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Comment by jermaustin1 | Hacker News Reader

I have started incorporating ChatGPT into my side project. I'm not integrating it into software or anything like that, but using it as a tool for product ideas, product photo ideas, funny social media captions, figuring out the best hashtags to use, product tagging and categorization.

It has proven to be a great way to get everything to around 70%, then send off to my assistant for the remaining 30% of polish. So at $20/month, it was such a no-brainer, that I had to do it. Even at $75/mo it would more than pay for itself.

It even understands the concept of a "shit post". So - its more social media savvy than I am, thats for sure.

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I paid for it, then stopped paying for it. It seemed to be completely novel and fun to use but after a while it just became a pain. I tried writing a library to act as a code assistant for data science but trying to get it to write the codes that were useful to me took around the same amount of time as writing them myself. What you say is completely correct, it gets to around 70% of whatever you ask it to do then you have to finish the job for it. Which I guess is nice. But I'm not going to pay 20$/month for something that i can just use for free that amounts to slightly better intellisense.

For text generation, it is much better for tasks like

* letter writing * rewriting my writing so i don't plaigerize myself * summarizing several paragraphs into one

but all of that is available in the free version.

>> I'm not going to pay 20$/month for something that I can just use for free

Well, it works until it doesn't because the website is overloaded. $20 gets you in through the VIP door and you don't need to wait along with the rest of the peasants.

You also get (throttled) GPT 4 which is much better at many tasks. That’s why I paid. We’ll see if the novelty lasts for very long but right now it’s a exciting product that I use multiple times a day and the most sci-fi invention of my life so far so I don’t mind paying

I didn't see any difference between 3.5 turbo and 4 for the data science app that I wrote. Another thing is that it's stochastic. So you could actually get a prompt that works well then you run it again and the identical prompt that generated codes that work now has generated codes that don't work. Of course, I could have my data science app cache codes that worked so if the prompt doesn't change it already has the generated code but I didn't want to have an ever growing repository of cached codes. Anyways.

In my experience 3.5 is so far away from 4 that it makes it makes 3.5 useless. I'd give another shot to gpt 4 if 3.5 was almost working for you (what did you use it for, anything for specific?)

Generation of data transformation pipelines in python. The problem is that a prompt that produces working code doesn't always produce working code.

If you use it through the API you can get very far with much less than 20$

free version is an order of magnitude worse than the paid version. It is still good though.

Yes, some of the transformation mechanisms are nice if you need to dump info into it and want it reorganized or processed into something else as well. But outside of that it's hard to justify spending $20 month so you can be bullshitted by some know-it-all toddling proto-skynet when you need factual information.

You can use bing chat for free. Supposedly powered by gpt4.

Bing gives you much shorter answers, often without code examples

I'm sorry but I have to end this conversation, I have been a good Bing and you have been a bad user. Thank you for your cooperation. Goodbye.

Sydney's quick to get into a bad mood when you say something bad about AI.

I've found that phind.com is pretty good, although I'm not sure which LLM it's backed by and I only use it for hobby projects.

phind.com claims they use GPT4 but you have turn Expert mode on. Otherwise it's their home baked model. It's explained here:

> Expert mode is our most advanced searching mode, powered by GPT-4. This mode hallucinates less and writes better code. We highly recommend that you use it for advanced questions. Whenever the "regenerate" button is pressed, Expert mode is used to increase the odds of a high-quality answer.

https://www.phind.com/tutorial

"Expert" uses GPT-4.

The cheap version does all of that much worse. I don't understand how people can be so cheap.

There are so many subscription products these days that it makes sense to assess the value of each carefully before committing.

If you're like me you tend to forget you're paying for something, and have to do a yearly purge.

It's very easy to slowly but surely rack up hundreds of dollars a month in subscription services.

My habit is to cancel right away when I start a subscription. You can still use the service for the month you paid for, and it's easy to restart it if you do still find yourself attempting to use it a month later.

Substack disappointed me because you can't do this. They remove content access if you do not have an "active" subscription. You don't have to pay again to "reactivate", but the paid content is locked until you do. This is obviously intended dark behavior because when I went to fully unsub later in the month they gave me a special dialog and a free month hoping for me to forget again this month. Very lame.

Oh, you haven't seen darker behavior of many Japan based services:

- Payment cycle closes always on the 1st of the month (which means, if you sign up on the last day of the month, you get 1 day of service for full month of payment. No proration, or anything.)

- If you cancel the service, you'll immediately lose access, doesn't matter if it's 1st day of the month, or very end of the month, it's gone. To reenroll, you often have to pay again.

I had a boss I didn't like a while ago, but one of the things he did that I did like was set a calendar reminder to unsubscribe. Too bad; it would've been easier on me mentally and emotionally if he were completely irredeemable, but I admit to using this trick myself now.

I've been using Privacy.com cards for years to avoid this. Set a limit of 1 month on the card, and if I'm actually using the sub I'll fix/update it when the sub runs out.

I don't think it's cheap to pay for a service, test it out for a month, find that in the beginning you used it everyday, and by the end of the month you forgot it existed. Then decide to not keep paying for it.

