Ask Lemmy

Generally, GitHub Copilot helps me type faster. Though sometimes it predicts something I'm don't expect and I have to slow down and analyze it to see if it seems to know something I don't. A small percentage of these cases are actually useful but the rest is usually noise. It's generally useful as long as you don't blindly trust it.

I get an email from corporate about once a week that mentions it in some way. It gets mentioned in just about every all hands meeting. I don’t ever use it. No one on my team uses it. It’s very clearly not something that’s going to benefit me or my peers in the current iteration, but damn… it’s clear as day that upper management wants to use it but they don’t know how to implement it.

I use it a lot to proofread my creative writing

The only thing I have to worry about is not to waste my time to respond to LLM trolls in lemmy comments. People admitting to use LLM to me in conversation instantly lose my respect and I consider them lazy dumbfucks :p

I'm a software person, llm tools for programming have been frankly remarkable. In my cleanest codebases copilot (using gpt4) autocompletes my intention correctly about 70% of the time today, reducing the amount of code I physically type by a huge margin. The accuracy shifts over time and it's dramatically less helpful for repositories that aren't pristine and full of well named functions and variables

Beyond that chatgpt has been a godsend sifting through the internet for the information I need, the new web feature is just outstanding since it actually gives sources

Chatgpt has also helped with writers block a ton, getting beyond plot points in my novel I was having a hard time with

It's been great with recipes, no more wading through fake life stories and ads

It's been helpful for complex questions about new topics I'm an amateur on, I've learned so much about neurology and the process of how neurons interact almost exclusively through the platform, fact checking takes a little time but so far it's been almost perfectly accurate on higher level objective questions

It's been helpful as a starting place for legal questions, the law is complex and having a starting place before consulting the lawyers has been really nice so I know what to ask

I could go on

It's useful when you want to write some algorithm using specific versions of libraries. It first craps out wrong functions but after 1 or 2 redirects it usually shoots something that I then adapt to my use-case. I usually try googling it first but when most fucking guides use the new way of coding and I'm forced to use fixed versions due to company regulations, it gets frustrating to check if every function of known algorithms is available in the version I'm using and if it's not, which replacement would be appropriate.

It might hallucinate from time to time but it usually gives me good enough ideas/alternatives for me to be able to work around it.

I also use it to format emails and obscure hardware debugging. It's pretty bad but pretty bad is better than again, 99% of google results suggesting the same thing. GPT suggests you a different thing once you tell it you tried the first one.

As always, it's a tool and knowing that the answers aren't 100% accurate and you need to cross-check them is enough to make it useful.

Only small use cases on my end: Professional - great at helping me save time on syntax related things (“help me right an excel formula that validates cell C2 as a properly formatted US phone number”). Personal - really helpful at fleshing out a comedy idea I’m toying with (“help me analyze and expand why the idea of ‘vampires benefitting from an app called Is There Garlic In This’ is funny for a stand-up routine”).

Otherwise, I spend just as much time verifying the LLM’s output as I would have just doing it myself.

I used it the other day to redact names from a spreadsheet. It got 90% of them, saving me about 90 minutes of work. It has helped clean up anomalies in databases (typos, inconsistencies in standardized data sets, capitalization errors, etc). It also helped me spruce up our RFP templates by adding definitions for standard terminology in our industry (which I revised where needed, but it helped to have a foundation to build from).

As mentioned in a different post, I use it for DND storylines, poems, silly work jokes and prompts to help make up bed time stories.

My wife uses it to help proofread her papers and make recommendations on how to improve them.

I use it more often now than google search. If it’s a topic important enough that I want to verify, then I’ll do a deeper dive into articles or Wikipedia, which is exactly what I did before AI.

So yea, it’s like the personal assistant that I otherwise didn't have.

It had a good impact for me, it saved me from an immense headache of university. I explicitly told the professors that, I have issues with grammar (despite it being my native language).

They kept freaking out about it and I eventually resorted to ChatGPT. Solved the issue immediately.

I've used it to help me write batch scripts and excel formulas but found it pretty bad for LISP

I have a book that I'm never going to write, but I'm still making notes and attempting to organize them into a wiki.

using almost natural conversation, i can explain a topic to the gpt, make it ask me questions to get me to write more, then have it summarize everything back to me in a format suitable for the wiki. In longer conversations, it will also point out possible connections between unrelated topics. It does get things wrong sometimes though, such as forgetting what faction a character belongs to.

I've noticed that gpt 4o is better for exploring new topics as it has more creative freedom, and gpt o1 is better for combining multiple fragmented summaries as it usually doesn't make shit up.

I genuinely appreciate being able to word my questions differently than old google, and specifying deeper into my doubts than just a key word search.

It’s great to delve into unknown topics with, then to research results and verify. I’ve been trying to get an intuitive understanding of cooking ingredients and their interaction with eachother and how that relates to the body, ayurvedically.

I think it’s a great way to self-educate, personally.

I’ve implemented two features at work using their api. Aside from some trial-and-error prompt “engineering” and extra safeguards around checking the output, it’s been similar to any other api. It’s good at solving the types of problems we use it for (categorization and converting plain text into a screen reader compliant (WCAG 2.1) document). Our ambitions were greater initially, but after many failures we’ve settled on these use cases and the C-Suite couldn’t be happier about the way it’s working.

ChatGPT itself didn't do anything, FastGPT from Kagi helps me everyday though, for quickly summarizing sources to learn new things (eg. I search for a topic and then essentially just click the cited sources).

And ollama + open-webui + stable-diffusion-webui with a customized llama3.1-8b-uncensored is a great chat partner for very horny stuff.

For me, a huge impact.

I took an export of all our apps reviews and used it to summarise user pain points. Immediately a list of things we can prioritise.

When I'm doing repetitive code. It will (90% of the time) place the next puzzle piece in the repetition.

Using better systems like Cursor, I was able to create a twitch bot. I could then use it to make various text based games such as 20 questions or trivia. All (90% again, nothing is perfect) of which was done through prompts.