[swozey]

This is such a strange take to me.

I use chatgpt almost daily. I use it like I used to use google in a lot of situations. Now GOOGLE frustrates me to use as a search engine. "How many hours ago was june 1st 1972" and you get links to time/date calculators instead of the answer. Then I'll click through a few and they won't even be what I need. Then I sigh and type it into chatgpt and it answers it.

I don't assume any code is perfect, but I talk to it like it's my rubber duck and it helps me figure out different ways to do something, or sometimes even hand holds me.

And now I don't have to ever do regex.

And hey my past engineering teachers, guess what, I haven't had to mathematically slice a subnet up without a subnet calculator either in my entire career.

[jerf]

"How many hours ago was june 1st 1972": https://chat.openai.com/share/3e3bb478-f7b1-49e1-81f9-235afe...

Payload of the answer: "So, approximately 455,796 hours have passed since June 1, 1972, as of February 16, 2024."

Today (as I write this) minus 455,796 hours: https://www.timeanddate.com/date/dateadded.html?m1=2&d1=16&y...

Which is Thursday, February 17, 1972. Since it just did the year and ignored the month you were asking about. (I accidentally deleted my first conversation instead of sharing it but it gave this answer twice.)

The real question though isn't whether ChatGPT is wrong, the real question is, can you detect it? That's going to be the important question here going forward.

[simonw]

Try "How many hours ago was June 1st 1972? Use Python"

https://chat.openai.com/share/d5264b01-3be5-4d59-b175-34ad90...

"June 1st, 1972 was approximately 453,304 hours ago."

Code it generated and ran:

    from datetime import datetime

    # Current date and time
    now = datetime.now()

    # Date and time for June 1st, 1972
    then = datetime(1972, 6, 1)

    # Calculate the difference in hours

    difference = (now - then).total_seconds() / 3600

This illustrates my biggest complaint about ChatGPT right now: the amount of knowledge and experience you need to have to use it really effectively is extremely deep.

How are regular users meant to know that they should hint it to use Code Interpreter mode for a question like this?

[swozey]

You're 100% right, I use it daily like I said and I really have NO idea what all the other options are. I tested a plugin or two and it caused problems with something so I disabled it.

I need to dig more into how much more I can do.

[swozey]

Ha, I didn't actually test it and I was curious if the answer would deviate at all from reality. Thanks for doing the math. Thankfully I know what bad rust looks like, but I'll totally get suckered for the wrong math.

[happypumpkin]

Fwiw Kagi has

"= 453288 hours" as the first result, above any links.

I feel like my account is gonna look like a Kagi shill pretty soon but it really is so much better than Google now. The Kagi + GPT4 combo is so much better than Google alone 1.5 years ago.