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Comment by whatever1 | Hacker News Reader

ChatGPT feels like the sequel of IBM Watson. Super intriguing first impressions, but I doubt it will solve any real problems.

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I have been chatting to it over the past 2 days and have learned so much tech related content that I have always had difficulty understanding.

Perhaps it's a personal preference, I personally find technical documentation indecipherable and can only really learn from seeing clear examples presented in front of me.

Not sure where else I can clearly get an answers to a line of questions like:

"how does X work, how can I use it in X language, can you show me more how X feature works, what if I want it use it X way, will it work with X, show more details on X point, now show me in X language when combined with Z"

I would have to read like 1000 pages of technical indecipherable documentation to get the breadth I can get in like 7 consecutive questions.

It is a very patient explainer, however it sometimes sprinkles some BS into its answers, so be super sceptical.

Not sure what you consider "real problems".

I already use it instead of google to look up stuff, as well as to learn additional things.

Is it some sort of magical AI that will always produce 100% accurate answers no matter what the question is? Absolutely not.

Is it better than giving me a list of links where some of them contain inaccurate privacy invading outdated garbage written than humans? To me personally, yes - it's much better.

I do have to say that I'm not attempting to solve cryptic crosswords or similar, but rather I use it for things that interest me or that I don't understand. Or even to go through some code I've written, to find bugs, improve it, and so on. And at least for my use case it has been more reliable than a lot of people I know.

After having used ChatGPT for a bit i am not trusting its output at all.

If i don't know the answer and it gives me one, how am i supposed to know if it's true? 20% of the time it just made something up.

I’ve already used it in place of googling for help with PowerShell stuff.

It’s quite lovely. I could have gotten the same result from a few minutes of reading stackoverflow but this was faster. I was actually quite surprised.

I'm about 50 / 50 right now on using it for this use case. I'm learning entity framework in C#. I'm not good at reading C# documentation right now. It's gotten me 50% good answers, and 50% where it is just wrong. A good case was "how do I add a composite key to an entity in a migration". Google and S/O show me the old style without migrations. It showed me the right method, which wasn't well documented in the EF Examples. I then asked it to show me it in the form of a full class. It did that nicely.

Then I asked it to show me how to do an upsert. It lead me down a 30 minute path of incorrect answers around AddOrUpdate which doesn't exist in EF, I said it wasn't there, it said "you need newest EF", what version? "6.1", I have 7 it's not in there, oh you need EntityFrameworkPlus. What Nuget package is that, it gave it to me. This doesn't actually have that function. Its here <stale link>. I looked, it's not in that package. It got insistent it was there an into a loop then said it was old and didn't have access to the internet.

Same deal day before with MailKit with GetBodyAsText and GetBodyPart, the former doesnt' exit and the latter it was saying the 2nd parameter was an int, which it's not, it's an actual meta object.

Both of these wrong answers lead me down 30+ minutes of incorrect paths.

TL;DR I need to learn how to read .net documentation like I can java and go docs.

It definitely seems like a tool I'll try in situations, and it's better than google at finding more nuanced answers. Google has so totally screwed up verbatim search right now chatgpt is aces compared to it.

try to let it explain a powershell script :) i said somethin like this: "Explain this powershell script <actual code>"

It is really nice for documentation or giving a summary what the script does. If the answer is to detailed you can ask for a shorter summary. And after that you can ask for translation to another language. German was no problem and the translation was on a impressively good level.

I use it to review my code, improve my writing, find obvious flaws in my ideas, brainstorm, understand code in languages I don't know; translate code from one language to another, etc, etc, it's incredible.

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