When you're a high schooler, yes, even Steve Jobs did it. But when your monthly salary is easily in the thousands, it's not a matter of pride to get it for <$20, it's a matter of stupidity.
> $20/mo, for the people in this situation, is not an amount of money worth thinking about.
I don't follow this logic. In this case everything that is currently sold for 2 cents can also be sold for $20, because "it is not an amount of money worth thinking about" (at least for some people).
Frivolously throwing money at unnecessary subscriptions isn't something for me.
Interesting.
As ever the whole sentence is important, rather than just picking out a part of it.
And not for nothing you probably will have better luck scoring a promotion by spending $20 a month on doughnuts for the team than on ChatGPT.
If you're contracting agency, it could be in your explicitly laid out in the contract that you might use information from 3rd party sources such as Google, Stack Overflow, and yes ChatGPT.
I am also a salaried employee and if I can save a minute of work time that’s one less minute I have to work.
I have a body of work I need to complete and sometimes that takes me 40 hours and sometimes much more.
The only way I can think of that $20 per month for increased productivity doesn’t help is if your company’s metric of success is being present/working 8 hours per day.
You've just described most office jobs.
This is why productivity improvements feel so meh. For people that are hyper competitive and ambitious, it's a way to tackle more and bigger challenges. Fine.
For others though, the benefits do not really materialize in meaningful ways. Maybe you can win some slack/recovery time, but it's not really truly free time. You're still working and on call.
In fact, in quite a lot of teams being productive is actively punished. Say that in agile you do a great sprint, and execute 10 story points instead of the normal 5.
Nice. Oh...so you can do 10? 10 it is then for all the future sprints. Without a pay increase, obviously.
I agree that hyper competitive and ambitious people might do this. I would add though that curious and passionate people will also do this.
I'll be honest... if I weren't getting paid to be a software engineer I'd do it for free. Like I did when I was 13 years old with my 300 bps modem creating a BBS program in 1985.
This leads me to do all kinds of crazy things like work 6 hours on a Saturday because I am quite simply fascinated about the level of engineering I can do to turn an 18 hour batch process into 4.
It's been extremely lucrative for my career. I'm fortunate to work somewhere that is truly pay for performance. But not in a million years is that why I do it.
Obviously if they start charging for the free version, they may also jack the price for the premium one.
You own your life - why not spend your own money for the things that make you and your life better?
Who cares?
I worked at a job where I had a small, crappy monitor. I made decent cash. I just bought a large decent monitor and brought it into work. I ended up using it for many years. My life was significantly better. I've done that at several jobs since then, and NEVER regretted it, in fact it was one of the soundest decisions I've ever made. Also keyboard and mouse.
There are so many people using the default keyboard, the default monitor, the default tools.
If you push work to do it for you, you need to challenge the "everone gets a dell 19" monitor" b.s. If you push your boss, he might have to do justification paperwork.
Just become what you are.
A monitor is relatively cheap, I would own it, and it will primarily improve my life and secondarily improve my productivity.
In contrast, with ChatGPT, if I'm working on a difficult programming job, I spend X time thinking deeply and Y time actually typing the solution. A system that can type for me is convenient but it may not speed things since I can only think so fast, so many hours a day. And the situation of renting a thing for $20 isn't just a constant expense but a bit of a feeling of being beholden - the price could be and probably will be raised, there is a pressure to get value out of the thing by using it more, etc.
And there's no guarantee that a code generator will make my life more pleasant - the time saved typing may be absorbed by meetings or whatever.
It's a bit like home automation or car dongles - some people might like never throwing a switch as they walk into a room but I think fewer people would see a benefit they'd pay for since they still have to walk into the room.
And it's good to keep in mind, the comparison is not $20 for ChatGPT versus nothing. It's $20 for ChatGPT Plus, versus my API-hacky-solution for $2, versus ChatGPT free, for $0.
Anyway, a counter-example is that the arguments above would not be against some broad framework that reduces both the thinking and the writing needed to construct programs - say a combination of a good programming, a good software engineering framework and a management that forced client requirements into a structured format. That sort of thing can reduce the needed programmer activity in a project on both the low and the high level and none of the arguments above object to this.
Haha, exactly my thoughts (https://github.com/rikhuijzer/ata). Davinci is nicer (more succinct) than ChatGPT anyway.
