I've been using ChatGPT pretty consistently during the workday and have found it useful for open ended programming questions, "cleaning up" rough bullet points into a coherent paragraph of text, etc. $20/month useful is questionable though, especially with all the filters. My "in between" solution has been to configure BetterTouchTool (Mac App) with a hotkey for "Transform & Replace Selection with Javascript". This is intended for doing text transforms, but putting an API call instead seems to work fine. I highlight some text, usually just an open ended "prompt" I typed in the IDE, or Notes app, or an email body, hit the hotkey, and ~1s later it adds the answer underneath. This works...surprisingly well. It feels almost native to the OS. And it's cheaper than $20/month, assuming you aren't feeding it massive documents worth of text or expecting paragraphs in response. I've been averaging like 2-10c a day, depending on use.
Here is the javascript if anyone wants to do something similar. I don't know JS really, so I'm sure it could be improved. But it seems to work fine. You can add your own hard coded prompt if you want even.
async (clipboardContentString) => {
try {
const response = await fetch("https://api.openai.com/v1/completions", {
method: "POST",
headers: {
"Content-Type": "application/json",
"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR API KEY HERE"
},
body: JSON.stringify({
model: "text-davinci-003",
prompt: `${clipboardContentString}.`,
temperature: 0,
max_tokens: 256
})
});
const data = await response.json();
const text = data.choices[0].text;
return `${clipboardContentString} ${text}`;
} catch (error) {
return "Error"
}
}
You use it consistently during the workday and it's still not worth $20/mo?
This is one of those puzzling things to me.
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.
I think there's also an argument to be made that $20 per month is a bigger deal than some people realise. The issue isn't just _that one_ specific subscription you're paying for. The issue is how they all accumulate over time.. and eventually you find that your metaphorical bucket of money has turned into a leaky sieve. Not to mention all the services you forget to unsubscribe from even though they've ceased to provide enough value to you to make them worth while.
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.
I think the monitor example is different from the ChatGPT example.
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.
The issue is once you buy a monitor for your work, they're then getting to rent it for free. If you need something to do your job better than they need to pay for it. You hurt yourself (financially) and you are contributing to a workplace culture where employees buy what they need. It's not just a monitor you're paying for!
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.
> why not spend your own money for the things that make you and your life better?
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.
You own that monitor. Would you pay $20/month to rent that monitor with the potential for price increases and ads popping up on it occasionally?
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.
When I worked at Amazon I brought my own monitor and chair. When I was leaving I put monitor on the chair and rolled it through security and loaded it into my car. Nobody asked a question, I’m still surprised many years later that security seeing somebody removing furniture and equipment from the building just shrugged at it :)
I’ve always brought my chair, monitor and keyboard to office. But I found ChatGPT to be inconsistent for programming tasks, sometimes it’s just wasting my time.
The question isn't really if $20 is worth it, the question is can you get 90% of the way there for much less? It sounds like he found a way, and of course he's going to do that.
In normal company, they will buy you a custom setup without problem.
There's a big difference between a monitor that you pay and own for many years, and a $20 monthly subscription though. It's going to be really quickly much more expensive than a monitor …
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.
Greek vs Roman work environment. The Greeks expected the craftsman to show up with his compliment of tools, sharpened and maintained. The Romans provided the bench, tools, and ensured they were sharp each morning before arrival of the worker. Both cultures produced marvels of design and construction.
I want a 5K 27 inch monitor but they aren’t affordable sans getting an iMac. I did buy my own 28” 4K (and we got my wife a nice 24” 4K) for work, but these are fairly affordable.
I wish I could do the same with my laptop, WFH would be better, but it is against security.
I buy my own laptop for work. Work will give me a good one, but I want a GREAT one. It’s the one tool I need to do my job, and I’ll be using it over 40 hours a week.
It’s a few thousand dollars, but I make a comfortable six figure salary, and I think it’s worth it.
I've been lucky to be working remotely, but if I ever go back into the office, I'll be bringing my own gear just like you.
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 IS spending his own money on something he finds useful-- the OpenAI API. NOT ChatGPT. He gets greater use out of the service, as the API isn't limited in its output the way ChatGPT is (no content filters), AND it's cheaper. Did you even read his comment>?
