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Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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