It'll be absorbed by reviewing the generated code, which you are ultimately responsible for. Is typing speed actually a bottleneck to many programmers, beyond certain point of expertise?
Not wanting to spoil it, I’ll just say that if you haven’t seen this show then you’re in for good laugh:
To be clear, I am not judging you. You did what was good for you and took the path of least resistance, as we all do many times a day. I am just trying to answer your question of "who cares?" We should all care a lot about this!
I'm an in-house producer at a tech company. I own a lot of film and audio equipment. I made it very clear in my initial negotiation that my gear was to be used solely at my discretion that and within 12mo we will fully transition off of it. I also used it to negotiate a slightly higher salary. It would've been easier to just give it away, but then why would they ever stop? I could've easily slipped into a position where they just use all my film equipment rent free and then I am on the hook to replace it as it breaks at a faster rate. That's not right without proper compensation.
If I have a nice dual-monitor setup, in a business where everyone gets a 19" Dell, I will be more productive. That will lead to more promotions, lower odds of being fired, etc. I will come out ahead. Plus, I'll be happier.
If my employer benefits too, how does that hurt me?
It all got restricted due to covid, and I doubt they’re going back :/
Another lesson from my career: No place is perfect. Don't make simplistic judgements.
At an organizational level, it's often not so much about money as about fairness, controls to avoid corruption, IT/supplier overhead costs, or similar sorts of reasons. I've been in C-suite, individual contributor, and everything in between. To flip things around, it's often cheaper to by a standard $3000 thing than a non-standard $1500 thing. Equipment costs are much lower than labor costs.
From my perspective, given three choices:
1. Spend $2000 of my time and $2000 of my boss' time to make an exception for a $500 monitor purchase
2. Be less productive
3. Drop $500
Often, I pick #3. I like my manager, and I don't want to complicate his life over a monitor. That lets me complicate his life over more important things, by the way.
When I was a director, I'd occasionally even spend personal dollars to buy things employees needed too. Dropping $20 is often easier than making a case to expense $20.
That being said, this is not that situation. I am a salaried employee at a small tech startup. It's always either "we have the money/don't have the money" or "I don't see the point." Luckily the latter is rare because they trust my judgment. But in the case of the former, while i get it's about resources, I'm not going to make it my problem. I am not going to fund their startup with my hardware. Which is why they are reasonable with me and just change their expectations when the resources aren't there. Of course I always try to find a solution that accomplishes the goal because I want us all to succeed, but I am not going to do it the way they want if they can't pay for it and it will only happen on my own dime.
It wasn't touchy, it was reasonable. I guarantee you not one engineer at our company uses their personal computer. It's no different than saying "I want a work computer." They were going to buy me film equipment but hadn't determined exactly what we needed yet and hadn't set aside enough resources (cash) for it yet. So this was a useful stopgap that worked for everyone. Plus it's not like I got 10k more or something absurd. It was a modest amount that made me happy and got them what they needed.
>If they cared about the equipment they would have preferred to purchase/finance it or lease it.
Wasn't for sale and neither of us wanted to get into a lease. Plus they absolutely made out like bandits if we put dollar costs on this. I was just happy to have some cash for using my gear that made my life easier while also establishing a precedent that my gear isn't there for them to joyride.
About monitors and larger stuff, you may argue. Employers can find and buy good ones in bulk, instead of making everyone individually spend hours being annoyed, searching and comparing and buying better equipment. Either way, for monitors the financial hit will be way less than 1% of a typical salary (okay, may depend on location, but a monitor lasts 5+ years).
I agree it has to stop somewhere. For me that would be stuff like Unity3D subscriptions, or tables, or FPGA tools and oscilloscopes. But monitors... shrug
This is nevertheless a great point. This culture is coming if it isn't here already especially when you add WFH to the mix
Frankly, I’ve been surprised at the results. Generally, they just say “OK” and the matter is settled and I don’t have unrealistic expectations saddled on me. It’s what I like about my company, they don’t dance around things. There’s a lot of trust and open communication. Plus every now and then they give me what I need. Because they know I’m being honest and not just trying to buy myself new toys.
Objectively, a few reasons:
- You can't afford it.
