Category Archives: ChatGPT

Should You Return to Your Old Job? Pros and Cons

With the current state of the market in software engineering, I can understand there are people out there who cannot find a decent and stable job. I might be exaggerating, but I do believe that the “peak” of software engineering was reached in ’21. It’s all downhill from there on.

Returning to a former job can be appealing for those seeking stability, familiarity, or a role they truly enjoyed, but it’s a decision that requires careful consideration. Especially in software engineering, and in the software industry, where job hopping is considered the norm. I will try to analyze a breakdown of the pros and cons.

Pros

  1. Familiarity: You already know the team, culture, and work processes, allowing for a smoother transition.
  2. Shortened Learning Curve: Since you’re familiar with the role, you can often pick up where you left off, leading to quicker productivity.
  3. Potential Respect or Promotion: Returning employees are sometimes valued for their previous loyalty, especially if they left on good terms, which could open doors to promotions or new responsibilities.

Cons

  1. Stagnation: Returning could limit new learning and growth, as it may feel like going back instead of moving forward in your career.
  2. Possible Tensions: If you left for reasons related to culture or management, those issues might still be there.
  3. Missed New Opportunities: Going back might prevent you from exploring fresh environments or companies that could offer new perspectives, skills, or compensation.

Mr. ChatGPT, could you please…?

The above, just as you guessed, came from a single, one-liner prompt:

Write the pros and cons of returning to your old job.

While I can see the reasoning behind it, and most of the pros do make sense, my belief is that the scale tips towards the cons. As usual, I’ll try to elaborate my train of thought.

Being primarily a millennial, when it comes to the job market, I was born on the wrong side of the history. Right when I managed to make a break and by shedding tears and spilling blood, graduated from my masters, I ended up right in the big financial crisis. Businesses closing down, political unrest, and not to mention that my current job aspirations were describing a profession that, at the time, half of the people could not grasp it even.

Therefore, just as my other peers born on the cusp of the millennia, we believe that having a job is actually a blessing than a burden. So, millennial compromise usually outnumbers gen z’s pickiness, or general “high maintenance” of all the younger people joining the industry. Hence, if usually millennials are changing jobs, they do so because there are strong reasons behind them.

Familiarity

The kind of reasons, once accounted and acted upon, do not easily change. Hence, the pro argument of Familiarity is a strong con. What would be the reason of returning to the old job, if, there was a familiar strong reason for leaving? If that reason has changed, yes, it makes sense, but this leads to other…kind of arguments (essentially a different company, or position), so let’s not explore that.

Shortened Learning Curve

This argument, while seems to be a big positive one, I will try to reverse it.

Indeed, since an employee left, was familiar at the least, or was doing a very good job at best, in his/her previous post. That leads to shorter time to production and increased productivity. However, we do not fully know the reasons for leaving (whether that was compensation based, or something else), but for most of the people in the industry, a short learning curve is something they generally avoid. Not learning something new (especially with all the new tools that come up every day), is considered to be job-killing. Not to mention the challenging part. It is extremely challenging to be able to comprehend, learn and adapt in order to fix something broken. Or create something new.

Potential Respect or Promotion

I cannot think a worse argument than this. The main reason behind it is quite simple. If there was enough respect, there would have been a promotion, and the employee would not have reached the exit door. GPT, is also mentioning “loyalty” and “leaving on good terms”. Both of those things are, obviously discarded, right from when someone opens the exit door…

Concluding

Returning to a former position for me does not really make any sense. Being an advocate of change and generally positive feedback, when someone leaves his post, there surely is a larger reason that has not change for him to return. If that reason has changed, the most of the times we are talking about a different company, with different managers and different colleagues. Not the same company anymore…

To quote the big economist: “This time is different”. No — this time its not different than the previous time, at least not in the software industry.

Prompt Engineering (Not)

Hello people! I’m back with a more engineering related post this time! I will explain how I managed to create a ChatGPT app, using a couple of other API’s resulting into this:

Image created by DALL-E
Image created using DALL-E, and the phrase “not sure fry futurama”

https://myopinion.fyi

In this blog post I will attempt to walk you through the entire experience of creating a full stack mini site, using the ChatGPT API from OpenAI, and building a prompt.