Probably for the next proposal I write, I'll pay for it again. It's super useful to take care of all the bullshit things you have to write for science to not plaigerize yourself.

I also tried using it as a dungeon master like that blog post from a couple weeks ago. But gpt4 didn't seem to remember things with regularity enough to actually work. Basically there was an uncanny valley because gpt4 doesn't have a pad of paper to write things down on like any person would have.

It's almost like ChatGPT is nerd-sniping us all. But we like it and it's useful to us.

Nerd-snipe and useful? That’s the holy grail! We’re having fun and we’re solving real problems that we have. Amazing.

I’ve already incorporated it into my publishing process. My home-grown “cms” uses ChatGPT (via API) to write my article description, draft a twitter thread, and craft a “viral insight”. The latter is mostly useful to make sure my article even makes a point.

Hoping to use it for a related articles feature next. I’m also building a chatbot based on my content.

> Nerd-snipe and useful? That’s the holy grail!

Yes. i think its a good software product! Maybe one of the best there ever was - I'm not surprised Sam Altman jumped the YC ship for this one, or that MS is particularly interested it. It gets ignored in all the other bru-haha but I'm excited to see what the really talented software teams of the world will be able to accomplish with an AI coding assisstent - and I don't mean just in the world of AI.

The activation energy for new software lowered by about 30% overnight, which is outrageously cool, and of course disquieting.

Especially for new software in a different language than you already know or haven't used years, in a realm other than your current area of expertise. It's pretty useful to be able to directly ask it how do to, eg basic string manipulation in $new_language, but even more convenient is to ask it to do the transformation for you. "Given a string of the format X, write a $language snippet that outputs X'." It'll do more advanced things than that, but that's one area I found it to be useful and time-saving in an unfamiliar language because it saves me from looking up that boilerplate before getting to the part where I throw a regexp at the problem.

Don't generalize, I've never used it and never seen any reason to use it.

My grandma has never used the internet and sees no reason to use it.

It would benefit her immensely to use it.

You should give it a shot, keep an open mind. Yes, it will get things wrong and yes, it will disappoint you. But every conversation I've had with it holds some surprises for me. It's a tool you'll need to learn to use before it actually becomes useful, but give it a couple minutes a few times a week and you'll start to see the diamonds in the rough.

Damn, they released the hypno drones already?

Thanks, now my day is going to be wasted.

Sorry, I don't get the reference(?).

It's a reference to the incremental game "Universal Paperclip". This is when something like "AI singularity" is reached in the game.

UP is one of the few modern games that I've wanted to play more than once.

Yep, factorio and UP are the only games I played more than only a few hours.

If you ever write code that starts with

#include <windows.h>

then it is a must have.

I've used it out of curiosity, but have no real use case for it.

Generalizing is perfectly ok. Having to wrap statements with terms like "almost all" or "most" adds unnecessary noise, outside of academia.

I've been using it for product ideas as well. Occasionally it's brilliant but sometimes it's so bad it's funny, like when it suggested Seven-Year Itch for a perfume brand.

Don't they say something about seemingly brilliant ideas being too obvious or usually not working out, and the terrible ones being the ones that are have more potential to be diamonds in the rough?

>> it's so bad it's funny, like when it suggested Seven-Year Itch for a perfume brand.

Yeah, what's wrong with that? I'm sure it would be catchy to a particular demographic. No need for a brand to cater to everyone.

But also it would heavily depend on the context they gave it when asking it to generate that.

Because GPT is capable of: doing marketing, math, science stuff, programming and anything else to a junior-semi advanced level, it needs to be prompted and given context to get it into the right "mood" for doing what you want it to.

There's a huge difference between casually chatting to it about various topics before suddenly asking what a good perfume brand would be. Versus providing it with the fragrances used in the perfumes that the brand makes, the general goals/image that the company wants to set, their target demographic etc and _then_ asking for a brand name suggestion.

I'd be keen to see how they asked.

I actually like to make the bad ones. It is fun. It is an exercise in creative engineering. Especially since my side project is making home goods for stoners.

That is a great name for a perfume brand! It’s also the name of a comedy by Billy Wilder staring Marylyn Monroe. Market it to rich old ladies.

> It has proven to be a great way to get everything to around 70%, then send off to my assistant for the remaining 30% of polish. So at $20/month, it was such a no-brainer, that I had to do it.

Yup. I bought accounts for everyone here. We are using it as what I have been calling a "force multiplier". We are not and cannot use it for coding, yet, things like presentations, analyzing logs, creating lists of things, researching topics, etc. It's a great time saver.

Also, for a lot of things ChatGPT is a much better search engine than Google. It gets you great answers and almost always the first time you ask.

In case the question comes up: We don't use it for coding because of potential liability concerns. At this point I feel that is a space that has not been explored at all. I have no interest in being a pioneer in a lawsuit that claims negligence due to the use of AI-generated code, even if it is reviewed by a human. The combination of fear-mongering and tech-challenged juries could make for very expensive outcomes.

I posed a question about this here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35655521

As long as you train everyone to understand that it hallucinates and that you need to double check any numbers or other real facts.

archive link unpaywall : https://archive.ph/Txq8r

better source : https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/04/18/1326235/microsoft-r...

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