- Paying for it doesn't let you "own" anything
- It's not reliable
- It's legal compatibility is not fully decided yet
- It can preclude opportunities for learning and even teach you entirely false things under the guise they are true
The list probably goes on, but I don't think we should buy everything that stands to make our lives better. If we applied that logic to everything in our lives, we'd all use computers from Skymall and eat food we see on QVC.
Pretty sure GP didn't say "completely give in to all impulse purchases and cease to use your brain about the worth of things."
I agree with GP. I bought my own monitor. It's great. It significantly improves my workday, and I get to take it with me if I quit. It generally gets two reactions: first, "how did you manage to get a better monitor than everyone else" and second, "why would you spend your money to help the company?" Not sure how something that contributes directly to my comfort while performing my job is helping the company more than it's helping me, but whatever. Seems very much like cutting off your nose to spite your face to just stick with the standard monitor to avoid "giving" the company something. Same as the folks who spend time every month filing expense reports and having corporate mobile device management profiles on their phones so they can get reimbursed $20/month for their mobile data.
An example? The OP was talking about purchasing a monitor/keyboard/mouse.
A one-off purchase is very different from making a hole in the bucket.
Obviously this all depends on how financially comfortable you are. But still.. time is money. Money you're spending today is time you're committing to work to earn back tomorrow.
$20/mo for a subscription of NYT, or Netflix is not one of those things. But ChatGPT in many cases can save whole days of work over each month, so - especially when you're a freelancer, it will pay itself off.
Or you're just treading water.
Not everyone gains some super power productivity or an excess of free time when utilizing tools...
Some people just being able to actually scrape by BECAUSE of said tools.
Your results may vary.
Natural language is ambiguous and ChatGPT can handle that pretty well, if you want to count letters use Python or something.
If you really are staring at strings and wanting those letters counted, you can easily ask it to write you a Python, JS, Ruby program that will do so, and in my experience for a task like that it will NAIL that task perfectly 100% of the time, and can even explain how it works to boot!
Also, a friend physicist tested ChatGPT on the basics of quantum physics and he was surprised at how much it knew.
IMHO the chat is at a level of 1st year university student - of any subject available. The only issue being that it always sounds super confident, even if it's wrong.
Anthropomorphising statistical models is a bad idea...
I work mostly alone on projects, at least currently. While I have friends I can bounce back general ideas on, it‘s hard to get good feedback on a small problem that I‘d be stuck with for, let’s say, 5 minutes.
So far, the choice has been between disrupting others‘ flow (who might not even work with the tech I‘m using), or exploring the issue myself. Problem solving is certainly not a skill I want to atrophy, but figuring out framework specific intricacies is more a chore than an interesting problem. A chore I can get stuck on. And that’s where the bot often points me in the right direction.
An example: I‘m dabbling in the PETAL stack with a side project, and Ecto‘s DSL still feels foreign to me. ChatGPT is actually really good at fixing my Ecto queries and recently made the suggestion to use the „dynamic“ function. It applied the function in a slightly wrong way, but that made me read up dynamic query building, which is already bearing fruit.
I could have read all of Ecto‘s documentation and wouldn’t need the bot, but that’s out of scope right now. I‘m currently working with native iOS, Android, JS/TS (Next), Flutter, and Elixir - if I read all the documentation, I wouldn’t write any code.
Previously I'd fall back to asking in a forum and getting a (tbf) much better answer a few hours or days later, but ChatGPT may be enough to point me in the right direction in a few minutes
It wasn’t meaningful enough to spend a lot of time researching or to pay someone to solve it so I was just going to give up on it.
Asked ChatGPT and it was able to unblock me by pointing me in the right direction.
Now I have a working tool to solve a very specific problem of mine.
Entertainment is an expense.
Sure, there's wiggle room in each but in a nutshell, that's the framework.
Unless you are salaried?
1. increase productivity 2. ask for a raise 3. profit or change company
and it worked pretty good last 7 years. Certain investments in tools definitely helped with that.
I think that's the big qualifier here. The productivity paying off the price is only meaningful if your time and money are arbitrarily fungible for each other, and for most people they are not. There's a good chance they won't be able to find a way to convert that saved time into the corresponding $20+ needed to pay the bill. And if finances are tight, $20/month might be a deal breaker.
