Show HN: I built a productivity app for Mac powered by GPT-3 | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I built a productivity app for Mac powered by GPT-3

kambanthemaker.gumroad.com

9 pointskamban7 comments

From the preview's shown at the top:

Input: "Write a small introduction about how human activity is destabilizing the Earth's climate and biosphere."

Output: "Humans have long impacted the environment, but never before in history have we had such a profound and widespread impact on the planet. The Earth is now in a state of flux, with human activity destabilizing the climate and the biosphere. The consequences of this are far-reaching and potentially catastrophic."

This is a bullshit generator. The video of it making a presentation (3rd preview in the carousel) is even worse. it is literally all BS and filler without any substance.

To further push this point. If you can condense the topic of an email into 2 bullet points, please for the love of god do not expand it into multiple sentences by stuffing it with filler.

I agree with you. Though I fear that creating bullshit is precisely many people’s job.

Why I get the implicit argument (make their jobs less onerous) I disagree with it on the whole.

The fact that a lot of people's job is to create bullshit is bad, for most definitions of bad. Personally, I would include morally bad in there.

And if the bullshit is bad, then creating software that makes it easier to make more of it is also bad.

If anything this software should work literally backwards.

marketing email -> 2 sentence summary of the deal and the restrictions

report -> remove all of the filler sentences that add nothing

presentation -> cut out slides that GPT can easily generate the majority from the title

Such a great point. Would love this in reverse.

Interesting take. I have a rewriting feature, one specifically is "Zinsser" mode. It uses the principles of William Zinsser based on his book "On Writing Well". It is supposed to do exactly that. To remove clutters from the statement. I will continue to fine tune it.

That feature does actually sound beneficial.

Strangely though, you make no mention of it anywhere on the page. There is no mention of that on that mode anywhere on the page.

That, “Rewrite sentences to match a style”, and “Fix grammar mistakes in the selected text” strike me, personally, as the most beneficial aspects of this.

The rest seem like a grab bag. For example, “Write code in any language”. There’s already GitHub Pilot, and that one is free.

The other applications seem either untrustworthy “explain code” or “write a technical blog” or simply fluffs up the input. Why would I as the reader want to read something if you the write didn’t care enough to write it yourself?

Oh. Your prices also need a little asterisk beside them to let people who jump to the bottom know that they also need to pay for an OpenAI account.

I appreciate the feedback. I will rewrite some parts of the content. "Explain code" might be beneficial to programmers. I actually use it.

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