• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

CHATGBT

F

framer

Veteran Member
Joined
Nov 27, 2008
Messages
582
Location
Murrell's Inlet SC
I've been asking the CHATGBT AI thingy with questions about my old Zenith Z-110 computer and it was well informed about it. I did need to let it know I was talking about a early 1980 computer as it 1st said it had no info. After that it spit out way more info than I needed but did give me what I was looking for. Could be and interesting source of help in the future.

I've also use it for help with coding issues with and old MS-DOS DBASE3 compiler problem and it gave me the code I was looking for.

I'm using the free CHATGBT.

Has anyone else used this source for vintage questions?

framer
 
First of all, you have to understand that ChatGPT is predictive language tool--the natural evolution of simple autocomplete. In other words, a fancy next-word or phrase guessing machine using a big data database. It will answer any question, even if it has to fabricate one.

If you trust it, you're a bit foolish.
 
It's also called ChatGPT (with a P). But it definitely can point you to information you might not be aware of, which you can then look up to verify yourself.

As Chuck said, never trust current Large Language Models.
 
Softmaker is offering an upgrade to their word processor to automatically generate essays on a topic using ChatGPT. I think the technology is not quite ready for that.

If ChatGPT can be restricted to somewhat reliable sources, the result can be useful. I need to figure out how to get it to provide sourcing on each claim. That would be a better search than finding a page mentioning a phrase.
 
krebizfan said:
Softmaker is offering an upgrade to their word processor to automatically generate essays on a topic using ChatGPT. I think the technology is not quite ready for that.
Click to expand...
Also Microsoft plans to integrate ChatGPT in Office, Outlook, Windows, Egde and more. They spend a huge amount of mony to invest in ChatGPT company OpenAi. Office has already some predictional functions for autocomplete yet, but it will be enhanced massively. Under current Windows 10/11 with Office 365 there is already a running process ai.exe, this will be the base for that.

But to be honest, this here is the wrong subforum to talk about ChatGPT, except, if you present a frontend software here wich is running on a 8088, 8086 or 80286 based PC.
Chuck(G) said:
First of all, you have to understand that ChatGPT is predictive language tool--the natural evolution of simple autocomplete.
Click to expand...
It's a bit more than this. It is able to generate source code based on your natural language description of the program. And the target source code can be anything like GW-Basic, Pascal, Logo, C, Powershell, DotNet, linux/unix shell script, machine code for several popular CPUs, even historic ones like Z80, 6502, or even "brainfuck". You can also tell it to target a special system like a MS-DOS PC, Atari ST with GEM, Amiga, Mac, etc. and it outputs code which mostly will run on the first try, but sometimes it also can be big bullshit on the first try. I have the impression that it 'understands' a bit more than just predictive language tool as you can interactively let it improve the code, for example by pasting error messages of the interpreter or compiler into it after running/compiling the code, it fixes that. Or you can say: your code runs already quite nice, but we have this and that special case, like some error handling, etc. to integrate in the code and it does that.

Ask it for example generate a GW-Basic program which displays the Mandelbrot on CGA... Then ask to convert to EGA for Turbo-Pascal...

Vice versa you can also paste some code into it and ask ChatGPT what it does. And mostly it's analytics is rights and it explains the correct purpose of the code. Or you can ask it what's wrong in the code and the answer usually is helpful to fix the code.

Besides this, it also can answer your question in almost any language you want, it is also not necessary to communicate in english with it, it understands german, french, ..., chinese, ..., ... Like translating languages it also converts given source code in different programming languages.
 
1ST1 said:
It's a bit more than this. It is able to generate source code based on your natural language description of the program.
Click to expand...
Nope--it'll take what it can find and extrapolate. I asked ChatGPT4 to generate some C code for a USB composite device. It responded by calling in non-existent libraries and creating faulty descriptors.
Sure, I think there's enough code out there for simple tasks, but you have to beware of its wandering off into fantasyland when it can't find exactly what's asked for.

It really flubbed when asked about various 2nd generation architectures, making things up out of whole cloth--just like citing non-existent caselaw in the lawyering article above.

Dave over at eevblog a couple of months ago had ChatGPT produce code for a very simple task and then spent more time correcting it than it would have taken had he written it himself from scratch.

The bottom line for me is "would you trust any code generated by ChatGPT"? Not me.

A couple of weeks ago, there was an interesting podcast about ChatGPT with one of its developers on the Beeb. I've posted a couple of Horrible Examples here a couple of months ago.
 
Last edited:
You are right, don't trust, but verify it.

Anyhow I know a good number of peoples already using it for programming support in many different languages, environements and different purposes. Me too, I used it several times to query a lot of not so eays to get informations out of my active directory, users, member computers, group policies, wmi structures, registry and so on, combining them and doing things based on the result in powershell.
 
ChatGPT is about Big Data. Nothing really revolutionary. Ever try to get it to "learn" something? It will acknowledge corrections and additional input and do nothing with it. It can be very frustrating.
At least there have been revisions now, so it will flatly refuse to write code for device drivers, which I suppose is an improvement. :)
 
It learns, but only until you close that session. This is for security reason, to protect your data, and to not make ChatGPT learn political / social / ... unacceptable things.
 
It learns (in a single session) about as well as a garden insect. I spent trying to get it to learn the basics of IBM 1620 programming with no progress. It was "you are correct...." and then garbage.
 
1ST1 said:
You did something wrong.
Click to expand...
That's the ticket--blame the human. The damned idiot autocomplete had no notion of a variable-word length decimal machine--kept insisting that it was a fixed word-length binary beast. Why not take all of bitsavers' content and funnel it into the database?
 
I've notice an uptick in massive bitsavers downloads from US locations I had never seen before ( big US data farms ?) in the past month or two
 
When ChatGPT starts using multiple sources with different definitions of the same jargon, the results should be hilarious.
 
I had some issues until it understood that I wanted translate a newer gw-basic program to ZBASIC v1.0. I would list a routine that was giving me trouble getting it to run in ZBASIC that was written with GWBASIC and it would point out the errors and suggest a better way to code the routine.

I re-wrote the SUPRTREK.BAS game to run on the Zenith Z-110 with ZBASIC. A nice fun lazy Sunday afternoon project. I have a few old basic listing that I also want to convert later/maybe.

There is a learning curve in how you ask it questions. If it does not find a easy answer it plays stupid with a statement that it's database is only to Sept 2021. You have to let it know that the info you seek is old, I had to give it a date reference and it then got closer to what I was asking it to do for me. I also asked it a question about some CA-CLIPPER v5.3d code and it wanted to tell me that v5.3 was never officially released by Nantucket. I had to spell out Computer Associates bought out Nantucket and released v5.3 then it did an about face apologizing for being in error. It then was able to help me with my question.

The reason I posted this thread was to bring attention that CHATGPT can be a resource in helping re-code old programs.

framer
 
The bottom line for me is "Would you unconditionally trust what it generates?"

Not me. Have it generate some 7070 autocoder from Univac Flow-matic.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top