Even if you're a freelancer, if your projects have billing caps related to the number of hours you expect to work then you don't necessarily have adequate time/money fungibility. $20 a month also might not be worth the cost of going out and acquiring a new project.
It's like paying for Jetbrains IDEs. I'm a bumbling idiot writing Symfony and Wordpress code and PHPStorm is 150 Euros a year. It probably increases my productivity by that much per day.
If ChatGPT saves you more than 60 seconds a day, or makes you work more comfortable, it's easily worth $20.
I earn 2000€ per month as a C# dev in France, (assuming $1 == 1€) I just need a hundred subscriptions like that to have no money left at the end of the month. While I'll admit a 100 subs is a bit much, it's very easy to have 10 or 15.
> If ChatGPT saves you more than 60 seconds a day
Even if it saved me 4 hours a day I wouldn't be paid more.
If you really don't like using your brain to write, then why not spend a bit of money to offload some thinking to this service?
If that's not your goal that's perfectly fine, but it's a very reasonable cost for anyone driven to be more effective and earn more.
I had found a high paying job in Switzerland that was close enough but it was canceled due to Covid.
If you’re an employee then use that additional 4hrs to focus on other things.
Is this a norm in your country? Which part of France do you live in, if you don't mind me asking?
Yes, I definitely hear you. If you're living well within your means then sure. But on the other hand, a shocking number of Americans don't live within their means and are strapped with credit card debt. In those situations even a small number of instances of this kind of "oh, it's just $20 / month" reasoning start to add up.
> It probably increases my productivity by that much per day.
Again, this doesn't matter if you're on the edge of cash flow positivity and can't actually turn that productivity into dollars. Your employer isn't going to pay you $20 / month more because they can't measure your productivity with that much granularity.
You're probably right that it's a medium-term game for employees (if their employer isn't ready to pay the $20, which I assume they would be), but you will certainly be more productive and get things done quicker than others (and probably measurably so), which should give you a good spot for a promotion or negotiations. But of course, that only really works if you derive value from ChatGPT. If it's more of a "my work is easier but not faster or better", then it won't make sense.
I still cannot afford, after house, car and living expenses, to spend 20 euros a month for an AI chat app, or 150 a year for an IDE.
For reference, I do most of my work in standard vscode with almost no plugins and/or emacs, depending on what I'm doing, on the company provided dell/windows laptop. The only subscriptions, personal or work, that I pay for are netflix, spotify, xbox game pass, nintendo online and amazon prime - and we're thinking of dropping netflix and spotify lately since they're increasing prices and lowering in value.
You're absolutely getting ripped off if this a real devops specialist role (some companies use that word for manual server admins) and your employment history is not an indicator of anything. Only the market is and where are you in the salary range for a given role.
I'm an average dev from Poland (basically 1/4 GDP of Italy), working for a Polish, not international company (clients are international), having less than 10 years of documented commercial experience and I'm making about 5k EUR after taxes (converted from PLN) and I'm not even close to the cap.
At my first company I made about 500 EUR a month, and whilst the second paid me twice as much, it was still absolutely ripping me off.
I'm just a full-stack .NET + React developer working in a mid-sized city as a contractor (but that's complicated, because in Poland most companies basically evade taxes by hiring via contracts with the same benefits and responsibilities as regular employees). I work up to 40hrs a week just like a normal employee.
Just take a look at one of the many job boards and search for "devops" or my role which is ".net full-stack": https://nofluffjobs.com/pl
Most oscillate around 20k PLN gross, which is definitely a lot more than 1700 EUR. Some rates given by devs in this thread are shocking and something isn't right.
edit: This is funny just after i wrote this I've seen so many references to Poland in this thread. But yeah it's interesting as working in UK as developer in small company I was earning 2500 pounds after taxes (Liverpool). And I thought that it's a dream job back then. But it was 10 years ago. And I think I am rather average developer just on level III on 6 level scale. So right now living in Poland my wage expectation is around 6k euro as Backend Java developer.
I suffer from this. Currently paying $30/mo for midjourney but get zero value. need to go delete that sub.
Everything we spend money on has a price that is set by what we are willing to pay collectively. Just because you don't want to pay the price doesn't mean it's not the right price.
