Using Chat-GPT to do my job

I am so excited! Today after reading articles about Chat GPT I decided to see if I could start using it to help me do my job. Here is my first bit of work:

How can I prevent a user from signing up with a particular email address, without retaining the email address itself?

If you want to prevent a user from signing up with a particular email address, but do not want to retain the email address itself, one possible solution is to create a hash of the email address and store the hash instead of the email address itself.

A hash is a mathematical function that converts a piece of data, such as an email address, into a fixed-length string of characters. Hashing is a one-way process, which means that it is not possible to reverse the process and recover the original data from the hash. This means that you can store the hash of an email address without retaining the email address itself.

To prevent a user from signing up with a particular email address, you could hash the email address and store the hash in a list of blocked email addresses. Whenever a new user signs up, you could hash the email address they provide and check if it appears in the list of blocked email addresses. If the hash matches a hash in the list, you could prevent the user from signing up.

This approach has the advantage of allowing you to prevent a user from signing up with a particular email address without retaining the email address itself. However, it is important to note that this approach is not foolproof, as it is possible for two different email addresses to produce the same hash. This is known as a collision, and it is a potential weakness of the hashing approach.

Write code in Laravel and PHP to do the above:

Here is an example of how you could implement the hashing approach in Laravel and PHP to prevent a user from signing up with a particular email address without retaining the email address itself:

// Get the email address provided by the user
$email = $request->input('email');

// Create a hash of the email address using the SHA-256 hashing algorithm
$hash = hash('sha256', $email);

// Check if the hash appears in the list of blocked email addresses
$blocked = DB::table('blocked_emails')->where('hash', $hash)->first();

if ($blocked) {
    // The email address has been blocked, so prevent the user from signing up
    return redirect('/signup')->with('error', 'This email address is not allowed.');
} else {
    // The email address is not blocked, so continue with the signup process
    // ...
}

Just stunning and scary! At the least, I think this is going to be a huge threat to stackoverflow :D - but I have already now asked it for code solutions to three problems and it has been helpful, and the fact it remembers and allows refinements is huge. I asked it to creat the database migration, and it also gave me that. The idea of it being hooked up to your whole software project, it will be just so powerful.