Comment by _huayra_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _huayra_ | Hacker News Reader

I'm getting pretty tired of these posts dunking on ChatGPT making it to HN. Yes, we know if you try to see if it is "smart", it'll fall down. It's pretty easy to show how silly it is compared to things a human could do, etc. Haha, robot do the mistake again!

This is the equivalent of someone Googling something back in 2000 and saying "wow this is just a joke because I searched for 'cat' and got a few dog pics. It'll never be useful".

I've had ChatGPT debug my router config, teach me esoteric C++ libraries with examples, set up config files for various things (e.g. CMake, Kubernetes) and be able to explain to me what it's doing when I ask it, and even help me learn a foreign language (hint: "I want to have a conversation in $LANGUAGE that I'm learning, so please respond to my queries using very simple words and phrases in $LANGUAGE", and yes, it'll do it).

Sure, you can have all kinds of "fun" asking it "are you a robot herp derp", but it does incredibly useful things right now.

> This is the equivalent of

No, it isn’t like that at all. People are claiming that ChatGPT is either intelligent or proto-intelligent (we’re on the precipice!). Which means being way, way more capable than a search engine.

But it is way, way more capable than a search engine.

Sorry. I meant to say way, way, way more capable. ;)

"people are claiming" is in reality a narrow subset of people... like very few.

Appreciate the insight. And I agree it's incredibly useful - I use it hundreds of times a day too! I guess my point (which maybe I didn't make clear in the post) is that it's just a tool and shouldn't be viewed with the mystique that some people ascribe to it.

I have a similar experience.

I've been using it to explain minified code I come across and unusual code patterns I don't understand. It's similar to a coworker in that it's not always right but can generally point me in the right direction if not. But one that responds within seconds and not with a random delay of 5 minutes to 3 days. It also means that I'm interrupting my real coworkers less.

Yes! It's basically like having a knowledgeable senior dev, but on pretty much everything. Maybe they don't always get the details right, but the insight in explaining the "fundamentals" of how something works is key, and ChatGPT usually does this quite well.

I used to be the "C++ wizard" who everyone in my team would bug when they'd come across some weird behavior, but now I just say "ask ChatGPT about $footgun in C++". It actually explains it super well!

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