It's a bit amusing that we find any price objectionable considering this ChatGPT experience didn't even exist a few months ago!
Which isn't to say that ChatGPT fits that bill for me - I think it requires too much supervision to save time. But people are too cheap about genuinely useful tools.
It does make me more efficient which is something I do care about.
It's the opposite. A salaried developer on an agile team commits to a certain amount of work per sprint. If they can get it done in 2 hours less time, that's a net gain for the developer.
There's something to "owning" a thing. You can resell it and rent it out, etc. It's an asset. SaaS is not an asset. It's a service.
It still makes sense for me to pay because I get more value compared to if I didn't.
Reminds me of the Built to Spill lyric. “It's barely yours on loan What you think you own”
I have no issues paying for thing I can use for a long time or re-sell if it turns out not being that useful, but spending money and investing time using cloud-based tools that can be discontinued by next month, thanks but no thanks.
It’s a few thousand dollars, but I make a comfortable six figure salary, and I think it’s worth it.
"Consoom more tech hardware made in China!"
"Don't think too hard about your monthly expenditures!"
"Trust the science!!!1!"
Well you've convinced me, buddy.
I wish I could do the same with my laptop, WFH would be better, but it is against security.
Recently, I've been gasp paying for software. Open source and free tools have come a very long way, but paid tools can be better. Especially when those tools are used daily as part of the job.
The paid tools often have free usage, albeit with some limits, so they are still useful to the defaults.
For example, TablePlus vs SQL Server Studio. I'm not a DBA and most often just need to run a quick query or two to check things. In this regards, TablePlus is light years ahead. No need to load a dinosaur for that.
He's a thought experiment: imagine a device that changes the scent of the air I breathe to something I find pleasant. I could use this device all day everyday for free (or on the cheap), but I will not pay $20/mo for it. Losing access to the features really isn't worth that much. On the flip side, many people pay thousands of dollars to rent machines that helps them breathe, even if that adds up to total of less than an hour of their lives - which is nor much.
I use my keyboard everyday but I wouldn't pay $20 per month for it. In fact, I paid around $4 total for it, as paying more would bring significantly more diminishing returns.
I use my phone every day and have used it for the past 5 years with no issue, it has brought me so much value and yet, if I draw the line, it didn't even reach $20 per month (price divided by time used), not even mentioning that I expect it to last another 2-3 years, bringing the cost down even further.
What kind of crazy value would you expect something to have in order to be worth $20/mo?
If he wouldn't pay $20 a month to prevent tooth decay, he clearly is the type who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
> What kind of crazy value would you expect something to have in order to be worth $20/mo?
The implication of that is that of tootnhcare cost more than $20 a month he wouldn't do it. Which is crazy, the expected return from brushing your teeth is well above $20 a month.
if it makes you more than $20 or saves you more than $20 then it’s worth it. Simple as that. That’s it. That’s the test. For some, the time they save and spend with family is “worth” $20, for others, productivity increases don’t lead to free time, while others still don’t have $20 to spend.
Fwiw I get my teeth professionally cleaned once a month and spend more than $20 on it. Because it’s worth it to me and because dental care is expensive. Toothbrushes are cheap not because they’re worthless but because they’re undifferentiated. All toothbrushes are the same. ChatGPT… isn’t.
And I paid 220 for my phone, which easily lasts 2 years.
That said: As a self-employed programmer, I think 20$/month for increased productivity is a steal!
Are you serious? If you had to pay $20 per month to brush your teeth you would stop doing it?
This would be the fast track to dentures by the time you're 45.
Brushing your teeth takes time. If you could pay $20 p/m to get the same results from say a stick of gum (i.e., no time)...is that then worth it?
The KB "as is" makes sense. But that's a fairly generic item. Adding value / differentiation is minimal.
Phone? Maybe. Put what's your service p/m? Is one worth considering without the other?
What crazy value? At $1 per work day?? It doesn't have to be crazy. Just 5 minutes per day is breakeven (and that's generous). In many cases, ChatGPT is more helpful than the ever polluted Google SERPs. One buck a day to avoid that? With the weekends free? Perhaps not crazy value but worthy of reasonable consideration.
No, because I start the kettle (or coffeemaker, depending on what I want) before I start brushing. I brush my teeth while waiting for the kettle to boil.