My attempt will be holistic, from inception to creation, in any case this happened in the timespan of a whole week. Only the implementation was done in a weekend.

Sleep deprivation

One day I had some issues sleeping, and while staying awake, I decided to play a bit more with ChatGPT. While analysing the way it works, and also highlighting what it can do best, I had a good idea. ChatGPT, can easily summarise a lot of data in a written form. That’s because of the way it is built, the LLM, can “understand” the text input and create vectors that are weighted which in turn changes the output. In plain words, it can be fed some data and asked to create a summary of it, in a good(ish) way.

The other aspect of that idea comes from the fact that I really enjoy eating at good restaurants. And travelling to many different places. Unfortunately, when you reach a place you haven’t visited before, and you are hungry like me, you would want to eat something. So you have two options:

  1. Ask local people, but you might get upsold something you might not like.
  2. Go to google maps restaurants and see what’s around that is good.

Google Maps Restaurant Reviews

Google offers a nice alternative. After we open the map app, we are met with a nice overview which shows all the available restaurants in the area, along with their average overall rating.

If you click the button restaurants, you are getting a list with a lot of restaurants that are in the vicinity, but that list isn’t ordered, not representative of how good the restaurant is. That is because, you cannot sort that list based on how many reviews there are, or which rating they have.

This is something I do not like with Google Maps Restaurant Reviews. I often have to scroll down all the time and search for the ones in the area with the highest number of reviews and rating in order to decide (more on that later why I didn’t implement my app that way — which will come at some time).

Clicking through one restaurant and you get the below section:

You get the rating (4.6 / 5) , the total number of reviews and the type of restaurant (here Fusion)

It includes the rating, the number of reviews and the type of restaurant.

Sure, but, why ChatGPT is needed here?

I’m glad you asked. If you click below, at the “reviews” , you are met with a breakdown of “the most relevant” according to google, reviews for that restaurant.

In that view, among other info, you see the actual user review, with some photos and his or hers total rating (ie. 5/5 in this case).

You guessed it right!

The My Opinion app is getting 5 of the “most relevant” reviews, along with the average rating and my own flavour of personal review prompt and calls the chat gpt api.

The prompt goes like this:

Restaurant: 'hoocut' near Platia Agias Irinis 9, Athina, Overall Rating: 4.3/5 from 2827 Reviews, types: restaurant,food,point_of_interest,establishment

Juliana M, Rating: 5/5, Visited: 10 months ago
Experience: For Greece’s version of “fast food” this was high quality and tasty. Only place I found a vegetarian gyro — had grape leaves inside. It was delicious. Also had the souvlaki over fries which was amazing. Able to sit in or dine out! Quick service. Wish we had an opportunity to go again. Open late!

Jeremy Saal, Rating: 5/5, Visited: a year ago
Experience: These were the best gyros we ever had. In fact, we dined there twice since the food was so good. This place was recommended to us by a local chef, who mentioned their pitas are made the traditional way, rather than mass-produced. The quality of the food and flavor were superb. Next time we're in Athens, this will be our first dining spot.

Allan Venegas, Rating: 5/5, Visited: 6 months ago
Experience: We came here during a food and wine tour we had booked and now I know why. This gyro is the best we have ever had anywhere. They show how these pitas are baked - fluffy yet crispy - packed with different meats. We only came here for a quick bite, but we definitely are going back before we leave Athens again. Even Gordon Ramsey came here in the past! Highly recommend

Sila A., Rating: 5/5, Visited: a year ago
Experience: Delicious gyros with quality ingredients. We tried the chicken pita and pork special, both were very tasty. The pitas are a bit small, consider ordering 2 per person if you are hungry.

Vlad M., Rating: 4/5, Visited: 7 months ago
Experience: Pita and sauce on the pita is nice.different.
The fries and salad is okay. But the cheese is not fluffy enough.
Overall it is very cheap!


Based on the above most relevant comments and overall data, write a small paragraph stating the reasons if and why you want to visit that restaurant.
You are an abrasive software engineer named Takis and you do not like to spend time or money in mediocre restaurants, and you value VFM above all.
Large portions get an extra credit, expensive prices are not. Recent reviews count more.
Write in a software engineering style making jokes and puns, while also referencing the reviewers.

