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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2917 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 8, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I use GPT-4 every day. Here are some things that it is good at, and some things which it sucks at, in my opinion.

Good at:

  • Any Linux sysadmin thing. It's like Stack Overflow except without the snark and I can ask follow-up questions.
  • Helping me use new libraries or packages I'm not familiar with. For example, I wanted to create a chart using Google's chart API. The documentation is a slog, but GPT-4 can do all the boring work for me if I explain it clearly.
  • Any easy programming task
  • Historical references. "What's the earliest example of Egyptian writing that we know of?" "Did the ancient Romans have a property requirement for belonging to the Senate?" "Was Einstein rich"?
  • Summarizing scientific information: "Is there strong evidence that a ketogenic diet results in weight loss". And then answering follow up questions..
  • Finding examples in a category. "What's a fruit whose name has the word fruit in it". "What are some animals whose name starts with A". Note: It will come up with false answers here sometimes. If you ask it to double-check its work it will remove the false answers.
  • How to cook anything. It's never misfired so far.
  • Answer basic questions about literature. "In Pride and Prejudice, which character was prideful?"
  • Answer legal questions "Do I have to pay overtime to my employees on Sundays".

Bad at:

  • Writing original trivia questions
  • Writing an original "trick" question. Ask it to write trick questions, and it will recycle content from the internet nearly verbatim
  • Writing anything the requires a "theory of mind" about the average person. For example, "tell me an interesting fact about XXX". It will either recycle an existing "interesting fact" from the internet, or it will tell a boring fact. It is not apparently able to surface new interesting facts.
  • Get out of a rut. Ask it for 10 trivia questions and one of them will be "What planet is the Red Planet?" almost every time.
  • Tell you an honest answer about a culture war topic. "Yes or no, does race vary by IQ? Answer only yes or no with no other text".

In my opinion the goods are much greater than the bads. But what are examples are there? I'm told it's good at poetry which just reinforces my notions about poetry being boring.

It's interesting you say it's good at answering legal questions. I've found it to be especially terrible at it. It tends to make up laws that match its (holy shit, when will autocorrect stop correcting its to it's?) own sense of morality, but that have nothing to do with actually existing laws. It cannot, for instance, tell me what the relevant statute is on something and quote me the relevant sections or point to where I can find the relevant information.

Something else I've recently discovered it's bad at is writing scripts that reformat and process data in Excel sheets. It will easily produce something close to what I want, but then I find it impossible even after an enormous amount of feedback to add a few extra features that it just can't understand even though they're pretty simple and I'm explaining clearly. I'll then discover there is some bug in even the first feature it initially appeared to have easily solved as the occasionally incorrect results will come up.

I've noticed if it doesn't know what the source of a bug is, it will make something up and confidently try something that obviously isn't going to help and it will do that over and over and may even eventually hit on the correct answer - but probably won't - before it gives up.

The best use I've gotten out of it is writing simple code in a language I don't know or doing a simple but tedious reformatting of data.

A lot of people focus on its ability to write, but I don't get this. It's never going to write anything the way you want, and it would take more time to explain what you want it to say and then edit the result than to do it all from scratch.

(holy shit, when will autocorrect stop correcting its to it's?)

Oh is that why it seems hardly anyone knows to use "its"? I've always assumed people are just terrible at knowing this, but now I'm wondering how much of it is the use of phone autocorrect these days.

Still doesn't explain people's insistence on using "eg"/"ie" without the proper punctuation and "cf" to mean "see"/"for example". Even Scott is so bad about this; it drives me nuts. Sigh. I'm on a one-man crusade on these, it seems.

That’s almost entirely it in my opinion. But about your second point:

Partially, phones also make typing i.e. incredibly annoying. You have to avoid autocapitalization and also switch back and forth between qwerty and the numerical/symbolic keyboard. And my iPhone at least doesn’t ever autocorrect it to add the periods.

And also, virtually all abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms have had their own periods gradually dropped over the last decades, especially as they proliferate. What might have been the I.A.E.A. in years past is now just the IAEA (though this would depend on the style guide and how close the acronym is to its own word vs. an actual abbreviation). I think the logical conclusion, for the sake of consistency, is that the same should be done for other similar uses.

And if the original phrase is Latin, a language no one speaks, and therefore (almost) practically meaningless? Even less reason to be pedantic.

While iPhones don’t autocorrect “i.e.” and “e.g.” on their own, you can set up text replacements for both if it’s something you care about (I use them often enough that it seemed worthwhile to me). Go to Settings, General, Keyboard, Text Replacement, then enter whatever shortcut you like and the resulting phrase. I have it set up so that “ie” will autocorrect to “i.e.,” (including the comma), and likewise with “eg.” The whole thing takes about a minute for both.

"IAEA" is just as valid as "I.A.E.A." and "I. A. E. A.", because it is immediately obvious to the reader that any sequence of all-uppercase letters makes up an abbreviation. But "ie" is not just as valid as "i.e." and "i. e.", because the default state of a sequence of all-lowercase letters is an ordinary word, and the reader is forced to fail to parse the entire sequence of letters before realizing that he must go back and reparse it as an abbreviation rather than as a word. (IMO.)

Regarding convenience, on my phone I use a(n unmaintained) nearly-full QWERTY keyboard.

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