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Comment by typest | Hacker News Reader

The other day, I was trying to build a web scraper, but I kept getting an error that the data wasn't utf-8 encoded. I gave chatgpt the error along with the first 10 bytes (e.g. b'\x1f\x8b\x08\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x03') and it informed me that this was a gzip-encoded binary file, and then it wrote me working code to decompress the file.

This is extremely valuable and saved me hours/was the difference between me stopping or not.

There will surely be people that overhype this, but there is real value as well.

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The first result of searching for your string on Google is a StackOverflow link [1] that mentions that this is a gzip header. There is another link [2] below it showing how to decompress it.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58552645/what-exactly-is...

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57328953/trying-to-decod...

This strikes me as comically similar to patterns I see in tech: people not knowing what came before, and fixating on overly complex new solutions to problems that were trivially solved with prior tools.

I fully expect a node.js server in a docker container to query GPT for error messages found in logs. They'll give it a cutesy name like ChattyDev, and before you know it, every coding school will be pumping out coders who think it's an essential development tool, and HN threads filled with people who will defend the practice to the death, referring to examples such as left-pad for prior art.

"yeah, well...people made fun of left-pad, but we see how it has completely automated the padding of strings, removing one more chance for error!"

GPTalloc: "Why worry about your own memory?"

I love that.

I hate to say it, but this is exhibit A in the "AI will just make some developers even more lazy than SO did"

To be fair, you could google "1f 8b" or even that entire hex string and Google will tell you the same thing.

Wow. Pretty amazing that chatGPT knows how to use Google.

This seems to really be where we're at now. Not a/better AI but a better search.

Better search because what exactly?

Context. I can never get Google to know the context of what I'm looking for, and the more context I add the more random 'important' stuff it decides to show me matching less significant terms. It was right in the article:

> Wall Street loves to play “Who wins, who loses” when a new technology explodes onto the scene. The fingers were all pointing at Google as a potential loser.

It's not just a play. It's business. There are so many people to invest on either Google or Microsoft, if more people wants to invest on Microsoft, some will do it at the expense of Google shares.

the difference is that with google you can trace the source of the statement, and with chatgtp they only option is to believe.

Also that google is able to give me live results whereas an LLM is trained on data from some point in the past. And just maybe I want to actually go to a site I'm searching for and not just wanting a summary or conversation about the topic. I just don't see how an LLM is going to replace search unless it can do all the other useful things search does right now.

Augment search, yes. Replace it with the current chatGPT interface? No way.

And you have comments underneath the StackOverflow answer by people who've tested it.

Which can be extremely useful, and people aren't always going to know to prompt an LLM to give them the info in those comments.

Bubbles can be based in real value.

The dotcom bubble was a bubble because there were a lot of junk, overvalued companies. Doesn't mean websites aren't useful.

I know what you mean but the word "bubble" implies no value. A bubble is mostly empty space of no value, the surface of the bubble hides the emptiness.

When the bubble pop as it inevitably does the emptiness is exposed.

The meaning you're going for here is that although there's a "bubble" it's likely a smaller bubble, not a large bubble like the dotcom bubble or the housing bubble.

In finance a bubble means an economic cycle where asset prices rise faster than their actual value. It is a term of art/analogy but it does not map 1:1 with physical bubbles such as soap bubbles. It does not mean that the underlying asset has no actual value.

The housing example is a great one. The 2008 housing bubble was due (in part) to overvalued houses. Those houses still have value though (they weren't scam houses that only existed on paper).

It is a 1:1 mapping to physical bubbles. Like soap bubbles.

I never said the bubble implies the underlying asset has no value. The bubble encases the difference in value and current value. The bubble does not encase the actual asset.

When a bubble pops that difference disappears. But the asset value remains because the intrinsic value was not what the bubble was referring to.

My main point was that just because there is an AI bubble does not mean that AI is not useful/valuable. Seems like we agree on that.

It's nice and all but simply putting "b'\x1f\x8b\x08\x00\x00\x00\x00\" in google search gives you the same answer (first link even)

I started out reading the article thinking the author was going to say that it's all vaporware, but he doesn't at all.

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