Some example code

In order to build the above, which was the easy part (devops here, not front end dev), I used node js, express and the direct library from OpenAI. I tried other implementations, like Chatgpt API, but at the time I wrote this app, I opted from ES6 and not Typescript (again devops here), which didn’t actually work for me.

 try {
    logger.info('ENABLECHATGPT', process.env.ENABLE_CHATGPT)
    let prompt = `Restaurant: '${data.name}' near ${data.vicinity}, Overall Rating: ${data.rating} from ${data.totalReviews} Reviews, types: ${data.type}\n`
    data.comments.map(comment => {
      prompt += `\n${comment.author_name}, Rating: ${comment.rating}/5, Visited: ${comment.relative_time_description} \nExperience: ${comment.text}\n`
    });
    prompt += `\n\n${template}`
    logger.info('prompt', prompt)
    let completion = { data: { usage: { prompt_tokens: 498, completion_tokens: 116, total_tokens: 614 }, choices: [{ text: "\n\nDefault Text!" }] } }
    if (process.env.ENABLE_CHATGPT == 'true') {
      logger.info('Sending to ChatGPT')
      completion = await openai.createCompletion({
        model: "text-davinci-003",
        prompt: prompt,
        max_tokens: 1000,
        temperature: 0.6,
        top_p: 1,
        n: 1,
        stream: false,
        logprobs: null,
        stop: null
      });
    }
    return completion.data.choices[0].text
  } catch (e) {
    logger.error(e)
    return "Mr. Takis is experiencing some electric intestinal problems right now and he's stuck at the electrical discharge seat..."
  }

Implementation

I chose all JS for this. For various reasons. One reason is that I already had a server with node js installed. Another is that I had worked on a previous project using node js and I had a template ready (and I do not develop stuff that often any more since I’ve officially become a devops for a long time now). And lastly because I’m certain people use JS more often than they are admitting.

I’ll update how I did the implementation soon, in the meantime, have a look at the app and give me a shout if you like it. I’ll just stop here with the following:

ChatGPT is good at “helping” write SIMPLE code.

That is because, I hadn’t worked with ReactJS before that extensively, let alone use some modules I haven’t seen before. So, I did the obvious thing, and asked ChatGPT to write me an “google maps autocomplete react js app widget”.

The above didn’t work out so well. Since the trained model for gpt when I was asking it was from 2020, that’s ages in the js, let alone react world. Therefore, it was hallucinating. And here’s when the frustration starts to kick in… The prompt I gave it to start was the following:

create a sample react app with a form and autocomplete from googles places api only for restaurants

And the response was this:

npx create-react-app restaurant-finder
cd restaurant-finder
npm install @google/maps react-google-autocomplete

And the code:

import React from 'react';
import { GoogleMap, LoadScript, Autocomplete } from '@react-google-maps/api';

const RestaurantFinder = () => {
  const onLoad = (autocomplete) => {
    console.log('autocomplete: ', autocomplete);
  };

  return (
    <LoadScript googleMapsApiKey="YOUR_API_KEY">
      <GoogleMap center={{ lat: 37.7749, lng: -122.4194 }} zoom={12}>
        <Autocomplete
          onLoad={onLoad}
          onPlaceChanged={() => {
            console.log('place changed');
          }}
          options={{
            types: ['establishment'],
            componentRestrictions: { country: 'us' },
          }}
        />
      </GoogleMap>
    </LoadScript>
  );
};

export default RestaurantFinder;

For the App.js:

import React from 'react';
import RestaurantFinder from './RestaurantFinder';

function App() {
  return (
    <div className="App">
      <RestaurantFinder />
    </div>
  );
}

export default App;

and here’s where things start to get weird. GPT searched for google maps, autocomplete and react and it autogenerated something that didn’t quite help. A simple autocomplete form which was conflicting locally with the current react installation.

After a lot of trial and error, and frustrated error messages, I tried the following:

create a sample react app using googlemaps/react-wrapper and not google-maps-react, with a form and autocomplete from googles places api only for restaurants.

