ChatGPT knows what's in my bar and what types of base liquors I love and/or can't drink. It knows what fruit, syrups and mixes are in my fridge. It knows that my friend is allergic to mint. It knows that when I ask for recommendations, I tend to want a choice between spirit forward, tiki, martini and herbaceous.

ChatGPT knows the broad strokes of the 3-4 main hardware projects I have on the go, and depending on the questions I'm asking, it will often structure its responses in a way that differentiates based on which one I'm thinking about.

It knows what resistor and capacitor values I have on my pick and place machine, and when I ask for divider ratios it will do its best to calculate based on those values to the degree that it will chain 1-2 resistors together to achieve those ratios.

I knows what kind of solder I use, and has warned me about components with sensitive reflow temperature concerns.

It's an extraordinarily useful feature for engineering and drinking, two things that are commonly found in the same Venn diagram.

I will say graciously that seeing this question asked here is absolutely stunning to me

If I ask a question about vehicles it know what cars I have and what I like in cars

If I ask for a question about vacation spots it know my parties composition or preferences

Things like that

I asked chatgpt a car related question in a fresh chat, and it answered it specifically with my car in mind.

Turns out a few month befor I told it in a prompt what car I was driving.

I turned memory of that day.

Can projects overlap? If not there’s general context information that’s often useful.

My job, my kids and time preferences around those things, my preferred tech setup and way of working and types of tech I’m better at. Things I already have (home assistant, little nuc, etc). I can throw a random question and not have to add this kind of information or manage it.

I had the same question a few days ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47162828

I didn't receive an answer besides "that's what people like", but I still can't think of (m)any situations where anyone would prefer it.

I broke my ankle and have multiple chats related to medicine, physical therapy, pain management, lawyer questions, how to handle messaging to boss and HR

I use it for my work. So i went it to remember everything about my business, website, the domain, which country we operate and on and on. It’s a ton of context which I don’t want to repeat each time.

Sure.

ChatGPT "knows" (has context that includes) some of the things I'm good at, and some of the things I'm not good at. I have my own tolerances for communication and it has context about that, too.

I use the bot for mostly techy things. So, for instance, I'm alright with using tools, and building electronics, and punting around on a Linux box so I don't need my hand held for that. But I'm terrible at writing code, so baby steps and detailed explanation there helps me a lot. I strongly prefer pragmatism and verifiable facts. I despise sycophant speech, the empty positivity of corpo-speak, assumptions, false praise, superfluous verbosity, and apologies and/or the implication of feelings from bots.

Through a combination of some deliberate training (custom instructions, memory), and just using it (shared context), it mostly does what I want in the way that I want it done -- the first time.

I don't have to steer in the right direction with every new session. There was a time when that was necessary, but it is no longer that way. Adjustments happen increasingly automatically these days.

That saves me time and frustration, and enhances the utility of the bot.

Meanwhile: Others have their own skills and preferences that may be very different in comparison to my own. That's OK. We each get to have our own experience.

I did /init and now CLAUDE.md is on several layers. I wish there was a reverse init and minimum as needed init.

I'll have to try projects I guess, but I just want to sometimes ask questions without it bringing up shit I asked about in the past which isn't relevant to what I'm asking this time.

exactly!

I have all the history settings off for this reason, but something that worries me is that there's a fair bit of information about me trained right into the model weights. I'm not "famous" by any stretch but claude has awareness of some of my HN-front-page-hitting projects, etc., which I think should be enough to bias responses (although I haven't tried to measure it).

I set my name to "User" in the settings, so in a clean-slate chat it has nothing to go on, but the moment claude code does something like `git log` it knows who I am again. I've even considered writing some kind of redaction proxy.

FWIW, both OpenAI and Anthropic have a toggle to do a “Temporary/Incognito Chat” that does not use or update memory. I too wish this was the default, and then you could opt in at the end of the chat to save some long term aspects into memory.

Is it?

Isn't there much more money in automating business processes than in answering consumer questions (sans ads)?

Automating software development has to be a multi-trillion dollar market. And that doesn't account for future growth.

Yeah, but then they went and added "memories" and in particular automatic memory management, and now it isn't a clean slate each time. And that's exactly what this is importing: those automatically curated memories that make the chat bot "feel like" it knows you.