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Bing with Copilot is insanely good and initially I was having a tough time getting my slower teammates to adopt it for the more tedious tasks. I don’t really u

Bing with Copilot is insanely good and initially I was having a tough time getting my slower teammates to adopt it for the more tedious tasks. I don’t really use it to do anything but tedious stuff and for searching for documentation that google will refuse to show anymore. and it provides sources so you can verify. It really does feel (to me) like the magic of google search’s majestic era, like 2010-2015. It just tends to give the correct answers at an extraordinarily high rate and can be poked and prodded in the right direction without a lot of work.

laborcontract 3y ago
Google getting rid of verbatim searches is an all time fumble for me. Prompt engineering a Google search to get it to find what you want is harder than getting gpt4 to talk about mature content.
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  I'm still kinda pissed about that, personally. I wouldn't object to it doing fuzzy "Google Knows Best" searches for normies, but I really wish verbatim was still an option. On the other hand, I rarely use Google these days anyway.
- fragmede 3y ago
  using " " to force the query still works, last I checked
mitthrowaway2 3y ago
I'm not seeing correct answers at an extraordinarily high rate, myself. For engineering and physics questions I get confident answers that are off by several orders of magnitude, and the sources cited tend to be only tangentially related to the query and don't answer the question themselves. What kinds of questions are you asking?
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  Like the original author of this post sorta alluded to, treating it like a very junior assistant or pair programmer. Those kinds of questions. Questions I do not have time to trawl google for that are easily available knowledge. I don't expect it to be an expert - I want it to eliminate toil. It does do that.
  - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
    > Like the original author of this post sorta alluded to, treating it like a very junior assistant or pair programmer. For me, treating someone like a junior assist means teaching the respective person a huge lot of stuff in a very short time, so that he gets useful as fast as possible. :-)
  - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
    It does give an answer, yes. But those are the kinds of questions that I often get where the answers are badly wrong. If it's programming, that's probably fine, it's generally pretty easy to verify. If you're asking for a statistic that seems like it ought be easily available knowledge but which you couldn't find within 1 minute of checking Wikipedia, it will probably confidently tell you something badly wrong. Make sure you double check.
Turing_Machine 3y ago
It's pretty good inside Visual Studio Code as well. Sometimes the autofill does the wrong thing, which is annoying, but not often enough for me to turn it off. The live chat feature is also pretty useful. ChatGPT-4, by comparison, seems to have gotten noticeably worse at writing code since it was first released. I have no hard data to show that, but I have a very strong feeling that it has. Now, they're both supposedly based on the same OpenAI stuff, but I think Microsoft must be adding some "secret sauce" to Copilot. Different training data? Different system prompt?

laborcontract 3y ago

Google getting rid of verbatim searches is an all time fumble for me. Prompt engineering a Google search to get it to find what you want is harder than getting gpt4 to talk about mature content.

Turing_Machine 3y ago
I'm still kinda pissed about that, personally. I wouldn't object to it doing fuzzy "Google Knows Best" searches for normies, but I really wish verbatim was still an option. On the other hand, I rarely use Google these days anyway.
fragmede 3y ago
using " " to force the query still works, last I checked

mitthrowaway2 3y ago

I'm not seeing correct answers at an extraordinarily high rate, myself. For engineering and physics questions I get confident answers that are off by several orders of magnitude, and the sources cited tend to be only tangentially related to the query and don't answer the question themselves. What kinds of questions are you asking?

JohnMakin 3y ago
Like the original author of this post sorta alluded to, treating it like a very junior assistant or pair programmer. Those kinds of questions. Questions I do not have time to trawl google for that are easily available knowledge. I don't expect it to be an expert - I want it to eliminate toil. It does do that.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > Like the original author of this post sorta alluded to, treating it like a very junior assistant or pair programmer. For me, treating someone like a junior assist means teaching the respective person a huge lot of stuff in a very short time, so that he gets useful as fast as possible. :-)
- mitthrowaway2 3y ago
  It does give an answer, yes. But those are the kinds of questions that I often get where the answers are badly wrong. If it's programming, that's probably fine, it's generally pretty easy to verify. If you're asking for a statistic that seems like it ought be easily available knowledge but which you couldn't find within 1 minute of checking Wikipedia, it will probably confidently tell you something badly wrong. Make sure you double check.

Turing_Machine 3y ago

It's pretty good inside Visual Studio Code as well. Sometimes the autofill does the wrong thing, which is annoying, but not often enough for me to turn it off. The live chat feature is also pretty useful. ChatGPT-4, by comparison, seems to have gotten noticeably worse at writing code since it was first released. I have no hard data to show that, but I have a very strong feeling that it has. Now, they're both supposedly based on the same OpenAI stuff, but I think Microsoft must be adding some "secret sauce" to Copilot. Different training data? Different system prompt?