Nice, this looks very promising!
Is there a way to create a note? Haven't seen it in the help menu yet (but could've just missed it during my quick skim).
117 karma · joined May 29, 2013
Ex-staffEng at Lyft Level 5 + Woven Planet working on ML for self-driving.
Exploring new projects at the moment, playing with AI and language learning: https://www.lingually.ai/
https://slowandsteady.substack.com/
Is there a way to create a note? Haven't seen it in the help menu yet (but could've just missed it during my quick skim).
That doesn’t mean they’re not useful though.
The large codebase context might be somewhat solvable and I've seen projects that use embeddings to find the relevant bits of code to feed GPT to help it with context. No clue how well any of them work though, haven't tested them yet.
I've definitely noticed times when the conversation gets cut off and it can't "remember" the previous messages. Often, it results in a loop of ChatGPT giving me a solution, me getting an error and sending it back, then ChatGPT being terribly sorry and suggesting a new solution. Repeat 3 times and often we make a full circle to the first solution in this way...
With the out-of-date SDK, I had a similar experience. ChatGPT got me started with ManifestV2 for the Chrome extension and I found out it's getting deprecated and I should really use ManifestV3. But you know what, I asked ChatGPT how to update from ManifestV2 to ManifestV3 and it gave me the steps and things to fix. I had to do a few iterations as new errors were coming up and some things needed a bit of a refactor, but it was all done quite fast.
The fear of juniors skipping out on key learnings, or even perhaps having a hard time finding jobs in a few years is definitely interesting and something I'm super curious to see how it will go...
3 big use cases for me so far:
- Github Copilot is just great. Often it helps fill in the code I was just about to write (or Google search). It just saves time, period. Plus, there's been at least a few times when I was ready to throw in the towel at the end of the day. But carried through as Copilot suggested the next line or implementation of a method I wanted to just create a placeholder for.
- ChatGPT for a project in an unknown domain. A few weeks ago I wanted to create a Chrome extension. I've never done it before and didn't know where to start. I asked ChatGPT and it delivered a great interactive tutorial with just the right code to get me started (I had to fix a few bugs that ChatGPT helped debug). Am I an expert in Chrome extensions thanks to it? Hell no! Have I created a working Chrome extension in a very short amount of time? 100% yes!
- ChatGPT for debugging. When I search for an error and get not-so-relevant Google search results, often ChatGPT can suggest rather relevant things to look into given an error message.
Of course, your mileage may vary, but saying AI does not help programmers based on a quick test of it not implementing things perfectly seems a bit surprisingly shortsighted I'd say.
And today's special episode is in Portuguese! Any learners out there? https://twitter.com/LinguallyAI/status/1662570120684662784
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2196522/12927853
Will try some other suggested languages tomorrow :)
Watching shows on Netflix, listening to random podcasts also helps.
But bridging this Duolingo-to-fluency gap, that's exactly what I'm trying to explore at the moment with the other projects on https://hn.lingually.ai/. I think AI can give something no other approaches can.
So essentially, I've now got a Chrome extension to get immediate feedback on text I write. Then I have a POC for a text-adventure game to practice chatting with GPT-powered characters (dm me at https://twitter.com/LukasPlatinsky and I can set you up with a link to test). Now the podcast for some content to listen to. I next want to explore some daily short writing prompts with immediate grammar check by AI. Adding Whisper could unlock speaking as well.
Lots of opportunities! Let me know if you're interested in trying any of these out :)
So, at least for me, there are 2 sources of this anxiety:
1. Does it even make sense to solve this? - Best thing is to try to validate the problem. Find people to talk to, get feedback. Or think about alternatives and constraints. Every now and then, I start feeling like “what I work on makes no sense, I should just abandon it”. Only to then analyse it, walk through the different options and decisions and realise I’ve done this decision making exercise previously when starting the project and I still agree with the outcome. But I guess it’s good to recheck the assumptions every now and then.
2. Can I solve the problem? - I often get discouraged when I realise things are a lot more difficult than expected and I start to doubt myself. Usually results in me procrastinating and taking a break. Things that help me are: taking a deep breath, doing some searching for similar problems, breaking the problem down into smaller tasks, finding a smaller, yet similar problem to address first. Again, talking to people and reaching out for help can be great. People are often happy and flattered when you come to them with well-formed questions and acknowledge them as someone you consider an expert in a field.
Hope this helps. In general, when working on very hard problems that might not be solvable, try and break them down, find the riskiest piece that seems solvable, and try to tackle it. If you fail, at least you fail fast and you can rinse and repeat :)
So far I've got requests for Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Russian then.
The "slow" refers to the genre of podcasts like News in Slow Italian. Mostly using simple language and slow speed. I've set the speed to 85%, might need to dial it down even slower it seems :)
It's briefly mentioned on the site as well: https://hn.lingually.ai/#two
Let me see if I can get a French episode generated for you today or tomorrow and if you like it, I'm happy to send some more your way :)
What is your level of French?
And this is already the best one I've found. Trust me, you don't want to hear some of the Italian text-to-speech stuff I've come across during this search...
I've mostly been doing Duolingo, recently some tutored classes on Preply. Trying to get to a level where I can converse with my Italian partner.
And I think GPT has tremendous potential for this. Seen a few projects exploring this besides mine. Can't wait to see where it goes. It would be a shame if we can't figure out some great ways to use the new generative AI algos for education!
I'd be happy to rebrand it if there's interest. The main issue is that generating an episode is around $3 roughly (~$1 on GPT4 APU, ~$2 on text-to-speech). So doing a daily episode in multiple languages might be a bit costly.
But if there's enough interest, I might be happy to fund it to get it going for a bit and see how it ends.
Are you learning Italian as well? What have you tried so far?