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Comment by jarjoura | Hacker News Reader

Just like a human, don't use these new AI tools to read your mind.

I've found ChatGPT to be impressively helpful at knowing where to continue to look for something. I can write a sentence and explain what I'm looking for, and maybe even paste in a code snippet, and 10 seconds later I get enough information to go back to Google and continue digging deeper.

For me it's become a bridge tool. Instead of spending an hour trying to get Google to understand my confusion and endless ads thrown my way, I get a very concise answer with full definitions in case I needed to know. It understands me, which is the most important part.

The code examples it spits out are meh, and likely always going to be error prone, but I cannot imagine it won't improve over time.

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Yeah it's great as an assistant to a critical thinking human, people who are criticizing it are either doing it for clickbait aka money or expected it go think for them.

Like it showed me how to split an audio file into parts with ffmpeg, I'm sure I knew it at some point but it took me less time than reading the -h or looking for an answer on stackoverflow, especially with google's greed that it stopped showing stackoverflow first and sometimes leaves it to the 2nd page and fills the first with garbage, started using yandex as an alternative to google a year ago, now using it by default and google from time to time, it's sad that the best product is behind us.

>Yeah it's great as an assistant to a critical thinking human, people who are criticizing it are either doing it for clickbait aka money or expected it go think for them.

You forgot the hyped up people who blindly tell you the latter and thus force you to state its limitations loudly. Every time I see these trolls I worry that I am too stupid to enter the right prompts but no, it then always behaves exactly how I think it should.

I think people are not criticising the good uses but the potentially really bad ones. While Im welcoming a human helper artificial agent I am uneasy about the upcoming general downgrading of human labor. Big money will benefit from this more than anybody else

It's like the friendly, patient forum poster who answers your questions and explains things in a "how to make a peanut butter sandwich" manner we all wished we had but are hard to come across.

I like that! A “friendly, patient forum poster” is a great analogy.

This makes me think that what’s really missing from these new AI is a response that asks for more context, instead of directly attempting to give you a correct answer. Often my questions don’t have enough contexts to be answered correctly but the AI never tells me that

Tell ChatGPT that you want it to ask for more context when it's needed and it will do so. I've done this before and it will continue to ask more probing questions until it's satisfied. You kind of have to guide it a little bit but it definitely works.

What you're saying really blows my mind btw

Why? When you intentionally keep your prompts vague it will ask you to clarify. Telling it directly to ask for more context sounds about right.

I just can’t fathom how these AI work. It seems like impossible to me

I'm working on an "AI Programmer" website and have attempted to do a requirements interview like that to get more context. Hoping to get the new release out within a week.

I was asking it some medical related questions today and I had the same thought. “What are some medical conditions that could cause constant fatigue, a weak immune system, and circulation issues resembling Reynauld’s syndrome?”

To which is could reply “Does the patient have skin lesions or joint pain?” to eliminate possibilities.

> Google to understand my confusion and endless ads thrown my way,

Another reason why Google is terrified here. Search is per query cheap. GPT isn't.

If it were down to cost per query, they wouldn't have implemented search-as-you-type, which is probably 5x as expensive as waiting for the user to hit the enter button.

I guess many companies will pay for Github Co-pilot, ChatGPT style things.

No one will pay for access to a search engine.

Kagi, a paid search engine, and I, one of their customers, disagree, for what that's worth.

Holy shit this looks AMAZING. Rule out domains from searches entirely? Sold!

Excluding domains from results used to be possible on Google too :(

Can you give an example? It seems to work for me (?)

You can exclude them from specific searches, but there used to be a button that would add the exclusion to a cookie.

I'm still so lost on why they're making a browser only for Apple devices

Could be resource limitation, apple users tend to be more likely to pay for products so it makes more sense to target them exclusively

Regarding that Mozilla and Google now work on their own browser engines for iOS I get the feeling that Kagi should drop Orion and maybe work on their own mail thingy or something else.

But what do I know?

I tried the 50 free queries, and it was basically exactly the same experience as DDG. I can maybe see paying $10-$20/yr, but $10/mo? No way.

mandatory HN Kagi plug

Honestly if it was not an advert riddled mess tracking my every move I would definitely pay for search.

ChatGPT/Bing is a superior rival to Google's I'm feeling Lucky button, thats a threat to Google's search engine dominance.

When you have two choices and don't really know which one to pick, there's an old trick to throw a coin. Go with the coin, unless you really dislike the outcome, which tells you that the other choice was the right one all along.

I use ChatGPT in a similar manner, for example when writing documentation, I'll ask it: "What are the important topics that should be covered in a documentation on X?" and "Can you give me a suggestion for a structure of such a documentation?". Now I can easily follow along, unless I feel like it is a bad approach.

With coding, it is almost like an improved rubber duck. I don't trust the replies, but the engagement is helping me structure my thoughts.

This is exactly how I use it now. It's like a custom SO helper. ChatGPT has read all the doc's. If you can ask the right question it'll give you a good boost.

But the building, that falls back on the engineer.

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