evancoop

I built PromptToolbox to collect prompts in a table that help guide ChatGPT conversations. I’ve included a list of prompts that can be used to customize conversations for different scenarios. Users can also add their own prompts to the table. This tool is intended to make it easier to create conversations with ChatGPT by providing a way to quickly find and customize the right prompt. I'm open to feedback and suggestions on how to improve it.

And sorry I could not pull them both / And build one module, long I sat ...

These pings annoy me, night and day, Incessant asks without delay, And lines to code to earn my pay... And lines to code to earn my pay.

If I gave this much thought to my weekly poker game, I might fare better.

Seems like, in aggregate, the question is whether adding variance to outcomes is net positive or negative?

Some students will receive multiple consecutive years of excellent instruction, others will receive multiple consecutive years of subpar instruction. Does the upside contain innovation and social mobility? Does the downside contain increased disillusionment with school and education broadly?

We pull the goalie when the odds are against us and increased variance is desirable. Is this such a case? Sadly, it may be.

Why does this simply threaten artists? At what point is code a type of creative expression? When are the IDEA for a novel technology and the chops to implement equally viable applications of AI?

Artists are losing today, but why are they in any way more vulnerable? They just seem to be next on the chopping block.

Can someone rewire my brain to be hyper-efficient when clicking through articles on HN and dreadfully-inefficient if my mind wanders to fantasy sports?

I suppose, if the definition of "weird" is loosely-related to "low probability of truth" or "wildly deviant from existing orthodoxy," the highest-upside ideas would seem to be "weird."

In that vein, the question is how many "weird" ideas can your portfolio of time and money afford at any point?

The NYT is taking a swing at longtermism, the New Yorker is taking a swing at effective altruism, and this begs for a little numerical reasoning on the topic. If we must consider every life (even distant lives), and most lives haven't been lived yet, and most lives not yet lived will enjoy a higher quality of life than we do (rational optimism), doesn't protecting THOSE lives trump everything else?

https://ae.studio/blog/most-lives-havent-been-lived-yet#pg

A skilled data scientist is likely to perform reasonably well on Kaggle...but are they the type who is likely to WIN?

Bezos buys the Washington Post, Musk buys Twitter...Now we need to long for the world where megalomaniacal billionaires just bought football teams?

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."

- John Wanamaker

“A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.”

― Bob Dylan

I aspire to this and to help others do the same.

I'm waiting for some Musk tweet, the requisite outrage from an impassioned subset of the populace, a quick-witted Musk response, followed by the new title:

"Elon Musk OWNS 9.2% of Twitter."

One useful regulation might be to prevent neutering the functionality of a product if the user does not elect to share their data. Unless those data are part and parcel of the core functionality, choosing not to share should not prevent receiving software updates, etc.

How about the sound of children playing outside? The sound of a baseball popping into a well-worn leather mitt still exists, but is becoming awfully rare. It ain't tech, but it's a byproduct of tech.

The question reduces to one of incentives. Scams are extremely easy to initiate, cheap to scale, and once they're sniffed out, extremely easy to replicate with a small variation in location/product/approach. In other words, they're like good software.

So...what might curtail the proliferation of scams (besides cruel and unusual punishments)? Decentralization? More factors of authentication?

This is how companies plateau and become stagnant. The issues described do not spur action (e.g. "these two just need to collaborate better"), they fester, and eventually, a non-trivial number of internal teams are "captured." They won't burn the company down, the under-performing individual is not likely to do anything to warrant actually being moved/fired, and so, the status quo remains...and spreads.

And then we wonder why large companies simply cannot innovate or execute on broader change initiatives?

"...not about people like you."

My wife, who spent much of her career in corporate HR, would often note: "People who want to work, will work wherever you put them. People who don't want to work will find a way not to work wherever you put them."

The people who used WFH as a "2 year vacation" are the same people who will wander the office engaging in random conversations and scrolling Facebook the remainder of the day.

I always wondered why we presume traffic and cubicles are a cure for the lack of motivation.

At some point, society will have a broader conversation about respecting the word 'no.' Without mentioning a different context explicitly, we all recognize the grotesque immorality when 'no' must be stated repeatedly (and even then, the requests do not cease).

Google (and other large tech companies) require a level of vigilance from their users in boundary-setting that would be unacceptable in almost any other context.

The subtitle of this article should read, "when science is performed irresponsibly, pseudoscience is treated like science."

Academia has a reproducibility crisis. Forensics has endured its own struggle with credibility. The media is undergoing similar scrutiny. When that which is expected to be trustworthy is proved unreliable, then how does society distinguish between that which is unreliable in design (e.g. dowsing) and that which is unreliable in execution (e.g. academic publications)?

Possibly, but I doubt that 35-years later, folks would continue to read and re-read that .txt file for its entertainment value. Those few hundred thousand bytes of Mario Bros. code have been reviewed by so many for so long!

It seems tangential, but interesting, that a system that provided my childhood years with probably thousands of hours of entertainment did so with individual games requiring less memory than the average corporate spreadsheet.

Has anyone attempted to calculate utility per byte? Certainly, the relative evolution of society would play a role (a cave-dweller might have found a few hieroglyphs entirely fascinating), but even with a certain adjustment factor in terms of the general complexity of dominant sources of information, Nintendo games would assuredly excel.

As evidence, folks are still speed-running the original Super Mario Bros from 1985. Lindy effect or efficiency of "utility" per byte?

During my doctoral years, two students in my department took their own lives (separate events, to be clear). The events themselves were horribly tragic, but the lack of even a clear acknowledgement of the causes of death left a surreal sense of denial.

Mental health is an enormously under-discussed issue in an increasingly digital society that hides suffering in so many of us.

Work becomes an increasingly integral element of our connection to others while certain employment becomes increasingly transactional.

We all can do better. So sorry to read about another human being lost too soon.

This is even more terrifying when one considers the possibility that the result of the second test is not independent from the result of the first. That is, some trait within the population increases the probability of a false positive (and this is likely in any heterogeneous population).

Now the conditional probability of infection, given TWO positive tests is still far below 50%.

This is why a second test of a different type, even if it is less accurate, if it is more likely to be independent, is much preferred!

The next question is how Lloyd's of London will handle the insurance risk at scale. Clearly, Mercedes is going to need one heck of an insurance contract to justify the policy. What happens if the system is hacked and the number of payouts required reaches stratospheric proportions? What quantity of secondary insurance will be needed for the insurer?

Fascinating questions.

How's this for an alternative? (https://www.agencyovervideo.com/)

Looks like someone built a solution awfully quickly!

The idea here is that there are certainly costs of storage and streaming. And there are certainly SOME customers that probably aren't optimal to serve.

The question is whether one can help those customers grow, and if not, avoid the bait/switch/shock paradigm of Vimeo.

How many domain-specific creators would benefit from a better model that could scale with them?

There are a few issues here.

First, the rather clumsy manner in which this was handled - even if certain customers aren't profitable, asking 'em to suddenly pay 10x what they paid before is a recipe for bad press.

Second, if Vimeo is unwilling to exert the effort to handle niche customers, there are folks waiting in the wings like (https://instillvideo.com/) for health and fitness folks.

Third, long-term incentives suggest growing a customer base rather than short-term plays for larger clients.

Curious where these displaced customers land!

Desperation might build motivation, but it will also ensure short-term thinking (needing to pay one's bills and feed one's family tends to do that). The most successful companies adopt a longer view, and this might be far easier without the immediacy of insolvency looming.