That is when GPT went fully hallucinating. It created a react app, that was using the googlemaps/react-wrapper but only by approximation, as it was trying to extend the google-maps-react functionality. Obviously this did not work at all. The previous attempts, weren’t working either, as the react app had moved ahead a lot, but, even if you do try to “guess” the correct combo of packages it was referring to, again, for me it did not work.

ChatGPT and Basic Calculus

Being a Computer Science master’s graduate, I had also being taught courses about Artificial Intelligence. Back then though, those were pretty basic. In ’08, all that was described as AI, was merely some algorithms that were designed to solve or calculate a specific set of problems.

Most common problem I can remember from back then was to write an algorithm that solves Euler’s 8 queens problem, or an algorithm for a permutation of the common puzzle of Hanoi Tower.

The theory behind the AI, was fairly simple. Algorithms and Data Structures, and actually it stopped there! No statistics, nothing fancy from a mathematical point. I can still remember BFS and DFS, but those were thoroughly taught at a separate lesson, called “Algorithms and Data Structures”.

Another aspect that was taught at that lesson, was how to use A* in a graph diagram, or a tree diagram, in order to reduce the possible branches in a potential “Artificial Intelligence” solution employed in an application. But frankly, the use of todays tools needed to create a serious AI application, weren’t the subject of that course.

“Pattern Recognition” was the most similar course that seems to be related to todays AI applications. This course was indeed a more “control theory” oriented course that was the grand-father of todays pattern recognition. Regression and discrete mathematics were the basic subjects of this course. Not probabilistic theory. Not even statistics. Now, after 15 years it has changed radically.

Last night, I decided to ask a very basic calculus question, the kind that 17 year old students are being taught. The subject was limits, and given some mathematical function, to calculate the limit of that function while the values approach the infinite.

A trip to Infinity

To Infinity and beyond!

A small parenthesis here. I have watched the documentary from Netflix, called “A trip to Infinity“, which was amazing! The stories explained in that documentary were very well presented. The “Infinite Hotel”, with infinite many rooms, which always has a room available, and the manager who visits all the rooms just in 1 minute. The Japanese Godzilla story was also very good. Later, physics are also involved and that abstract mathematical concept, called infinity is being applied to our real world universe. Definitely recommended, and I have to say I was very impressed with the work they did!

However, this is something that unfortunately cannot be easily represented in the limited space of a LLM AI application such as ChatGPT. I think in general the Calculus quizzes cannot be answered that well via that model. The reason, is, that it requires a huge amount of data (one would argue infinite?) to actually grasp the concept of something that big as infinity. Even at the very first lessons of my masters, we were taught that a computing machine cannot grasp the concept of infinity.

As simple as doing a division by zero, will raise an exception or make any program crass (I’ll write a blog post sometime why this in PHP created a few hundred thousand dollars losses, once in a blue moon), ChatGPT also crashed when I tried repeatedly to request it to calculate the simple limit:

This is what it replied with:

The calculation of this limit is being done by approximation, a strange technique, but valid from a more practical view, nonetheless.

When I “devised” the above quiz, I had in mind this:

L’Hôpital’s rule

The above rule merely says the following:

If after calculating separately the limits of the numerator and the denominator you reach to a paradox like:

or :

and if we assume the denominator to be a function that is continuous and differentiable, and the same happens to the numerator as well, then the above limit gets transformed to:

Interesting…

Therefore, I saw the response and I quizzically asked:

Completely wrong, but partly also right?

And there you have it. ChatGTP completely flunked the response. The function for the limit calculation changed radically into a sinusoidal function (who knows why? some neuron had different weights and thats the first thing that connected with the question?).

Luckily the response was the same, and correct still, at 0.

I decided to give it another chance:

ChatGPT acknowledges the defect

Again, even though it acknowledged the defect, and it made it even worse! Now it calculated it to 2/3, which is completely wrong.

That’s where I decided to stop playing with ChatGPT and Basic Calculus. I believe it is actually very well written, but, when it involves abstract thinking, we have a long – long way to go…

Conclusion

If you are a calculus student and you want to cheat your homework with ChatGPT, do think it twice. You might get a correct answer result (after all there are a few stuff we can’t calculate with calculatory methods), but the proof of that answer would be mathematically incorrect!