I don't get that time back if I don't brush my teeth; I still have to wait for the coffee anyway.
I wouldn't pay $20 per month for a keyboard either, but I doubt that a $4 keyboard is even close to diminishing returns unless you got a really good deal. Even $100 for a decent mechanical keyboard is not much if you use it for many years.
$20 a month for ML tool that is only sometimes useful is a tough sell, especially in a world where a lot of people feel like $80 a year for IntelliJ is too much.
Coders are thrifty bastards, except when it comes to their personal vices in which case financial responsibility goes out the window...
> have found it useful for open ended programming questions
i have found it to be terrible when it comes to something simple, like constructing a regex.
curl https://api.openai.com/v1/completions \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_API_KEY" \
-d '{
"model": "code-davinci-002",
"prompt": "##### Create a regular expression to match words starting with 'dog' or ending with 'cat'.\n \n### Java Code",
"temperature": 0,
"max_tokens": 182,
"top_p": 1,
"frequency_penalty": 0,
"presence_penalty": 0,
"stop": ["###"]
}'
```java
String regex = "\\b(dog|cat)\\b";
```Wouldn’t having ‘\b’ on both sides match beginning AND end? It’s got the parenthesis for the ‘|’ in the wrong place.
The regex I was expecting would be
"\\b(dog.*)|(.*cat)\\b"
you regex will match the whole line up to cat.
https://regex101.com/r/ZNQa9X/1
The generated regex is the same as
(\bdog\b)|(\bcat\b)
I’m currently trying to figure out how to match a word starting with dog without using
\bdog.*
.*
So I was thinking I could say
\bdog[^\b]*
\b(dog\S*)|(\S*cat)\b
https://regex101.com/r/sbpy8s/1
But this matches for example
dog.cat
But I would like that it matches separately
dog
cat
Likewise, I’d want for example
dogapple-bananacat
dogapple
bananacat
\b(dog\p{L}*)|(\p{L}*cat)\b
But that does not match
dog42
What I want is a way to include everything after dog that is not \b
And likewise everything preceding cat that is not \b
Edit: I think I’ve found it after reading https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4541573/what-are-non-wor...
(\bdog\w*)|(\w*cat\b)
To me it feels like if 90% of $TASK content out there would be bad and people would struggle with it, then the AI-genrated $TASK output would be similarly flawed, be it regarding a programming language or something else.
As a silly example, consider how much bad legacy PHP code is out there and what the answers to some PHP questions could become because of that.
But it's still possible to get answers to simplistic problems reasonably fast, or at least get workable examples to then test and iterate upon, which can easily save some time.
\bdog\w\* (\bdog\w*)|(\w*cat\b)
> i have found it to be terrible when it comes to something simple, like constructing a regex.
Oh yeah, agreed. It's not good for super specific stuff like that. But more like, I write a weird loop and ask if there is a more idiomatic way to do the above. Or I just describe what I want to do and say, "list three options for accomplishing that". It's great for "feature discovery" essentially. I find it complementary to copilot.
As a reader of people's paragraphs, please don't. Stick to bullet points.
1. Person has brilliant insight
2. Insight is 3 bullet points
3. GPT expands into prose (because that's what people think people want)
4. Reader sees paragraph, thinks "Bah that's long"
5. Reader uses GPT to extract the 3 core bullet points
I can't imagine an exec wanting to or having time to read more than a few condensed bullet points. If they have questions, they'll ask.
"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR API KEY HERE"
Since the $20/month is for priority access to new features and priority access including during high-load times, not API access (a separatr offering not yet available), I don't understand the cost comparison. What you are proposing does not substitute for any part of the $20/month offering over the basic free product.
Idk why but programmers are the cheapest people on earth in regards to programming tools.
I bought Intellij idea for $400 like 12 years ago and got made fun of at work even though it made me substantially faster than eclipse.
The lack of distinction on this term plagues the English speaking world in more ways than frugal programmers. See: the entire political spectrum in the US
Suppose a new word was introduced. What would the dictionary definition be?
But to be more clear:
Free as in "gratis" is like "buy one get one free". It means something provided at no cost - ie: "They had a problem with their computer system so they gave me the salad for free"
Free as in "libre" is like "freedom", a more abstract concept about being not being restricted from something or having the right to something.
