5 ms·

The point is you need to collaborate with the LLM, not just expect it to provide fully-formed answers. I've saved countless hours of work over the past few mon

The point is you need to collaborate with the LLM, not just expect it to provide fully-formed answers. I've saved countless hours of work over the past few months using GPT-4 to help me solve problems. One general framework can be to use it to help you google a solution instead of a problem. Googling a problem gives you all kinds of results, which you then need to dig through and understand in order to evaluate whether there's something that can be adapted to your use case. On the other hand, you can ask GPT-4 for solutions to the problem, and then google those, which cuts the process down significantly. Of course that's only one example. The pattern though is that you need to play to its strengths. It's not particularly smart, but it's very knowledgeable. Just like a human though, you can't expect it to perfectly regurgitate all the details. You use it for direction, and then refine from there, through conversation with the LLM as well as external research.

mrkramer 3y ago
>Googling a problem gives you all kinds of results, which you then need to dig through and understand in order to evaluate whether there's something that can be adapted to your use case. Exactly; search engines give you those blue links and short descriptions of the search results which are not enough for you to grasp what is the website about. I think what search engines need to do is tackle the complexity of going through the results of a search engine. Google page rank seemed like a silver bullet back in the day but the websites which are the most popular are not necessarily of the best quality. What we need is to lower the complexity for casual users when they deal with search results. On the other hand ChatGPT is like an answer machine that can give you satisfactory answer on your fist try but if not, you need to talk with it, push it and explore what answers it gives you, just like you said. I think ChatGPT type search engine will be more suitable for people who are "lazy" or for the people who don't have time to "Google" and go through search results and look around the web for the helpful and useful information.
- bagasme 3y ago
  Yikes! I mean ChatGPT-style search engine is more fit for noobs and the faint-of-heart people (the ones with nothing in the world for them IMO).
  - mrkramer 3y ago
    I've tried ChatGPT inside Microsoft's Bing search engine and it is pretty good so far. It definitely saved me time that I would lose clicking on search results and skimming through websites looking for useful information.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > I think what search engines need to do is tackle the complexity of going through the results of a search engine. This is exactly what I don't want a search engine to do for me. Going through the list of results and evaluating them is an important part of my process, if what I'm trying to do is learn something new.
  - mrkramer 3y ago
    So how do you differentiate blue links that all look the same? I mean yes there is description of a search result but that doesn't tell you very much about the website or the quality of information that you are getting. Bing did a good thing with their annotations[0] because my thinking is that something like annotations lower the complexity of browsing and skimming through search results. [0] https://blogs.bing.com/search/2022-08/Shopping-Searches-are-Now-Smarter-on-Microsoft-Bing https://blogs.bing.com/search/2022-08/Shopping-Searches-are-...
