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Ask HN: What do you genuinely use ChatGPT for?

5 pointsby sabrina_ramonov9 months ago

4 comments

dtagames9 months ago
One pattern I like to use is to learn about a topic for myself and then, if there are areas of possible confusion, explain <i>my understanding</i> to ChatGPT and ask if it&#x27;s correct.<p>This produces different results from just asking about the topic itself. When ChatGPT says that <i>you</i> answered the question correctly, you know you&#x27;ve got it. Sometimes I&#x27;ll get answers like, &quot;Almost except this one part you&#x27;re describing incorrectly,&quot; which is very helpful.<p>It&#x27;s a true test of your own knowledge to ensure that you can explain it to someone else correctly, even if that someone is an LLM.
tocs39 months ago
I have been using it for simple tech advice. Sometimes it is hard to know words to use in searching a new subject or what products (electronic breakout boards and the like). Sometimes I ask which python libraries to use or for example code. I am a hobbyist and use it to get my foot in the door so to speak.
solardev9 months ago
I find it a fantastic tool to ask generalist questions that I can subsequently validate myself, when necessary.<p>It&#x27;s largely replaced Google for me as a general purpose answer finder, for everything from basic coding and tech stuff to historical events, veterinary medicine&#x2F;pet advice, homework help, tribal law, translations and cultural differences, GIS, biology, mental health, radio licensing, finance...<p>If an answer seems dubious, I&#x27;ll double-check it the traditional ways. But that doesn&#x27;t really happen all that often for me.<p>I also use it a lot for its natural language abilities, like asking &quot;what do you call it when ____&quot; or &quot;what&#x27;s that thing&#x2F;company&#x2F;software that does _____&quot;, which are traditionally really hard to do in keyword based engines like Google. The LLM is so much better at this than keyword stemming.<p>Overall I find it a crazy helpful tool, like having a super smart personal assistant that knows a little bit about a heck of a lot. Sure, it&#x27;s wrong sometimes, but it&#x27;s way way less spammy than Google (for now), and is generally good enough to provide a Wikipedia style summary in readable English<p>I don&#x27;t think of it as some sort of magic. &quot;Glorified autocomplete&quot; is a perfectly useful tool, for common enough datasets where the training data is statistically likely to be accurate anyway. I mean that&#x27;s a lot of what human knowledge is to begin with. For every true expert that actually does their own research and replicates their results for validations, there are thousands more who will just blindly parrot a good-enough answer.<p>In my conversations with employers, doctors, friends, peers, and more, the LLMs are really helpful for getting up to speed and learning the basics beforehand. From there, it&#x27;s a matter of validating the specifics the old fashioned way, but saving time on the initial background is a huuuuge thing for me that would&#x27;ve been otherwise really hard in the Google SEO wasteland.<p>Put it this way: I wouldn&#x27;t trust an LLM over a human expert. But I would trust it more than your typical online marketer, who has misaligned incentives and often lacks domain expertise.
gtvwill9 months ago
Teaching me technical terms required to learn solutions to problems.<p>Something I&#x27;ve found over the years is the vast majority of stuff is easy to do and easy to learn. The hard part is finding the correct language to use to describe the problem or the solution that you are after. ChatGPT is great for this. I can ask it roughly in lamens terms from a descriptor of something and get the technical terms that let me research a solution 10x quicker than if I just googled my way around the interwebs blindly.<p>I also use it for writing the general bulk of an email. Ill run through and correct it&#x2F;rewrite it a bit in my own words but it gets the ball rolling and is great for giving ideas on structure rather than content.