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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2165 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 3, 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 can't tell you how to be less boring outside of work.

However, you clearly don't have an infinite amount of work. So any time savings there would be something you should seek out, and the better you get at this, the initial problem becomes less of a problem.

Is there any standardized format in the data you deal with? If so you can automate all the grunt work with a python script. If it's not standardized, it's going to be a bit more rough..

BUT GPT-4 exists. I'm sure "code-interpreter"/"advanced data analysis" can do what needs to be done at a fraction of the time you would need in excel. And anonymizing data is trivial with a python script as well.

I really don't think someone sufficiently smart enough to use ChatGPT and write a bit of code should be doing excel-monkey work in this day and age when we have tools that can do that automatically with natural language prompts.

Automating away a bunch of my work has actually been in my mind. There's often no standardised format to the data though (sometimes a client will just throw us various bank statements, rental statements and other such documents and we'll just have to use those). This isn't an insurmountable problem and I do want to do it, but I haven't had sufficient downtime to pursue that goal yet.

Human in the loop my man -- just take your best shot at automating the thing and then present it to yourself (or better yet a lackey) item by item as approve/don't approve.

You do work like a robot this way, but stuff gets done a lot faster even if your automation is highly imperfect.

Did you try using code interpreter for a batch or two? It can demolish through spreadsheet grubt work.

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