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> so many normal people use ChatGPT and find it not only interesting but also, critically, useful Is this actually true though. I write code for living and tri

> so many normal people use ChatGPT and find it not only interesting but also, critically, useful Is this actually true though. I write code for living and tried to use it many times but it wasn't really that useful to me ( vs google search) Curious to hear ppl who are using it in 'critically useful way' . i am eager to use it my workflows .

somehnguy 3y ago
To your point - I don’t actually know a single ‘normal’ person IRL who uses ChatGPT or any other LLM app in general. The only people I know that have ever even mentioned them are other engineers at my job. Even then it’s more just bragging in passing about getting into the latest beta $whatever or making it generate some outrageous paragraph for 30 seconds of fun.
- gbraad 3y ago
  I have seen several people justifying their use for it to work on that novel they always wanted to write. when challenged on who is actually writing it, they respond with "you need to understand the limitations", and that by itself it "can't write the novel". in short, they mean that ChatGPT only grnerates short passages the size of a few paragraphs. they are therefore just puzzling and joining these short plots together. can't imagine what kind of novel could be resulting from this.
  - qbasic_forever 3y ago
    We are already seeing stories of AI fail too, like this lawyer that tried to use it to write an argument and it invented entire cases which don't exist. The judge is not pleased! https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65735769 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65735769
taf2 3y ago
I was on vacation at the beach so this was back in march and I had just received access to gpt4. I had lot of time and I was mostly curious to see if I could use c++ and the recently released whisper.cpp which is pretty solid for transcription s… so I haven’t written c++ for sometime and figured let’s guide gpt 4 to help me write this. It started out giving me the Skelton code. From there it was less about it driving the code and more about it writing the tedious functions. A request handler for parsing form data. After I got the example I could reuse and fit the code into the right places at the end I have a working c++ service wrapping whisper.cpp … I should open source the work but I was blown away that I was able to get this working and still be totally relaxed… occasionally I’d compare my searches in google to my answers from gpt 4 and the difference was me spending 15 - 20 minutes reading through search results vs 5 to 10 minutes… so yeah I’m a crazy ceo who won’t shut up about ai
usaar333 3y ago
See this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36152510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36152510 It's not going to be barely useful, if at all, when you have high skill in a domain. It's quite useful when you don't.
- williamcotton 3y ago
  It’s pretty useful for doing grunt work in domains that you know pretty well. https://chat.openai.com/share/aff14574-4f3e-496e-a11c-aa8ee2ea1ab6 https://chat.openai.com/share/aff14574-4f3e-496e-a11c-aa8ee2... I could have done the work by hand, but instead I played some guitar while it updated the labeler software for the ML project I’ve been working on. In fact, I think ChatGPT and Copilot wrote the majority of the code in this project: https://github.com/williamcotton/chordviz https://github.com/williamcotton/chordviz
  - usaar333 3y ago
    I'm a bit confused by the productivity gain you are seeing. For me, it would be faster to just do the react work (assuming I'm in webstorm with its own fast autocomplete) than go back and forth into ChatGPT and explain what I want in natural language and copy the results back in The only clear win I see is your last example where you are extracting coords into an array. I agree that text transformation like that is a great use of ChatGPT (that's mostly where I use GPT3)
    - williamcotton 3y ago
      Aside from copying and pasting, all I typed was: Add a text input and button to this app that sets the currentImage cookie to the filename in the input and then sets the current image to that as well And: Great, now I'd like to add support for the ii and vi chords. We need to add the keyboard shortcuts for "2" and "6" so when these are pressed it correctly sets the chord name as well as updating the tablature And: The G and C are finished. Complete D, E and A The cognitive load was significantly reduced to the point where I got through practicing Paul Simon’s America twice while waiting for the responses. And that’s not the easiest song to sing and play on acoustic guitar! So instead of just having the updated labeling software, I got some practice in and retained some will power to label 1,500 images when it was completed! But thanks for explaining to me that you know better than me about what saves me time and energy…
jedberg 3y ago
Anecdote, but I needed some code to transform a couple of csv’s into one with some cells merged. I could have written the Python myself in about 45 minutes including the testing and spot checking. Instead I described the csv’s that I had, the one I wanted, and asked for Python code to do it. The code ChatGPT (v3) produced was flawless. I ran it on the data and spot checked it. The entire process took five minutes.
williamcotton 3y ago
I have done some iOS and macOS work in the past using ObjectiveC and C. I have done some DSP work using MaxMSP and PureData. This morning I decided I wanted to write a simple audio visualizer for my iPhone using SwiftUI, a language and framework I have never used. Within an hour I had through the direction of ChatGPT-4 an app running on my phone using a 3rd party library called AudioKit and drawing some fractal looking thingies, as well as a pretty decent understanding of how it all worked because I asked for detailed explanations of every line of code. I’m not sure that I could have had this little app up and working in a single day let alone an hour if I only had a search engine at my disposal.
- ldhough 3y ago
  Googling "audio visualizer SwiftUI" gives me these as the first, fourth, and seventh results: https://medium.com/swlh/swiftui-create-a-sound-visualizer-cadee0b6ad37 https://medium.com/swlh/swiftui-create-a-sound-visualizer-ca... https://audiokitpro.com/audiovisualizertutorial/ https://audiokitpro.com/audiovisualizertutorial/ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/accelerate/visualizing_sound_as_an_audio_spectrogram https://developer.apple.com/documentation/accelerate/visuali... I do tend to reach for GPT4 before Google for things like this now, but I feel like it should definitely be possible to get this up in only slightly longer with just Google, even if you want some mods.
  - williamcotton 3y ago
    But I wasn’t interested in someone else’s audio visualizer, I was interested in a specific approach using pitch detection and primitive line drawings, not displaying an FFT as a bar graph. Sure, I could have synthesized a few different search engine responses but it would have taken a lot more work and I would have run into issues that slowed me down to the point where I had to get back to my other duties as the father of 2 and 4 year olds who were home for the week!
    - ldhough 3y ago
      Yeah its definitely better than piecing together parts from different tutorials to be sure.