Software can be "free as in libre", ie: it's open-source. It can also be "free as in gratis" in that it costs no money. But they're different concepts, and have different implications.
Many developers want software to be "free", as in open-source, and confuse that with "I will allocate no resources towards that thing".
I particularly like the "free as in beer", which is a HIGHLY confused term, but I take it to mean: Beer itself is free - it's not patented and anyone can learn to make it. However, any individual beer is a product that took effort to produce, and thus, is not free of charge.
But you’re correct - the mainstream meaning of that term is the opposite - which I find bizarre.
We all got different brains though, shoutout learning from others perspectives, ty for sharing yours.
The quote references it because it is (or was) a cliché promotional offering.
"Free as in beer" you get something, you don't have to pay. "Free as in speech" you have the rights to do things, like modify source code.
and later
"Free as in puppies" As in you get it for free, but it's gonna cost you later. Most open source software is like this, you get it, but have to invest is using/mastering/maintaining it. Of course, you have to invest like this in paid, software as well.
I'm intrigued by ChatGPT as a work assistance tool. I have found it useful a number of times. But there's no way it's adding a contours $20/month of value to my day when I compare it to other things on which I spend my money. I'd rather just not have it than spend that much.
$20 one time fee? Maybe. $20/mo? Not at all.
This is no different than streaming media services. There are streaming apps where I'd like to see their content, but not the rate they charge I don't find worth the value. So I don't subscribe.
It probably reduced my work stress by 20% so this was incredibly cheap. And even then I used that license for 2 years, so it was really 75 cents a day. Developers will spend $5 on a bagel but not $5 a day for tools, it's pretty wild
That's because savings-due-to-tools don't scale but rental does.
I can all but guarantee that you're using, daily, some tool that is free. Why aren't you paying $5 a day for it?
You've gotten more value out of bash, grep and related tools than IntelliJ is ever worth to you, and yet if I came up to you and said "here, use my replacement grep, bash, etc for only $5/day" you'd laugh.
Developers who aren't using the expensive tools aren't cheapskate like you assume; they're simply too tired to want or need another rental, because the marginal increase in time savings won't be noticed by them.
Because nobody has been crafty enough to capitalize on that market, or is unable to provide a sufficiently convincing alternative that would attract people to it.
For example, I can get by with something like mRemoteNG for tabbed SSH sessions: https://mremoteng.org/
It's kind of quirky but works. Someone else might appreciate something like the excellent MobaXTerm more, which adds multi-execution capabilities, a GUI for port forwarding and much more: https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/
Sometimes free tools also become paid, see Docker Desktop (for business) or something like Lens: both are proof that, it feeling like a rug pull aside, many people will pay for what even was formerly a free tool.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, you have developers that can't capitalize on their software and the projects aren't sustainable: https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html
On a more positive note, this is why Open collective, GitHub Sponsors and other crowd funding solutions are nice, since now you can throw money towards whatever projects you support and think deserve to exist.
> You've gotten more value out of bash, grep and related tools than IntelliJ is ever worth to you, and yet if I came up to you and said "here, use my replacement grep, bash, etc for only $5/day" you'd laugh.
Someone might laugh, but there's a project out there that attempts to commercially create a terminal replacement: https://www.warp.dev/
Many would find the idea offensive (such a core part of their interaction with the computer having paid aspects), but that's just the world that we live in. Not all IDEs are free. Not all OSes are free. You don't even own software nowadays, more often you just rent it. If there is profit to be made, someone will make it.
I think that the free software movement has its nice aspects, but people will absolutely pay for whatever makes their lives easier or more pleasant.
> It's kind of quirky but works. Someone else might appreciate something like the excellent MobaXTerm more, which adds multi-execution capabilities, a GUI for port forwarding and much more: https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/
...
> Someone might laugh, but there's a project out there that attempts to commercially create a terminal replacement: https://www.warp.dev/
But here's the rub - all those people whining about how cheapskate developers are because they don't want to shell out $5/day for ChatGPT/IntelliJ/Whatever aren't deriding people who are not using these paid for replacements.
It's only ever the people using IDEA or Visual Studio or similar who develop superiority complexes over their choice of rentals.