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > So how do you differentiate blue links that all look the same? They don't all look the same. They all tend to go to different places. I find that it's reasonably easy to spot a great deal of garbage sites just from their domain name or url, and that weeds out a large chunk. Ignoring multiple results for the same site also weeds out a large chunk (I only need one of them). The rest, I just click on and take a look at the page. It's pretty quick and easy to weed out most of the garbage ones with a quick skim. The rest, I sample, read captions and boxes, skim paragraphs and such to determine if it's along the lines of what I want. That's pretty quick too. For the most part, it's the same process that you use when researching in a library. The reason that I want to do this myself rather than outsourcing it is because I'll inevitably learn something in the process that will shift my viewpoint to one that's more targeted or meaningful for the purpose I have in searching. It doesn't matter how good the engine is at collating and summarizing results -- even if it's perfect, my understanding not only of what I'm looking to learn, but also discovery of important but serendipitous or unexpected knowledge, is lessened. It's a bit like the difference between reading Cliff's (or Cole's) Notes about a book and reading the book.
KingLancelot 3y ago
[dead]
ragequitta 3y ago
It really is astonishing how much you can get done this way. I've been setting up a home lab for myself, and the answers Gpt4 gives are miles ahead of the stack overflow results or documentation of the apps or whatever else. Rarely (very rarely) it will give me a wrong answer, but then I paste in the error message or describe the problem I had and it almost always comes up with the correct answer 2nd try. Final step is asking where I might learn more because it's not working, and gpt always gives me a better link than google. I'm convinced the people who say it's nothing but a BS machine have never tried to use it step by step for a project. Or they tried to use it for a project most humans couldn't do, and got upset when it was only 95% perfect.
- orwin 3y ago
  I disagree with that. It's very useful writing boilerplate and documentation, but two third the time I'm in front of a bug I'm to lazy to understand and ask ChatGPT, with context and all, the answer is wrong. I can fiddle with it to reduce that to a third of the time, but in the end, only the questions that are really, really hard to figure on your own are left. Still, it's way better and more efficient than Google. Less than not being lazy and using my two braincells tbh. My newest use is Hello, i' m working on X, I use Y tech, my app do Z and I want to implement W. Can you provide a plan on how and where to start?
  - throwawayadvsec 3y ago
    What tech stack(s) do you work with?
    - orwin 3y ago
      Sorry i'm a bit late. Depends. Professionally, its a mix a python, typescript (those i practically never use ChatGPT for, or rather, i use it for questions i usually ask google/reddit/SO), terraform/terragrunt on AWS with some Cisco config and some other hardware stack i don't remember but that require custom terraform providers. I automate the deployment of the hardware, so i think writing custom providers and terraform is roughly a third of what i do and i cannot use ChatGPT for that, its output is way too bad. Personnally, a lot of bash, C, AWK at the moment (typescript + html/css until last april, now i'm back to the basics). The figure i gave in my post were more for that. The last time i used it was yesterday, i wanted to hack something on an old game i used steam+proton for. I knew it was a weird Wineprefix, so i asked ChatGPT for it, i might have asked poorly, but after fiddling, i had the response (tbh i had to look how to get the game ID, so in the end i lost more time than not), then when it still didn't work, cause the path was shit, i entered all necessary context in ChaGPT4, and it couldn't find the easy "USER=steamuser" env variable to add before launching Wine. I stopped after 10 minutes, looked into a example Wine cfg file, understood the issue and fixed the problem myself. I mean, it's probably good for really basic stuff, so it could have helped me when i was starting, but 80% of the stuff i code automatically without really thinking about it, and when i have to stop to think, ChatGPT isn't helping. Also tbh, VSCode is really, really good and fix my old, time-consuming task of "what's this argument again?"
QuantumGood 3y ago
So many small things go faster. For example, I throw the output of Windows-Shift-T (power tools keyboard shortcut for screenshot OCR) text into ChatGPT with a "remove line breaks" prompt. Yes, I know how to Ctrl-H ^l in Word, and other ways, but they sometimes produce odd results (missing spaces, extra spaces), and GPT is faster.

