mostlyobvious

_USES

4 min read

This page is keeping track of what I’ve been using LLMs for (and maybe what I’d like to do)

My default custom instructions are fairly simple:

  • “I am a highly technical AI research scientist, full stack developer, and technologist.”
  • “Be technical, precise and concise when answering.”

So far the summary is:

  • Superior programming documentation / assistant - ChatGPT4 CI has read and remembers most of the technical documentation on the Internet (some better than others), is very good at instruction following, can do math quite well, and is excellent at simple coding tasks.
    • eg, do you remember the syntax for doing conversions or chained filters with ffmpeg? Ask it what you want to do and ChatGPT can tell you perfectly and explain every flag correctly
  • It’s also excellent at tabular data and reformatting data. It can take the worst laid out PDF cut and pasted table and format it into Markdown or CSV, and it can extract and do operations for non-regularly formatted data as well (eg, numbers from log/human output)
  • Having tested with native speakers, GPT-4’s Japanese fluency and translation is the best of any translator (Google Translate, DeepL) or language model (all the Japanese-trained LLMs) out there. This probably applies to most languages.

What I’d like it to do in the near-term (all these tasks I feel like are close to possible):

  • GPT-4 is close (but not quite there) in quality as a personal assistant. Primarily, I’d like it to first be able to prioritize my TODOs/scheduling
  • There are a number of projects I’d like it to be doing, like organizing/sorting my filesystem, email, bills etc
  • Obviously if it could book hotels, do travel planning, etc, or make restaurant reservations, etc that’d also be nice, for simple things, probably pretty doable.
  • Realtime universal translator

Highlights

2023-09-12 Getting fish scripts wrong

So here’s an case where I used ChatGPT4 CI because I thought it would just bang out the correct script for me (since I had just used it to translate a bash script to fish in one shot) to solve a niggle I’ve had for years (not automatically wrapping pasted URLs) but it actually kept getting things wrong. Still, I wouldn’t have bothered to write this correctly if I didn’t believe it would have done it for me…

Conversation Log: https://chat.openai.com/share/bef5f764-60a3-4de7-ae6c-49ffbf577cad

# Smart Paste for URLs
function custom_paste
    set clipboard_contents (wl-paste)  # Wayland
    # echo "Original: $clipboard_contents"
    
    set clipboard_contents (string replace -r '^https?://[\S]+$' '\'$0\'' $clipboard_contents)
    # echo "Modified: $clipboard_contents"
 
    # Append the modified string at the end of the command line
    commandline -a $clipboard_contents
 
    # Move the cursor to the end of the line
    commandline -C (commandline -b | string length)
end
 
# Bind Ctrl-V to custom_paste function
bind \cv custom_paste

2023-09-10 Linux Volume Modification

It’d been a while since I had to really muck with disk partitions, but yesterday I swapped my boot drive from a 4TB NVMe (Maxio MAP1602 controller that’s wonky w/ Linux atm) to an ever so slightly smaller 4TB NVMe (Phison E21T controller) and had do some filesystem/partition resizing. While there are probably easier ways to do it, I documented my process for posterity (eg, me in a few years when I have to do this again): https://mostlyobvious.org/?link=/Reference%2FSoftware%2FLinux%2FMoving%20Partitions%20Across%20Drives

It’s worth noting is that during the process, I used ChatGPT4 (no code interpreter on my phone, so it couldn’t do the sector calculation math for me) and it was so much better than trying to search for all the info separately. It had crucial info (like unit specifications) that wasn’t in the help or man files of the tools, so IMO it’s more likely I might never have to do this again and that an AI tech support agent will be able to handle stuff like this soon (would need a keyboard adapter).

2023-09-07 Cheese Consumption

Just out of curiousity…

2023-09-06 Audio Resampling for PyTorch

2023-09-4 Showing FPS Count in Unity Linux

2023-09-03 Geocoding and Hilbert Curves

This was just a fun random project I decided to do and was a breeze with ChatGPT CI

Writeup:

Chat Logs:

2023-09-02 Table Formatting

I needed a table for my OmniQuant writeup. One of the things that ChatGPT does an amazing job at is reformatting random tables (even random stuff copied from a PDF) and formatting it into Markdown, CSV, you name it.

2023-08-22 Transcription Experiments

Writeup:

2023-08 Japanese Voice Chatbot

See:

Combined with WhisperX and VoiceVox(https://voicevox.hiroshiba.jp/)