somehnguy 3y ago

To your point - I don’t actually know a single ‘normal’ person IRL who uses ChatGPT or any other LLM app in general. The only people I know that have ever even mentioned them are other engineers at my job. Even then it’s more just bragging in passing about getting into the latest beta $whatever or making it generate some outrageous paragraph for 30 seconds of fun.

gbraad 3y ago
I have seen several people justifying their use for it to work on that novel they always wanted to write. when challenged on who is actually writing it, they respond with "you need to understand the limitations", and that by itself it "can't write the novel". in short, they mean that ChatGPT only grnerates short passages the size of a few paragraphs. they are therefore just puzzling and joining these short plots together. can't imagine what kind of novel could be resulting from this.
- qbasic_forever 3y ago
  We are already seeing stories of AI fail too, like this lawyer that tried to use it to write an argument and it invented entire cases which don't exist. The judge is not pleased! https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65735769 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65735769

taf2 3y ago

I was on vacation at the beach so this was back in march and I had just received access to gpt4. I had lot of time and I was mostly curious to see if I could use c++ and the recently released whisper.cpp which is pretty solid for transcription s… so I haven’t written c++ for sometime and figured let’s guide gpt 4 to help me write this. It started out giving me the Skelton code. From there it was less about it driving the code and more about it writing the tedious functions. A request handler for parsing form data. After I got the example I could reuse and fit the code into the right places at the end I have a working c++ service wrapping whisper.cpp … I should open source the work but I was blown away that I was able to get this working and still be totally relaxed… occasionally I’d compare my searches in google to my answers from gpt 4 and the difference was me spending 15 - 20 minutes reading through search results vs 5 to 10 minutes… so yeah I’m a crazy ceo who won’t shut up about ai

usaar333 3y ago

See this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36152510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36152510 It's not going to be barely useful, if at all, when you have high skill in a domain. It's quite useful when you don't.

