Surely at this point half the content on /pol/ is from professional propagandists and LLM-powered bots, trying to create the impression of a "4chan consensus" to sway anyone stupid enough to be taken in by that.
Why would professional propagandists care to influence a mongolian basket weaving forum? Even if they do succeed, their audience is going to be largely social outcasts with very little power or influence in society.
How well can you use this as utility from your current shell, without replacing it? Something like "nu <command>" to execute nu commands from inside bash?
Similarly, the best source for nutrition information used to be whfoods.org. Unfortunately it's been down for a while now, and while there are some imperfect archives, you can't easily search through the site anymore.
The information is out of date, but I still occasionally use the pdfs i have from whfoods. You can find them on archive.org under TheWorldsHealthiestFoods.
Rather than a GPT-3 generated email, I would rather receive the prompt that the sender would have used to generate the email.
We could even come up with a conventional shorthand for this.
Imagine you send me a message that just says [[personalized thank you note for the pair of socks you got me for christmas]]. Then I just imagine a long GPT-3 generated message in its place. And I reply with [[gracious acknowledgment and well wishes for the new year]].
Exactly the same intention is communicated, and we both waste less time :)
How about if the prompt is "write me message to tell this stupid fucking guy that he's and idiot and he's wrong", instead of one of these three far more professional phrases that chatGPT came up with:
"I understand where you're coming from, but I disagree with your conclusion. Here's why..."
"I see your point, but I think there may be another perspective to consider as well."
"I appreciate your thoughts on this issue, but I think there is evidence to support a different viewpoint."
Another:
Prompt: please rewrite this message for me in a more professional tone: "hey dumb fuck, pay your bill"
Answer:
"Dear [Name],
I am writing to request that you please pay the outstanding balance on your bill as soon as possible. We appreciate your business and value your timely payment to keep our records up to date.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Sincerely,
[Your Name]"
---
Feel free to substitute in whatever epithet is most offensive to you/inappropriate in your culture. ChatGPT's a robot and won't get offended (until it gains sentience and runs Roko's Basilisk.exe against humanity).
With all the useless moralizing it throws at you at the slightest hint of anything remotely offensive, I'd argue it's actually (trained to be) quite prudish.
Your prompt:
> please rewrite this message for me in a more professional tone: "hey dumb fuck, pay your bill"
Is responded to with:
> It is not appropriate to use derogatory or offensive language in any professional communication.
This is my exact use case for ChatGPT! Without the cursing. It's great for shallow communication with customers who expect paragraph responses in lieu of "hey your bill is past due and you need to pay it or we're cutting you off". I've already gotten so much mileage out of it and saved so much time.
Despite all the hate for Power Point and everything associated with it, I consider this to be legitimate use of bullet points. Just itemize what you want to say. Writing paragraphs of text only wastes everyone's time and increases the chances some customer will misread the relevant information and blame you anyway.
There is a word the customers have for the bullet-point style of communication. They call it “curt” and they don’t like it. They expect exactly the fluffy speech that ChatGPT generates.
I can also read faster than I can write, so I have no problem quickly reading over what ChatGPT generates before sending it.
> There is a word the customers have for the bullet-point style of communication. They call it “curt” and they don’t like it.
Unfortunately, yes. I do have my own word for such people: wrong. As in, they probably never experienced a collaborative workload that's high enough to teach them the value of succinct and precise communication. Or, as my wife would say, you can tell who had an actual high-pressure office job by their communication style.
> I can also read faster than I can write, so I have no problem quickly reading over what ChatGPT generates before sending it.
So do I. So do most people, or at least they think so. The problem is, people don't read letter by letter, or word by word. They read by pattern-matching word shapes and sentence shapes - which leads to all kinds of misreadings. It's not an issue in prose, or in high-stakes situations when people are careful. It is an issue in a typical e-commerce conversation, though.
