4 ms·

> for what promises to be a very important class of tech What I see here is the automated plagiarism machine can't give you the answer only what the answer wou

by chx 3y ago

> for what promises to be a very important class of tech What I see here is the automated plagiarism machine can't give you the answer only what the answer would sound like. So you need to countercheck everything it gives you and if you need to do so then why bother using it at all? I am totally baffled by the hype.

x0x0 3y ago
For things that are well covered on stack overflow, it's a strictly better search engine. eg say you don't remember the syntax for a rails migration, or a regex, or something you're coding in bash, or processpool arguments in python. ChatGPT will often do a shockingly good job at answering those without you searching through random docs, stack overflow, all the bullshit google loves to throw at the top of search queries, etc yourself. You can even paste in a bunch of your code and ask it to fill in something with context, at which it regularly does a shockingly good job. Or paste code and say you want a test that hits some specific aspect of the code. And yeah, I don't really care if they train on the code I share -- figuring out the interaction of some stupid file upload lib with aws and cloudflare is not IP that I care about, and i chatgpt uses this to learn and save anyone else from the issues I was having, even a competitor, I'm happy for them. For a real example: > can you show me how to build a css animation? I'd like a bar, perhaps 20 pixels high, with a light blue (ideally bootstrap 5.3 colors) small gradient both vertically and horizontally, that 1 - fades in; 2 - starts on the left of the div and takes perhaps 20% of the div; 3 - grows to the right of the div; and 4 - loops This got me 95% of where I wanted; I fiddled with the keyframe percents a bit and we use this in our product today. It spat out 30 lines of css that I absolutely could not have produced in under 2 hours.
- skerit 3y ago
  > This got me 95% of where I wanted Exactly. Even when it gives an answer that contains many mistakes, or doesn't work at all, I still get some valuable information out of it that does in the end save me a lot of time. I'm so tired of constantly seeing remarks that basically boil down to "Look, I asked ChatGPT to do my job for me and it failed! What a piece of garbage! Ban AI!", which funnily enough mostly comes from people that fear that their job will be 100% replaced by an AI.
- nerdbert 3y ago
  And so now nobody is adding anything new to Stack Overflow, and thus ChatGPT will be forever stuck only being able to answer questions about pre-2024 tech.
weweersdfsd 3y ago
Sometimes the big picture is enough, and it doesn't matter if some details are wrong. For such tasks ChatGPT and LLM's generally are a major improvement over googling, and reading a lot of text you don't really care about that much.
Charlie_32 3y ago
Well creativity can be used outside of acaedmia, so no checking required there aside from intellectual property?
ctrw 3y ago
Why do we need textbooks if they are just plagaries of the original papers anyway?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bdowling 3y ago
  You don’t need textbooks. Most textbooks are garbage.
  - ctrw 3y ago
    So are most papers.
- melagonster 3y ago
  textbook have higher requirement. papers offer probably truth, but textbook should offer most important common sense in specific discipline.
cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
It’s telling that comments like these hit all the same points. “Plagiarism machine”, “convincing bullshit”, with the millions of people making productive use of ChatGPT belittled as “hype”, all based purely on one person’s hypothesis. The proof is in the puddling. I am far from being alone in my use of LLMs, namely ChatGPT and Copilot, day-to-day in my work. So how does this reconcile with your worldview? Do I have a do-nothing job? Am I not capable of determining whether or not I’m being productive? It’s really hard for me to take posts like these seriously when they all basically say “anyone that perceives any emergent abilities of this tech is an idiot”.
- stavros 3y ago
  When people feel passionately about a thing, they'll find arguments to try to support their emotion. You can't refute those arguments with logic, because they weren't arrived at with logic in the first place.
- chx 3y ago
  Tell me how that works. You add industrial strength gaslighting to your work and not afraid of being fired...?
- NoGravitas 3y ago
  The truth is that we doubt that you are actually doing any productive work. I don't mean that as a personal insult, merely that yes, it's likely you have a bullshit job. They are extremely common.
EnigmaFlare 3y ago
For many thing I'm trying to find out, I'll have to verify them myself anyway, so it's only an inconvenience that it's sometimes wrong. And even then, it give you a good starting point. Who are these people that go around getting random answers to questions from the internet then blindly believing them? That doesn't work on Google either, not even the special info boxes for basic facts.
- 15457345234 3y ago
  > Who are these people that go around getting random answers to questions from the internet then blindly believing them? Up until relatively recently, people didn't just vomit lies onto the internet at an industrial scale. By and large if you searched for something you'd see a correct result from a canonical source, such as an official documentation website or a forum where users were engaging in good faith and trying their best to be accurate. That does seem to have changed. I think the question we should be asking ourselves is 'why are so many people lying and making stuff up so much these days' and 'why is so much misinformation being deliberately published and republished.' People keep saying that we're 'moving into a post-truth era' like it's some sort of inevitability and nobody seems to be suggesting that something perhaps be... done about that?
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Excluding the internet, people at large have been great at confabulating bullshit for about forever. Just jump in your time machine and go to a bar pre cellphone/internet and listen to any random factoid being tossed out to see that happening. The internet was a short reprieve because putting data up on the internet, for some time at least was difficult, therefore people that posted said data typically had a reason to do so. A labor of love, or a business case, in which these cases typically lead to 'true' information being posted. If you're asking why so much bullshit is being posted on the inet these days, it's because it's cheap and easy. That's what has changed. When spam became cheap, easy, and there was a method of profiting from it, we saw it's amount explode.
t_mann 3y ago
> so then why bother using it at all? Because it's still more efficient that way [0]. [0] https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=64700 https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=64700