I mean, $5/day to save my employer (not me) 5m/day is a good deal for my employer. I, however, don't get the value of that 5m[1].
[1] Which is why I pay for the IDEA IDE in my personal capacity even though I won't use it at work. Because if they save 5m/day, I get that time saved. Luckily my current (and last three or four) employers had no hesitation in purchasing software we wanted, so I never had to use it at work.
> It's only ever the people using IDEA or Visual Studio or similar who develop superiority complexes over their choice of rentals.
Hmm, that's an interesting point, though I feel that sometimes we forget two aspects of software development (or also game development, to take a popular hobby as an example as well):
- developing software (and games, too) is hard and takes a lot of time and resources of all kinds, more so than most people realize
- many of these projects are only ever profitable (or even sustainable) because of being able to attract large audiences
It's more visible when you see post-mortems about how much indie creators struggle even if the projects themselves are well made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUsuusNLxik (first example that jumped in mind), though I'm sure that it happens to a lot of startups out there as well, that end up folding.
With that in mind, I can almost understand why people would be a bit upset that a demographic that's generally reasonably well off (developers) scoff at products that seem reasonably priced, especially when considering how much work has gone into them. Though personally, I think a bit more kindness could go around even then.
Organizations being too spending-conservative and not wanting to invest into tools that would both improve productivity and reduce stress is just puzzling (if you don't just explain it with ignorance, or greed).
And? You have 400$ less than them.
I'm working on a product with this capability, plus a lot more including cross-app contextual support and developer extensibility.
If anyone is excited about this kind of embedded-in-your-workflow integration of AI tools I'd love to chat! (email in profile)
I prefer to use clipboard as the exchange place. I select text, copy it, then query the service. Once the query completes I can see the answer in popup and can paste it to my current editing place.
This is the code:
local hyper = {"cmd", "alt", "ctrl"}
hs.hotkey.bind(hyper, "Y", function()
local url = "https://api.openai.com/v1/completions"
local api_key = "..."
local headers = {
authorization="Bearer " .. api_key,
["content-type"]="application/json",
accept="application/json"
}
-- hs.eventtap.keyStroke({"cmd"}, "c")
local message = hs.pasteboard.readString()
local data = {
prompt=message,
model="text-davinci-003",
max_tokens=32,
temperature=0
}
hs.notify.new({title="OpenAI query", informativeText=message}):send()
hs.http.asyncPost(url, hs.json.encode(data), headers, function(status, body, headers)
local response = hs.json.decode(body)
local answer = response["choices"][1]["text"]
print(body)
hs.notify.new({title="OpenAI response", informativeText=answer}):send()
hs.pasteboard.writeObjects(answer)
-- hs.eventtap.keyStroke({"cmd"}, "v")
end)
end)What is unexpected is the ability to perform highly in a multitude of tasks it was never trained for, like answering questions or writing code.
I suppose we can say we basically don't understand what the f* is going on with GPT-3 emergent abilities, but hey, if we can make it even better at those tasks like they did with chatGPT, sign me in.
Is not that the AI is too dumb, it's that my computer now can write me code I'd take one hour to Google and check and test. Now I ask, ask for corrections, test the answer and voila, my productivity just went through the roof.
So, my point is: don't believe (or be mad about) the hype from people that don't understand what curious marvel we got in front of us, just see how you can use it.
It's like an employee, but for $20/month.
It strikes le that most people don't see that as fundamentally problematic.
Caution is always required.
TypeError: undefined is not an object (evaluating 'data.choices[0]')
I’ve consistently found that Google returns similar results. The only difference is that if it’s a longer snippet I need to click into the website, but even then, it’s usually faster than chatGPT.
I think it absolutely worth 20 bucks/month. It's an absolute helpful tool. To write text, but as I discovered yesterday, to write code. Over a long chat with many iterations, you can produce code,test code or pseudo code. I used yesterday in a meeting with some colleagues, while discussing a new feature. The code produced after our initial spec was pretty good to make sure we all understood what we wanted.
I was surprised at first, but I notice you're GPT-3 model, not chatGPT (no API so far)
Continue, starting from:
last line of output
Here is the javascript if anyone wants to do something similar. I don't know JS really, so I'm sure it could be improved. But it seems to work fine. You can add your own hard coded prompt if you want even.