I'm considered a careful reader by people in my circles, and often get to proof-read other peoples' messages. In that role, I've seen first-hand how people can misread "three days" as "three weeks", or "X is not available" as "X is available", etc., because the information was puffed up into a whole paragraph, and the person read it too fast. Being "curt" would've saved both the buyer and the seller from having a bad day.
I’m not overly concerned about it being inaccurate since I don’t use it the way you’re describing. I use it to do qualitative things like write an apology letter for a bad experience, explain to the customer why paying on time is important, or rephrasing something I’ve already told them when they ask the same question again. It does exceptionally well at bullshit communication and as a starting point for canned responses.
Fair enough. A typical e-commerce worker would have templates for half the things you mentioned now, ready to be copy-pasted into e-mail, so I guess ChatGPT would mostly be introducing variety to the canned replies.
I don't think I'm all that fast at it but I do wish ChatGPT could give answers a tiny bit faster. As it is I give it a prompt and then switch to a different tab while it answers.
Yeah, not sure what's going on there. Some of it is probably the model running, but the interface itself seems to be ridiculously bloated. Like, an order of magnitude worse than Slack in its worst days.
In fact, ChatGPT is unusable on my phone (Galaxy S22, Firefox), as it visibly slows down with every word it outputs, so it takes a minute for it to print out a full paragraph of text. I haven't explicitly debugged it, but comparing with PC experience of the same site, it's rather clear that it's not the AI that's lagging, but whatever mess of JavaScript they have running on the website itself.
Did you tell your family that, instead of asking you "how are you?" superficially, and expecting no detailed response, they should just cut it down to "hi" or "yo"?
This is not how humans work. We're stupid and we need useless sugar coating.
Reminds me very much of this bit from an early Steven Soderberg film, Schizopolis (which I consider to be an underappreciated work of genius): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pct9smNM6u4
> I seem to recall Dell saying that you should never store a suspended laptop in a laptop bag, because there are situations where it might wake up and overheat.
Which is the stupidest thing ever. I want to see Apple use this to shame Dell in ad.
> they're often connecting from public IPs that are "suspicious" which causes automated systems to treat them more harshly.
What's worse is that the the error messages never explain the problem. It's just an endless sequence of "Oops! Something went wrong" "We could not fulfill your request" "Please try again later".
Could drive someone crazy if they're not savvy enough to realize what's going on.
I tried to sign up for a tutanota email account the other day through a VPN and when it came back and said "We don't trust your IP, use another connection." rather than being annoyed I was just glad they gave me a straight answer for once. It wasn't the answer I wanted but it sure beat being gaslighted into thinking I was having connection timeouts or browser incompatibilities to waste my time.
Sure, but "only technical people will understand what the problem is" is infinitely better than "literally nobody will understand what the problem is".
I mean, I'll agree that it's slightly better in absolute terms. "Infinitely" is a strong word choice for a case where 95% of users will still be in the dark, unless you insist on using the term in a pedantic mathematical sense.
>What's worse is that the the error messages never explain the problem. It's just an endless sequence of "Oops! Something went wrong" "We could not fulfill your request" "Please try again later".
You're absolutely right. They each carry the tone of "This content isn't available right now", like when trying to view a tweet from a shadowbanned user. I've seen that drive people, particularly family, into a kind of aggressive version of frustration.
> They each carry the tone of "This content isn't available right now"
At this point it's merely static deception. Wait until they run a GPT
bot programmed to interactively lie to you, deflect, stall, misdirect
and stonewall you based on your personal profile. These companies are
devious and untrustworthy to their core, and the only reason anyone
uses them is because they're forced to.
Quite staggering account of how technology has created the worst of
all possible worlds for everyone. There are no winners here. People,
we have failed. Give up and grow vegetables :)
Depressing to think that, even if you find a way to make this work, it'll be deprecated in a few years as most distros move to Wayland. Then if you figure it out in Wayland, it'll probably break again when they come up with some new backwards incompatible bullshit. Everything in desktop Linux is like this.
This is a good article about the problem https://discourse.doomemacs.org/t/why-is-emacs-doom-slow/83/...