chatGPT

I’ve been playing with chatGPT lately. After a round of use, it’s genuinely impressive—but also genuinely absurd. Whenever I see self-media headlines like "chatGPT will put programmers out of work," it feels over-hyped. chatGPT is a great little helper for programmers, but it’s still a long way from replacing them.

What’s impressive is that chatGPT is extremely good at code. I used it to optimize a lot of my blog’s code, and after fixing a major pitfall recently, the blog’s loading speed has improved noticeably.

Besides refactoring code, chatGPT can also generate small programs or simple games. Coupled with its excellent semantic-analysis ability, you can even integrate chatGPT into a search page so you no longer have to dig through piles of copy-paste garbage when looking things up.

As for drawbacks, when optimizing code chatGPT often drops entire blocks. This isn’t the usual truncation that you can fix by saying "continue"; the full code is printed, yet one or more sections are simply missing. For example, my share-card code checks whether the input URL belongs to specific sites (Bilibili, Steam, GitHub, etc.) and then parses the corresponding content. After chatGPT’s optimization, only the Bilibili parser remained; code for the other sites vanished. Also, when generating longer code, chatGPT produces more bugs that you have to fix yourself or feed the error back to it.

Another big issue is that chatGPT’s training data stops at 2021, and it can’t fetch fresh information from the internet. When it encounters something it doesn’t know, it confidently invents wrong answers. Plus, it misunderstands polysemous words—e.g., in the image below, "apple" is interpreted as Apple Inc. rather than the fruit.

Portal here:

Work & Exams

A while ago, to prepare for the civil-service exam, I took a job as a programming teacher at a training center. I thought teaching would leave me time to study, but it turned out you do everything: cleaning, recruiting students—you name it. Twenty-plus classes a week, and on weekends you still have to talk parents into renewing. The pay was pitiful, and salaries were never on time. I’d fall asleep on the sofa scrolling my phone as soon as I got home. Eventually I quit to focus on the exam. (Gotta complain: after I resigned they still asked me to persuade parents to renew—what kind of trick is that?)

Cold? COVID?

The weather here has been swinging wildly—hot one moment, cold the next. I started feeling sick yesterday, and last night I ran a slight fever. Worried it might be COVID, I masked up and got a PCR test (luckily our local test site hasn’t closed). When the result came back negative, I chatted with a friend, who said some people test negative the first few days after infection, so now I’m anxious again and preparing to get tested for several more days.

Why no home test kit? Couldn’t grab one…

In the end, I hope everyone stays safe and healthy—especially with the Spring Festival approaching; after restrictions were lifted, things could get risky.