And it's cheap. Imagine I told you that you could have direct access to every PhD in the world and they would respond to all of your questions instantly... for $20/mo. Mind-blowing stuff and people still complain.
It gives me better answers on most things than my actual PhD friends do. So... yeah?
The funny thing is, it's somewhat less useful for certain business stuff, because so much of that is private within corporations. But the stuff you learn in a PhD program is all published. And it's pretty phenomenal at distilling that information to answer any specific question.
Multiple times a week I run into an obscure term or concept in a paper that isn't defined well or doesn't seem to make sense. I ask AI and it explains it to me in a minute. Yes, it's basically exactly like asking a PhD.
The AI is optimized for producing text that sounds like it makes sense and is helpful.
This is not a guarantee that the text it produces is a correct explanation of the thing you are asking about. It’s a mental trick like a psychic reading tea leaves.
And they do. They stand on the fact that they save time, raise productivity, and assist in learning. That's the merit.
Demanding absolute perfection as the only measure of merit is bonkers. And if that's the standard you hold everything in your life too, you must be pretty disappointed with the world...
None of my comments say I’m demanding perfection. That’s a fallacy to reduce my position to absurdism, so it can be easily dismissed.
LLMs have not improved my productivity. When I have tried to use them, they have been a net negative. There are many other people who report a similar experience.
> This is not a guarantee that the text it produces is a correct explanation
A guarantee of correctness is perfection. I don't know else to take it.
Not all jobs or tasks are helped by LLM's. That's fine. But many are, and hugely.
You dismissed it for everyone as "a mental trick like a psychic reading tea leaves". Implying it has no value for anyone.
Your words.
That's just wrong.
Now you say it doesn't have value for you and for some other people. That's fine. But that's not what you were saying above. That's not what I was responding to.
"But the stuff you learn in a PhD program is all published." - What? This is the kind of misunderstanding of knowledge that AI boosters present that drives me insane.
And last sentences conflate a PhD with a google search or even dictionary lookup. I mean, c'mon!
I'm not talking about learning practical skills like research and teaching, or laboratory skills. I'm talking about the factual knowledge. Academia is built on open publishing. Do you disagree?
And the things I'm looking up just can't be found in Google or a dictionary. It's something defined in some random paper from 1987, further developed by someone else in 1998, that the author didn't cite.
And something that lead you to that paper would be wonderful but instead you have been disconnected from the social side of scholarship and forced to take the AI "at its word".
I've also seen AI just completely make up nonsense out of nowhere as recently as last week.
Huh? Nobody's forcing me to "take the AI at its word". It's the easiest thing to verify.
And I've got enough of the social side of scholarship already. Professors don't need me emailing them with questions, and I don't need to wait days for replies that may or may not come.
You literally ask it for the paper(s) and author(s) associated, put them into Google Scholar, and go read them. If it hallucinates a paper title, Scholar will usually find the relevant work(s) anyways because the author and title are close enough. If those fail, you Google some of the terms in the explanation, which is generally much more successful than Googling the original query. If you can't find anything at all, then it was probably a total hallucination, and you try the prompt a different way. That probably happens less than 1% of the time, however.
I mean, it's all just kind of common sense how to use an LLM.
It’s not actually cheap, just subsidized. Becoming reliant on it now virtually guarantees you will have a tough decision to make later when profitability is actually important.
Walk into any coffee shop or office and I can guarantee that you'll see several people actively typing into ChatGPT or Claude. If it was so useless, four years on, why would people be bothering with it?
I don't think you can even be bullish or bearish about this tech. It's here and it's changing pretty much every sector you can think of. It would be like saying you're not bullish about the Internet.
I honestly can't imagine life without one of these tools. I have a subscription to pretty much all of them because I get so excited to try out new models.
What does this mean? You don't get to write off the difference between your "target price" and actual sale price.
And a reminder that companies always do better if they make more money, not point in purposeful losses (unless you are getting a side benefit like goodwill from charity).
I think, but am not sure, the point they're trying to make is that hospitals and insurance companies can "charge" really high prices and then they can forgve those high prices in exchange for a tax break?
That's not at all how it works so they don't have any idea what they're talking about. This is like when people say businesses can "write it off on their taxes". Only people who don't know what that really means say it.
Kinda related: anyone know if there is an autocomplete plugin for Neovim on par with Cursor? I really want to use this new model in nvim to suggest next changes but none of the plugins I’ve come across are as good as Cursor’s.
Absolutely unreal. Kinda funny how some people are complaining about minor glitches or motion sickness when this is the most impressive piece of technology I've seen. Way to go, OpenAI.
One thing that helped me get rid of all of these time-wasting apps was deleting them from my phone, but allowing myself to use the app’s website. It only took a few days for that small bit of friction to make me want to avoid the apps altogether. I did this with all my social media apps a while ago and eventually deleted the accounts.
I recently had to do this with YouTube because YouTube Shorts were getting very addictive. I still use YouTube on my computer, but my overall usage is significantly down.
The idea of adding a bit of friction is incredibly powerful. On desktop I use the excellent "News Feed Eradicator" [1], which removes the main news feed from popular destinations, while still allowing you to browse remaining functionality (e.g. subscriptions page on YT, messages on LinkedIn/Reddit). Fully open source, and available for Chrome/Firefox.
On mobile I use "One Sec" [2], which injects a short delay before opening any apps you specify. The delay is configurable; from a few seconds, to half a minute.
It's impressive how only 3-4 seconds are enough to re-engage your prefrontal cortex and make you think -- "wait a minute, why am I opening this app again?".
I also follow the "website-only" access pattern, and I never use/installs apps except a decent calculator app and whatever horrors my bank forces upon me.
I only install apps that are tools that would benefits from being on a portable device that I bring everywhere. Kinda like a PDA. Now it’s mostly utility apps, information (wikipedia) and reading, and communication.
After seeing a post on the HN front page, I've replaced YouTube entirely with NewPipe, and it is a huge improvement.
I still subscribe to channels that I like and respect, but not being subject to the toxic injection of YouTube shorts or recommendations drastically cuts down on my dwell time in that app.
Same! Deleted the mobile apps first, then exclusively used the platforms on a private window. That added a lot of friction especially how they make it so hard to log in.
I mostly use Youtube now on the Apple TV but recommendations are so awful, I only spend about a few minutes a day.
For Reddit, Twitter, Pinterest and Imgur the website is almost unusable on mobile when not logged in. Log out, don't save your password in the autofill. Now you have to log in to get your fix, which is now a hassle.
