Day 8 - Computer Skills

Not too technical, I promise. (I hope?)

Today we’ll brush up on some basic computer skills, which are useful for the other lessons in this series. If you’re on a smartphone instead of a computer, they work a little differently, but the same general principles apply.

By the way, happy Friday! Remember to take two days off, and I’ll send the next email on Monday.

Skills we’ll review or learn about:

• copy / paste

• files

If you breeze through those and need something else to do, use your LLM to study up on “Markdown”, that will be handy, too. (And if you breeze through that, brush up on your HTML or JavaScript skillz. 🙂)

Try some or all of these prompts.

I’m brushing up on my computer skills. Tell me about copy and paste. Tell me about files.

You might say at the front of that, “I’m on Windows” or “I’m on a Mac” or “I’m on an iPhone” or “I’m on Android.”

Compare copy and paste on a computer to copy and paste on a smartphone.

How do files work on (iPhone, or Android)?

When I download a file, where does it go on my (computer, or phone)?

Why is it called “copy” and “paste”?

What are files? Why are they called “files”?

Level your questions and investigation up or down based on what you already know. But even if you know a lot about these computer skills, I encourage you to brush up on the background.

Now for some context. It may not seem like it, but chatbots and LLMs are still in the early days. In five years or whatever, they’ll be so embedded and integrated into our computers, and our interfaces will be so voice- and gesture-based, that we won’t use copy and paste or files with them much anymore.

But, we’re not there yet, and so we’re using some old-school ways to represent information (text) and move it between applications on our computer or smartphone (copy/paste, files). They’re basic, they work with every application, they’re well-understood (if you’re an old-time computer user, or a computer system designer, anyway). And crucially, they give us lots of capability to apply LLM power to accomplish real work on our device.

Some bonus prompts, feel free to try these, or it’s okay to skip them, too:

Tell me about the history of using text to represent information.

Tell me the history of computer text, starting with telegraph / TTY and ASCII, through to modern-day text on computers and smartphones.

When were computer files invented? What’s the difference between “binary” files and “text” files? What are some common kinds of text files?

Copy / Paste Overview

We use “copy” to grab some information from one place (an email or web page, for instance), and “paste” to put the information into another place. So, hopefully when I share prompts, you “copy” the prompt on your device, and “paste” it into your LLM, right?

Similarly, when you have the LLM produce some output—a joke to share, or an improved outline for the novel you’re writing—you “copy” the information from the LLM, and “paste” it into your social media app, or your personal knowledge management system, or your word processor.

A thing to notice, especially on computers: since your LLM is usually running in a web browser, you can highlight text and copy it just like you would with any other web page. If that’s working well, great!

Sometimes, you’ll find that the formatting gets lost, or it’s hard to select a long message from the LLM. Usually, there’s a small copy icon at the bottom or top of the LLM message, which lets you copy the whole thing at once, and sometimes the formatting works out better, too. If you haven’t tried that copy icon, try it a couple of times.

Some LLMs have another copy button, for the whole conversation. That may be helpful in the right circumstances, too.

Files Overview

Depending on when you started using computers (maybe never, if you mostly use smartphones), you may have more or less familiarity with files.

I’ve been using computer files for most of my life, and it has been a massive part of the way computers were used. On the other hand, if you started with computers 10 years ago, you may use “the cloud” as the place where things happen, and for instance, if you’re using Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Gmail for most of your computer/smartphone information work, you may not really think about files at all.

I still want you to know about files for some upcoming lessons, though, so let’s either recap or learn about files to make sure we’re all sort of on the same page.

You can think of “files” as a computer representation, similar to a physical information object: a page in a book, a whole book, a glossy handout from a store, a photograph.

You can “save” a file from one application / program, say Google Docs or Microsoft Word, and “open” or “load” it in another application. Or for images, you can “save” a file from Apple Photos or Google Photos, and “open” the file in an image editor.

The “file” is saved on and loaded from your “disk” or in your “storage”. You should have a special app you can use to find your files and do stuff with them (copy or duplicate, delete, rename): File Explorer for Windows, Finder for Mac, Files or something similar on your smartphone.

Okay, we’re almost there! Let’s practice with copy/paste and files. Let’s try a simple thing with a kind of file called an “HTML” file. HTML is the programming-style “markup” used to make web pages, but don’t worry about that for now. Just think of them as another text file, albeit with some funny text inside.

The Actual Exercise

Prompt your LLM:

Show me the HTML to say “Hello, world.”

It should show you some gobbledygook text. Somewhere in the middle, you might be able to find the actual phrase “Hello, world.” If you can, great, if you can’t, don’t worry about it.

Now, using your magical “copy” skill, you could copy some or all of that. You could even “paste” it back into any conversation with the same or a different LLM, and ask it to tell you what it means.

Actually try that if you’re curious, skip it if it sounds like too much work—you get the idea.

Now let’s do it a little differently:

Make an HTML file that says “Hello, world.” and let me download the file.

I’ve tried this in ChatGPT and Claude, on the computer and on iPhone / Android. I think it’ll work for you. If your LLM doesn’t let you download files, try ChatGPT or Claude. You probably need to be signed in, and you may need to be pretty specific about “Let me download the file.” Without that instruction, you’ll still get the HTML, but it may be set up for “copy” instead of “download”, and in a lesson or two, “download” will be much easier.

ChatGPT will put a download link in the chat itself. Claude will probably make an “artifact” (a document to the side), and where there’s a “Copy” button, you should be able to find “Download”.

Now actually download the file, and poof!, you’re done!

You might continue a little more and click or tap on the downloaded file, if you can see where it went, and you’ll probably get a page that says “Hello, World.” But don’t worry too much about that yet.

Thanks for following me on this little deep dive into computers—I think it’ll come in handy soon.

Have a good weekend!

—Pete