by chx 3y ago

x0x0 3y ago

For things that are well covered on stack overflow, it's a strictly better search engine. eg say you don't remember the syntax for a rails migration, or a regex, or something you're coding in bash, or processpool arguments in python. ChatGPT will often do a shockingly good job at answering those without you searching through random docs, stack overflow, all the bullshit google loves to throw at the top of search queries, etc yourself. You can even paste in a bunch of your code and ask it to fill in something with context, at which it regularly does a shockingly good job. Or paste code and say you want a test that hits some specific aspect of the code. And yeah, I don't really care if they train on the code I share -- figuring out the interaction of some stupid file upload lib with aws and cloudflare is not IP that I care about, and i chatgpt uses this to learn and save anyone else from the issues I was having, even a competitor, I'm happy for them. For a real example: > can you show me how to build a css animation? I'd like a bar, perhaps 20 pixels high, with a light blue (ideally bootstrap 5.3 colors) small gradient both vertically and horizontally, that 1 - fades in; 2 - starts on the left of the div and takes perhaps 20% of the div; 3 - grows to the right of the div; and 4 - loops This got me 95% of where I wanted; I fiddled with the keyframe percents a bit and we use this in our product today. It spat out 30 lines of css that I absolutely could not have produced in under 2 hours.

skerit 3y ago
> This got me 95% of where I wanted Exactly. Even when it gives an answer that contains many mistakes, or doesn't work at all, I still get some valuable information out of it that does in the end save me a lot of time. I'm so tired of constantly seeing remarks that basically boil down to "Look, I asked ChatGPT to do my job for me and it failed! What a piece of garbage! Ban AI!", which funnily enough mostly comes from people that fear that their job will be 100% replaced by an AI.
nerdbert 3y ago
And so now nobody is adding anything new to Stack Overflow, and thus ChatGPT will be forever stuck only being able to answer questions about pre-2024 tech.

weweersdfsd 3y ago

Sometimes the big picture is enough, and it doesn't matter if some details are wrong. For such tasks ChatGPT and LLM's generally are a major improvement over googling, and reading a lot of text you don't really care about that much.

Charlie_32 3y ago

Well creativity can be used outside of acaedmia, so no checking required there aside from intellectual property?

ctrw 3y ago

Why do we need textbooks if they are just plagaries of the original papers anyway?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bdowling 3y ago
You don’t need textbooks. Most textbooks are garbage.
- ctrw 3y ago
  So are most papers.
melagonster 3y ago
textbook have higher requirement. papers offer probably truth, but textbook should offer most important common sense in specific discipline.

cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago

It’s telling that comments like these hit all the same points. “Plagiarism machine”, “convincing bullshit”, with the millions of people making productive use of ChatGPT belittled as “hype”, all based purely on one person’s hypothesis. The proof is in the puddling. I am far from being alone in my use of LLMs, namely ChatGPT and Copilot, day-to-day in my work. So how does this reconcile with your worldview? Do I have a do-nothing job? Am I not capable of determining whether or not I’m being productive? It’s really hard for me to take posts like these seriously when they all basically say “anyone that perceives any emergent abilities of this tech is an idiot”.

stavros 3y ago
When people feel passionately about a thing, they'll find arguments to try to support their emotion. You can't refute those arguments with logic, because they weren't arrived at with logic in the first place.
chx 3y ago
Tell me how that works. You add industrial strength gaslighting to your work and not afraid of being fired...?
NoGravitas 3y ago
The truth is that we doubt that you are actually doing any productive work. I don't mean that as a personal insult, merely that yes, it's likely you have a bullshit job. They are extremely common.

EnigmaFlare 3y ago

For many thing I'm trying to find out, I'll have to verify them myself anyway, so it's only an inconvenience that it's sometimes wrong. And even then, it give you a good starting point. Who are these people that go around getting random answers to questions from the internet then blindly believing them? That doesn't work on Google either, not even the special info boxes for basic facts.

15457345234 3y ago
> Who are these people that go around getting random answers to questions from the internet then blindly believing them? Up until relatively recently, people didn't just vomit lies onto the internet at an industrial scale. By and large if you searched for something you'd see a correct result from a canonical source, such as an official documentation website or a forum where users were engaging in good faith and trying their best to be accurate. That does seem to have changed. I think the question we should be asking ourselves is 'why are so many people lying and making stuff up so much these days' and 'why is so much misinformation being deliberately published and republished.' People keep saying that we're 'moving into a post-truth era' like it's some sort of inevitability and nobody seems to be suggesting that something perhaps be... done about that?
- pixl97 3y ago
  Excluding the internet, people at large have been great at confabulating bullshit for about forever. Just jump in your time machine and go to a bar pre cellphone/internet and listen to any random factoid being tossed out to see that happening. The internet was a short reprieve because putting data up on the internet, for some time at least was difficult, therefore people that posted said data typically had a reason to do so. A labor of love, or a business case, in which these cases typically lead to 'true' information being posted. If you're asking why so much bullshit is being posted on the inet these days, it's because it's cheap and easy. That's what has changed. When spam became cheap, easy, and there was a method of profiting from it, we saw it's amount explode.

t_mann 3y ago

> so then why bother using it at all? Because it's still more efficient that way [0]. [0] https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=64700 https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=64700