some good ones: Finnish translates to "Artificial wit", Swahili to "Artificial cunning") - Understanding jargon in a tweet about payment services - I wanted to know the difference between a "payment aggregator" and a "merchant acquirer" - As a thesaurus, finding alternatives to "sanctity" in the sentence "the sanctity of your training data" - Fun: "Pretend to be human in a mocking way", then "Again but meaner and funnier" - "What should I be aware of when designing the file and directory layout in an S3 bucket that could grow to host millions of files?"

gwd 4y ago

Sign up for the API and use the playground. You don't get the plugins, but you pay per usage. GPT-3.5 is super cheap, and even GPT-4 isn't that expensive. My first month, when I had only access to GPT-3.5, I didn't even break $1.00; and now that I've gotten access to GPT-4, I'm at about $3. I've only once had it tell me that it was too busy for the request; I tried again 30 seconds later and it worked.