It has been great at estimating calories in things. When possible, I compared to the actual food label, and it's usually within a reasonable margin of error. But not everything is labeled, and when you're on a diet it's better to have at least something to go off of.

I think there are many thousands of folk in fields beyond IT that use it all the time. It's by no means perfect, but for many of us managing teams or doing boring AF admin, working with procurement, writing user documentation or trying to navigate basic system configs then it's immensely useful.

bash scripting, light python programs, fixing software and hardware issues, learning Japanese, learning other things, writing applications, all the boring stuff and stuff need extreme repetition or data mining. Ideas comes from me, work is done by machine.

I have a workflow that translates English srt files to my desired target language. It’s a great use case bc LLMs are proficient at picking up the nuances of language translations, especially related to idioms and the like.

A couple so far. I have a local copy of Stable Diffusion. It's handy for upscaling some kinds of images. I'll also use it to flesh out my worldbuilding project with landscapes and scenes.

Less often, I'll consult ChatGPT, without logging in. For the times when a search engine doesn't cut it but a forum post would be too much. I'm usually skeptical of AI summaries, but I find it justified for boiling down poorly-written stuff that I have to read, but isn't worth my time in long form.

As a teacher, it's good at making assignments for students. Though I don't use it out of principal.

Best use for me has been feeding it logs and pcaps, incorporating it into Wireshark sounds far more useful to me than summarizing a two-line email.

I find it's good as a "search engine of last resort". I would pay $2 monthly at most for one, and less if it's American.

I use notebooklm to act as my research assistant when it comes to labour law and union contract. Claude has helped significantly with compiling the chapters for my upcoming book. Deepseek has created several courses for me to further refine my skills and education.

I actually just view it as the latest abstraction of search. Yahoo in the 90's did not give you a blurb summary of links or would do math equations for you or give answers to simple questions like what time is it or whats the capital of alaska.

I had ai write a python script for me that checked a directory for zip/rar files that don't also have video files, unzip them and if it fails retry at a doubling interval. It would have taken me an hour or so, took the ai 5min+15min of me fixing it. I also had it add logging which is definitely something I wouldn't have been arsed to add otherwise.

It isnt very helpful at my day job writing professional code though, and I dont think someone who didn't already know how to do it themselves could make use of it.

I only really use LLMs for project ideas, naming things, or recipes, but it’s great for those. For recipes especially, trusting the gaslight machine adds an extra layer of suspense and fun to cooking or baking.

It’s also fun, but not useful, to ask Linux questions - chatgpt specifically told me to restart dbus while in an active GUI session when I asked it about a simple case of unintended behaviour. It’s probably the dumbest Linux advice I’ve heard to date, so I got a lot of enjoyment out of trying it to see how bad it would fuck things up