mrkramer 3y ago

>Googling a problem gives you all kinds of results, which you then need to dig through and understand in order to evaluate whether there's something that can be adapted to your use case. Exactly; search engines give you those blue links and short descriptions of the search results which are not enough for you to grasp what is the website about. I think what search engines need to do is tackle the complexity of going through the results of a search engine. Google page rank seemed like a silver bullet back in the day but the websites which are the most popular are not necessarily of the best quality. What we need is to lower the complexity for casual users when they deal with search results. On the other hand ChatGPT is like an answer machine that can give you satisfactory answer on your fist try but if not, you need to talk with it, push it and explore what answers it gives you, just like you said. I think ChatGPT type search engine will be more suitable for people who are "lazy" or for the people who don't have time to "Google" and go through search results and look around the web for the helpful and useful information.

bagasme 3y ago
Yikes! I mean ChatGPT-style search engine is more fit for noobs and the faint-of-heart people (the ones with nothing in the world for them IMO).
- mrkramer 3y ago
  I've tried ChatGPT inside Microsoft's Bing search engine and it is pretty good so far. It definitely saved me time that I would lose clicking on search results and skimming through websites looking for useful information.
JohnFen 3y ago
> I think what search engines need to do is tackle the complexity of going through the results of a search engine. This is exactly what I don't want a search engine to do for me. Going through the list of results and evaluating them is an important part of my process, if what I'm trying to do is learn something new.
- mrkramer 3y ago
  So how do you differentiate blue links that all look the same? I mean yes there is description of a search result but that doesn't tell you very much about the website or the quality of information that you are getting. Bing did a good thing with their annotations[0] because my thinking is that something like annotations lower the complexity of browsing and skimming through search results. [0] https://blogs.bing.com/search/2022-08/Shopping-Searches-are-Now-Smarter-on-Microsoft-Bing https://blogs.bing.com/search/2022-08/Shopping-Searches-are-...
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > So how do you differentiate blue links that all look the same? They don't all look the same. They all tend to go to different places. I find that it's reasonably easy to spot a great deal of garbage sites just from their domain name or url, and that weeds out a large chunk. Ignoring multiple results for the same site also weeds out a large chunk (I only need one of them). The rest, I just click on and take a look at the page. It's pretty quick and easy to weed out most of the garbage ones with a quick skim. The rest, I sample, read captions and boxes, skim paragraphs and such to determine if it's along the lines of what I want. That's pretty quick too. For the most part, it's the same process that you use when researching in a library. The reason that I want to do this myself rather than outsourcing it is because I'll inevitably learn something in the process that will shift my viewpoint to one that's more targeted or meaningful for the purpose I have in searching. It doesn't matter how good the engine is at collating and summarizing results -- even if it's perfect, my understanding not only of what I'm looking to learn, but also discovery of important but serendipitous or unexpected knowledge, is lessened. It's a bit like the difference between reading Cliff's (or Cole's) Notes about a book and reading the book.

KingLancelot 3y ago

[dead]

ragequitta 3y ago

It really is astonishing how much you can get done this way. I've been setting up a home lab for myself, and the answers Gpt4 gives are miles ahead of the stack overflow results or documentation of the apps or whatever else. Rarely (very rarely) it will give me a wrong answer, but then I paste in the error message or describe the problem I had and it almost always comes up with the correct answer 2nd try. Final step is asking where I might learn more because it's not working, and gpt always gives me a better link than google. I'm convinced the people who say it's nothing but a BS machine have never tried to use it step by step for a project. Or they tried to use it for a project most humans couldn't do, and got upset when it was only 95% perfect.

orwin 3y ago
I disagree with that. It's very useful writing boilerplate and documentation, but two third the time I'm in front of a bug I'm to lazy to understand and ask ChatGPT, with context and all, the answer is wrong. I can fiddle with it to reduce that to a third of the time, but in the end, only the questions that are really, really hard to figure on your own are left. Still, it's way better and more efficient than Google. Less than not being lazy and using my two braincells tbh. My newest use is Hello, i' m working on X, I use Y tech, my app do Z and I want to implement W. Can you provide a plan on how and where to start?
- throwawayadvsec 3y ago
  What tech stack(s) do you work with?
  - orwin 3y ago
    Sorry i'm a bit late. Depends. Professionally, its a mix a python, typescript (those i practically never use ChatGPT for, or rather, i use it for questions i usually ask google/reddit/SO), terraform/terragrunt on AWS with some Cisco config and some other hardware stack i don't remember but that require custom terraform providers. I automate the deployment of the hardware, so i think writing custom providers and terraform is roughly a third of what i do and i cannot use ChatGPT for that, its output is way too bad. Personnally, a lot of bash, C, AWK at the moment (typescript + html/css until last april, now i'm back to the basics). The figure i gave in my post were more for that. The last time i used it was yesterday, i wanted to hack something on an old game i used steam+proton for. I knew it was a weird Wineprefix, so i asked ChatGPT for it, i might have asked poorly, but after fiddling, i had the response (tbh i had to look how to get the game ID, so in the end i lost more time than not), then when it still didn't work, cause the path was shit, i entered all necessary context in ChaGPT4, and it couldn't find the easy "USER=steamuser" env variable to add before launching Wine. I stopped after 10 minutes, looked into a example Wine cfg file, understood the issue and fixed the problem myself. I mean, it's probably good for really basic stuff, so it could have helped me when i was starting, but 80% of the stuff i code automatically without really thinking about it, and when i have to stop to think, ChatGPT isn't helping. Also tbh, VSCode is really, really good and fix my old, time-consuming task of "what's this argument again?"

QuantumGood 3y ago

So many small things go faster. For example, I throw the output of Windows-Shift-T (power tools keyboard shortcut for screenshot OCR) text into ChatGPT with a "remove line breaks" prompt. Yes, I know how to Ctrl-H ^l in Word, and other ways, but they sometimes produce odd results (missing spaces, extra spaces), and GPT is faster.