Chat GPT explorations

This morning, I took my wife to UPS to return some packages. During the drive, she shared a useful shopping tip with me. She mentioned that when you buy something online, like on Amazon, it's smart to keep searching for the same item on other websites even after making the purchase. She often finds the same item at other stores, such as Walmart or Target, for a lower price. Since there's usually a return window, she often sends the item back and buys it from the other store to save money. While it might seem like a bit of effort, the potential savings can make it worthwhile.

This got me thinking about whether tools like ChatGPT could assist us in the process of finding when it makes sense to return a package within the time window to save by buying it somewhere else. And if that could be automated, that would be amazing.

In this post, I wanted to start documenting my thoughts on ChatGPT because I've found myself asking the same question lately over and over: Can ChatGPT help with that? I plan to share some of the ways I've been using ChatGPT, and this post might evolve over time as I discover more. Depending on the amount of content I generate, I may split it into separate posts.

Let's get down to business:

ChatGPT is all the hype these days, and for good reason. I've used it on multiple occasions so far, and I have been pleasantly surprised. In fact, what you just read was re-written with ChatGPT! For fun, I also wanted to keep the original version of my text:

Here we go:

This morning, I brought my wife to UPS to return some packages. On the way there, she was telling me a shopping tip. When you buy something online, say on Amazon, it's important to continue searching for that item on other sites, even after you've bought it. She told me that she often finds the same item at other stores for a cheaper price, like Walmart or Target. Given that there's a window where you can return the items, she often sends the item back so she can purchase it at another store for a much cheaper price. Sometimes, the price difference is not worth it, but in other cases, the difference is considerable enough to make the extra effort worthwhile.

To me, that sounded like a lot of work, and I wondered if something like ChatGPT could help us do this. More on this later in a follow-up blog post.

In this post, I mainly wanted to start jotting down my thoughts on ChatGPT because lately, a lot of things I've been thinking about come back to the same question: Can ChatGPT do that for me? I want to share with you some of the things I've been using ChatGPT for. It's probably going to be a post that keeps being updated. I might end up splitting into different posts depending on how much content I can produce.

See the difference? Which one you like better?!

Doesn't matter! The fact is there is probably already tons of information you are reading on the web that is re-written by ChatGPT.

Grammar companion

For example, I've used ChatGPT to help me correct some grammar (you'll see in this video that I can't even spell "grammar" correctly; that must be from me being an ESL person!).

Interestingly, with all the hype comes the expectations. Recently, ChatGPT has had a hard time keeping up uptime with their expectation and the ones from their users.

There's actually nothing wrong with being in this situation; it can be seen as an opportunity for improvement. They'll eventually figure out scaling and this issue will become a thing of the past.

Coding companion

On a more exciting note, ChatGPT can even write code for you! Yes, you heard that right.

This is super cool, honestly. It's incredibly useful for those learning to write code and can serve as a helpful companion when learning a new programming language. While I don't believe it will replace software engineers, I do think it has potential as a day-to-day resource.