williamcotton 3y ago
It’s pretty useful for doing grunt work in domains that you know pretty well. https://chat.openai.com/share/aff14574-4f3e-496e-a11c-aa8ee2ea1ab6 https://chat.openai.com/share/aff14574-4f3e-496e-a11c-aa8ee2... I could have done the work by hand, but instead I played some guitar while it updated the labeler software for the ML project I’ve been working on. In fact, I think ChatGPT and Copilot wrote the majority of the code in this project: https://github.com/williamcotton/chordviz https://github.com/williamcotton/chordviz
- usaar333 3y ago
  I'm a bit confused by the productivity gain you are seeing. For me, it would be faster to just do the react work (assuming I'm in webstorm with its own fast autocomplete) than go back and forth into ChatGPT and explain what I want in natural language and copy the results back in The only clear win I see is your last example where you are extracting coords into an array. I agree that text transformation like that is a great use of ChatGPT (that's mostly where I use GPT3)
  - williamcotton 3y ago
    Aside from copying and pasting, all I typed was: Add a text input and button to this app that sets the currentImage cookie to the filename in the input and then sets the current image to that as well And: Great, now I'd like to add support for the ii and vi chords. We need to add the keyboard shortcuts for "2" and "6" so when these are pressed it correctly sets the chord name as well as updating the tablature And: The G and C are finished. Complete D, E and A The cognitive load was significantly reduced to the point where I got through practicing Paul Simon’s America twice while waiting for the responses. And that’s not the easiest song to sing and play on acoustic guitar! So instead of just having the updated labeling software, I got some practice in and retained some will power to label 1,500 images when it was completed! But thanks for explaining to me that you know better than me about what saves me time and energy…

jedberg 3y ago

Anecdote, but I needed some code to transform a couple of csv’s into one with some cells merged. I could have written the Python myself in about 45 minutes including the testing and spot checking. Instead I described the csv’s that I had, the one I wanted, and asked for Python code to do it. The code ChatGPT (v3) produced was flawless. I ran it on the data and spot checked it. The entire process took five minutes.

williamcotton 3y ago

I have done some iOS and macOS work in the past using ObjectiveC and C. I have done some DSP work using MaxMSP and PureData. This morning I decided I wanted to write a simple audio visualizer for my iPhone using SwiftUI, a language and framework I have never used. Within an hour I had through the direction of ChatGPT-4 an app running on my phone using a 3rd party library called AudioKit and drawing some fractal looking thingies, as well as a pretty decent understanding of how it all worked because I asked for detailed explanations of every line of code. I’m not sure that I could have had this little app up and working in a single day let alone an hour if I only had a search engine at my disposal.

ldhough 3y ago
Googling "audio visualizer SwiftUI" gives me these as the first, fourth, and seventh results: https://medium.com/swlh/swiftui-create-a-sound-visualizer-cadee0b6ad37 https://medium.com/swlh/swiftui-create-a-sound-visualizer-ca... https://audiokitpro.com/audiovisualizertutorial/ https://audiokitpro.com/audiovisualizertutorial/ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/accelerate/visualizing_sound_as_an_audio_spectrogram https://developer.apple.com/documentation/accelerate/visuali... I do tend to reach for GPT4 before Google for things like this now, but I feel like it should definitely be possible to get this up in only slightly longer with just Google, even if you want some mods.
- williamcotton 3y ago
  But I wasn’t interested in someone else’s audio visualizer, I was interested in a specific approach using pitch detection and primitive line drawings, not displaying an FFT as a bar graph. Sure, I could have synthesized a few different search engine responses but it would have taken a lot more work and I would have run into issues that slowed me down to the point where I had to get back to my other duties as the father of 2 and 4 year olds who were home for the week!
  - ldhough 3y ago
    Yeah its definitely better than piecing together parts from different tutorials to be sure.