I Have Not Found Chat GPT Very Useful

This post breaks one of my informal rules for writing: "Don't write about the current thing" [1]. But Chat GPT and now Bing have been swallowing up everything and I wanted to say some things. I'm sort of being this guy:

A person sees a crowd gathered in a park. Wading through he sees a man playing chess with a dog.

"What a smart dog" they exclaim.

"Not really", replies a member of the crowd. "It's down two to five".

This is basically how I feel when people discuss current AI abilities.

— ja3k (27/35 tokens remaining) (@ja3k_) June 24, 2020

But to be clear I'm not saying the dog isn't impressive. I'm just saying I don't want it to be my tutor.

I've tried to use Chat GPT three times and all three times it failed so then I stopped trying. I tried to use it to edit my utilitarian post. I pasted one paragraph at a time and asked for feedback. Here is the transcript up until the point where I gave up:

Note two things:

• It's very nice. I think humans have this fault too where when you ask them to edit they often focus on the positive.
• When I push it to be more critical it makes something up about what I wrote. It says to replace centimeter with cm but it is cm in my original writing.

I recently put prediction alerts back online. I ended up just provisioning a smaller shared core postgres db instance which will cost $0.20 a day. But before I settled on that I was considering bundling in an sqlite db and using the local file system to run it all out of one ec2 instance.

In the very first bullet it tells me to go the AWS management console. Also maybe this is expecting too much but using sqlite in this way is sort of a bad idea and it should tell me that.

I wanted to learn more about dark energy, so I asked it where I could see astronomical data and it didn't even try to help me:

Probably I'm both expecting too much and bad at prompt engineering. But for the time being I'm sticking to google and documentation.

[1] I intended to write a "my rules for writing" post at some point but at this point the only two I remember are this one, "no advice", which maybe I've broken from time to time but kept to the spirit of, and "no politics" which I've sort of broken twice.