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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

I can't imagine using ChatGPT for anything, personally. As a society we have grown physically obese on high calorie, sugar-packed foods combined with a sedentary lifestyle. Seems like we're about to become mentally obese when we no longer have to use our minds read or write and can just be spoon-fed AI generated words, music, and video. We will become a society of fat, drooling simpletons sitting in recliners consuming endless entertainment plugged directly into our senses while an IV drips glucose into the nearest vein.

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Some counterpoints.

1. People have been saying "this tech will make people stupid" for ages. And it's kind of true, but it's not clear that it's bad. Yes, when technology can do things we stop learning to do those things because it stops mattering. If it does still matter we would still learn.

2. I've had good conversations with ChatGPT. I didn't ask it to solve a problem, I asked it to describe algorithms, give me information about them, etc. It was a great tool. Instead of having to find a peer, catch them up, do the polite dance, schedule a call, etc, I can just say "Hey tell me about consensus algorithms. OK, tell me about some of the tradeoffs. Given this change in a data model, what changes in those tradeoffs?"

Anyway, I think this doomer view is pretty unfounded.

I feel like the people who think ChatGPT is pointless, unusable, boring etc, don't really get it. If you need to know a hard fact, just Google it. GPT will tell you what to look for.

For example, I needed to learn about Slack chatbots. I asked it what frameworks I should look into, then how to use a specific framework or API. "Write me some boilerplate code doing X in Y framework". It's gets you up and running in minutes.

I'm exploring and learning other programming languages at a crazy rate because I can have it translate something I wrote. Or, "Hey, give me a demo C++ program that uses arrays, for loops, logical operators, and a simple class." "Great, now rewrite this in Node.js."

Sure, it might make a mistake, but copy and paste your error code and 90% of the time it compiles.

I highly encourage any skeptics to just sit for a couple days and try to get it to write code. Once you get the hang of what it can and can't do, it's immensely helpful. This is vacuum tubes to transistors paradigm changing shit.

You're saying, "if you need to know a hard fact, just Google it", but at the same time saying "I'm exploring and learning other programming languages at a crazy rate".

Those are somewhat contradictory to me. Information about programming languages are hard facts.

If it translates your code into another language how do you know it's using best practices? How do you know there aren't subtle bugs in its translation? Is it using modern syntax?

I don't really see much value unless in "exploring" another language like this. Basic data structures, control flow and logical operators are very similar in all languages.

If it could show me modern syntax following best practices that is correct then that would be insanely useful, but there's no way to know whether it's showing you junk or not.

> but there's no way to know whether it's showing you junk or not.

My experience so far is that it's light on junk, and the junk is really obvious.

A difference between ChatGPT and Google in this scenario is that Google cannot really synthesise or compose facts/knowledge together. These giga language models are decent at this, if anything they do it a bit too well/much, putting vaguely/somewhat but not quite right things together alot of the times. Which probably has some uses...

Bit of a side note, but while I agree on #2, I'm not too keen on what happens when it gets good enough that you're no longer the one using it to bypass people, your (former) boss is instead...

The biggest downfall at the moment is it's questionable accuracy in some cases but saying you can't see any potential in this tech seems disingenuous at best.

The amount of time it could save just by being good at summarizing the thousands of pages of poorly structured documentation I read yearly is immense.

By that definition, you shouldn't be using computers or calculators or contacts application on the phone. These tools are augmenting our own computational units we carry around. Sort of like a external storage or a external tpu.

Yeah they are all crutches. I feel bad that I can't add three-digit numbers in my head when my grandparents could do it easily.

When I was in high school I remembered all my friends' phone numbers. Now I don't know anyone's number.

I don't think it augments our computational units, it atrophies them and we become ever more dependent on the tools. Yes, the tools can also do things beyond (or faster than) what the best human mind can do -- but at a cost.

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