I found it has replaced a large percentage of google searches for me - particularly programming related. I can literally put the same keywords in ChatGPT that I used to put into google, and I'll get answers from various programming language docs, with examples I can follow-up on, with no SEO spam / ads.
B2B startup in the sales/financial space. We were solely targeting Salesforce customers in the USA at the time, who conduct all transactions in USD ($).
So sprinkled throughout our very large app were thousands of dollar signs - some rendered on page load in the HTML, some constructed via JS templates, some built on graphs in d3.js, and some built in tooltips that occassionally popped up on the aforementioned graphs.
One day, a Sales guy pops in with "Hey, I just sold our app to a big player in Europe - but they need the currency to display in Pounds instead of Dollars" (might have been pounds, might have been some other European currency - memory is a bit hazy).
CEO steps in and supports Sales guy, says their demo starts in a few days - and the demo needs to take place with the client's data, on their instance, and show Pounds instead of Dollars.
Wat?
Small dev team, 5 members. We gather and brainstorm for a couple hours. Lots of solutions are proposed, and discarded. We get access to client's instance to start "setting things up" and poke around a bit.
We discover that all the field names are the same, and SF was just storing them as numbers. No currency conversions had to be done. We literally just needed to display the pound symbol instead of the dollar symbol.
One of the devs on my team says "Hey guys, I have a dumb idea..."
In short, he remembered an extension from back in the day called "Cloud2Butt". When you loaded a page, it would scan all html on the page and transparently and instantly replace all instances of the word "Cloud" with the word "Butt". Recollecting this, the dev wondered if we could look at their code, and write something similar to crawl the DOM tree and just replace all dollar symbols with pound symbols. The resulting "fix" would then just be a simple JS function we put on top of our stack, instead of refactoring thousands of files.
So... we tried it. With one small addition (making it do it on a setInterval every 100ms, which took care of the tooltips on the graphs) it worked flawlessly. We intended it as a stopgap measure to buy us time, but there were no complaints so we just let that run in production for several years, and the app expanded to several more currencies.
I've used ChatGPT 3.5 (not 4, too expensive) to translate most of the Latin writings of Jerome, Ambrose, and Ambrosiaster (from Migne's Patrologia Latina) - the translations have been put in this repo in the public domain:
- ChatGPT did excellent with about 3 sentences max at a time. Exceeding 3 sentences would cause it to often truncate the response (e.g. translating 3ish of 5 sentences, or hallucinating more).
- ChatGPT would originally return the translation, sometimes randomly prefixed with a variant of "The translation is" and sometimes wrapped in quotes, othertimes not. Using the function interface to ChatGPT eliminated this problem.
- When it comes to quotations from Bible verses, ChatGPT sometimes "embellished" (not sure what else to call it). E.g. if part of Ephesians 2:7 is quoted in Latin, in the English ChatGPT would sometimes insert Ephesians 2:7-8 in full.
An open source database that pulls up all historical Christian commentary on a verse in the Bible - e.g. see how the early church fathers interpreted a verse, it's often illuminating.
Was inspired by CS Lewis' comments about the "Old Books": "Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books."