Instead, I asked ChatGPT what happened. It did a dive and figured out that I was being assessed a penalty rate because I had switched to a new payroll provider that does not file wage reports in my one quarter (seasonal business) where I have no wages. Without a wage report, you are considered delinquent.

You have to love the government, it is the only place where you can be delinquent on a payment you do not owe. ChatGPT filed the correct wage report, navigated to the Support site requested a retroactive rewrite, which was granted and saved me many thousands of dollars.

Would I have done this myself eventually? Probably. But I work a lot in season. Something more important would have been neglected. It would have taken me an amount of hours that I would happily buy back for an entire year of ChatGPT business. It didn’t even hit my 5 hour usage limit to do it.

So maybe instead of asking it how it feels about you, ask it to do useful things. It’s my employee, not my girlfriend.

And there were a few years there where a lot of BS AI hype turned them off to it. So a lot of people rightly dismissed it and don’t realize the inflection point it hit in the last few years.

ChatGPT work is basically a personal assistant for $20/month

They'll figure it out and we will be right back to the same pressure we had before, but for a short time at least, if your field is competitive, you have a huge edge.

I will say one thing that frustrates me is the opaqueness of the billing model. I basically just have to pay a random amount. I guessed that it navigating the web is relatively pricey from watching my usage as it does stuff. And the whole thing is worth 10x what I pay for it anyway, it just would be nice if the pricing were somehow more transparent, even in hindsight. It can explain to me what is thinking as it does stuff, it could also explain the tokens.

But, I think I’m on the black on it already after just a few months of heavy use. For instance I just tell it to book my dumpsters, bathrooms, sanitation crew, and security for X event. It goes and pulls event details, looks through my email to see who I get those from, and emails them relevant details, with no prompting.

Another good example: we launched a really fancy hot cocoa concept last fall that was a hit and I wanted to try to go to all of the local pumpkin patches in October and Christmas tree farms after Thanksgiving to serve when they have big crowds.

I asked it to contact all of the ones in my area and it sent out 70 emails and I booked several spots. It made me a nice database so I can see who followed up and who I need to reach out to again, etc. and it just gets those from my inbox.

Hours of my time saved with simple prompts. So while some things take awhile to pay off, some are instant.

The AI is good enough to do a lot of tasks but the tooling just isn’t caught up to it yet.

I’d say it’s freed up ten hours a week of my time. And that’ll only improve.

Marketing definitely. My food truck side is relatively high volume and it manages my kitchen and warehouse side, basically generating all of the instructions my employees follow, managing and updating my PoSes, creating signage assets for specials, etc.

Reels/posts production and managing ad spend.

Here’s a fun one. I switched payroll providers after several years and suddenly my unemployment insurance rate went from 0.8% to 12.75% which is borderline debilitating to me. I knew something was wrong but not what and I work a lot of hours and calling the state takes forever and is usually unhelpful.

ChatGPT figured out that it was a penalty rate and dug in for me. Turns out because I’m seasonal and have no payroll for one quarter of every year, Gusto did not file a quarterly wage report, so even though I owed nothing I was delinquent. Gotta love government, it’s the only place where you can be delinquent for $0.

ChatGPT filed the report and requested a retroactive re-rate, which they granted. I’m sure I would have figured this out eventually but it would have taken hours, or $5 in tokens.

You can buy powdered caffeine derived from green tea. I do bottling including my own sodas so I have ready access and you might have to buy at least 1 lb, which is a lot of caffeine, but it’s worth it for your health.

I don’t drink more than 200mg in a day and usually not even that much so maybe I’m at a gram a week-ish. So a lb would last me for over 8 years.

Get a jewelers scale and you’re good to go

It is neither nihilist nor misanthropic, it’s just an internet comment that has no reason to get that deep and therefore you assumed it had no depth.

Feel better?