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Re:Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive? by throwaway4aday on Saturday March 25, 2023 @09:31AM (#35302452)
If you share your prompts then we could help. The most generally applicable thing I can think of is that you have to drop your old habits from using search engines, those types of queries will not get you very far. You have to talk to it like you would talk to someone in your company Slack/Teams/whatever chat and explain what it is you're trying to do and what tools you want to use to do it. Then ask it to refine its answer by telling it what it got wrong or clarifying the request you made by adding more details. Also, always keep in mind that it is fundamentally a text completion engine. You can drastically alter the type of output you get by adding relative context up front. That can be anything from snippets of code to requests for it to write in the style of some famous person to even just a chunk of your own writing so it can get an idea of the style that you use.
Re:Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive? by roflyear on Saturday March 25, 2023 @05:10PM (#35307390)
I'm not talking about informational stuff.
Re:Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive? by throwaway4aday on Sunday March 26, 2023 @11:17AM (#35315335)
Cool, if you don't want to talk about it that's ok. In that case I'd suggest looking up one of the various prompt libraries and learning from there.
Re:Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive? by roflyear on Sunday March 26, 2023 @02:57PM (#35318122)
I'm just not talking about trying to fish an accurate answer. I think you can do that. I'm talking about getting an answer about something that requires an interaction that gets the model to "understand" the problem (like you would a person) - which GPT can't do.
Re:Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive? by wnkrshm on Monday March 27, 2023 @04:20AM (#35324211)
Something akin to: Here is a niche mathematical problem that does not fit any existing solutions/publications, we need a working but not necessarily optimal solution to do this. ?
Re:Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive? by roflyear on Monday March 27, 2023 @09:24AM (#35326398)
Sure, or even an existing algo or method that is applied to something very niche that hasn't been done much (at least in the data GPT is trained on, I guess).

In my experience these things need a little nuance communicated as a part of the problem, but GPT can't get there. It just starts looping over incorrect solutions (rather than modifying them slightly to get it right like a person would).

These aren't crazy advanced things, either. I'm not a genius. I solved the problems when GPT couldn't. I was just trying out GPT4.

Re:Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive? by throwaway4aday on Monday March 27, 2023 @07:29AM (#35325307)
Consider how long our comment thread is and I still don't have a clear idea of what you're talking about or how to help you.
Re:Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive? by roflyear on Monday March 27, 2023 @09:22AM (#35326369)
I'm not looking for help, so I don't think we're really trying to have the same conversation.