"Pay the billion dollar companies for solving problems that they created!"
"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'm the opposite. I was using my laptop's build-in screen for months. My manager had to remind at every 1:1 for months to buy a monitor until I finally did.
Also that $20 should be tax deductable
No. I'm a salaried employee. Marginal time/effort savings do not directly translate into more money for me. But the $20 charge hits my bank account today. Perhaps if I use it consistently enough and in smart enough ways I will be perceived to be a more valuable/productive employee, which might translate to a raise. But that's a lot of maybes. I'm sure it will get to that point eventually, but by then the value will be undeniable and my employer will pay for the subscription. Until then, I will continue to use the free version, or pay-per-use with the API, or just use google.
A cool trick is to go to system preferences and reduce cursor speed to the lowest possible. This way you make sure you're not working faster than what you're paid for.
If you outperform your peers and get a raise just 6 months sooner that pays for itself.
No. I'm a salaried employee. Marginal time/effort savings do not directly translate into more money for me.
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.
Can you ask your boss to expense it?
I use my toothbrush every day but I wouldn't pay $20 per month for it.
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?
I even thought $20/month is such a cheap option. You articulated very well that $20 is indeed a lot despite something being useful everyday. It's time to revisit all my monthly $10 subscriptions and see how much they are actually delivering reasonable value.
Devil's Advocate here...
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.
> 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 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.
the cost of your phone plus the call/text/data plan is less than $20/month?
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> I use my toothbrush every day but I wouldn't pay $20 per month for it.
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.
People are so cheap it's ridiculous. If we ever get past people being unwilling to pay for software beyond rates of 1 cent per hour tech will blow up to 10x as big as it is right now.
Alternatively, people are tired of paying subscriptions for everything. And many SaaS actively mislead on price and employ dark patterns to make canceling difficult. It's often not worth the hassle.
Think of all the different software and tools you use daily and consider how much you would pay if they were all $20/month subscriptions. Using something daily also says nothing about the value it provides - maybe there is only marginal utility over the next best option but being free makes it worth it. SAAS vendors are so greedy it's ridiculous.
People are also delusional
This is hacker news, a title that includes breaking the rules. Should almost be a matter of pride to get it for less than $20..
> Should almost be a matter of pride to get it for less than $20.
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.
Is it surprisingly? Value is not determined by frequency of use, but by the qualitative difference: if gp doesn't use it at all, would anything of value be lost?
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 pay $80 a year for IntelliJ and that works out to waaay less than something like CoPilot or ChatGPT and is waaay more consistently useful.
$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...
Right? $1/workday and you still get to use it evenings and weekends. No wonder b2b is the way.
I would think the big issue here is that they still make a ton of money off of you by selling your data. Any Software as Service is deeply flawed because it is pretty much guaranteed to extract as much data from the consumer as possible. In this case, it is quite a bit worse, because it's likely close to your entire content or body of work that they will take. So unless it becomes something that runs locally and has no networking component to it whatsoever, it's not going to be worth spending money on for many people or companies.
They seem to be getting good results using the paid API that has fewer restrictions, and have a neat integration with their workflow.
One dollar per day? If it saves you less than 5 minutes...it's paid for.
The absurdity of OPs comment cannot be understated.
Shhh, I'm his boss and have convinced him he's making a good salary at 25 cents per hour.
He deserves to be paid for his work, other people not as much.
Considering the cost of the API, no. It's not.
Nice, I'm the developer of BetterTouchTool and I'll definitely use this one myself :-)
Thanks for the great app man! You may not have even realized this, but this was randomly crashing only a few versions ago, and you just recently pushed an update that did something to the Replace w/ Javascript functionality that fixed it. Was super pleasantly surprised to have found that overnight the problem was solved without even having to submit a bug report.
I was shown BTT 10 years ago and to this day I still use it. Thank you for making Mac a better place.
Heaping on the praise, use this tool every day, for years, on every mac I've had. Best 15 quid spent
Another happy user here. BetterTouchTool [1] is a must-install on any new Mac for me. I have so many keyboard customizations that it's hard to live without. Thanks for such a great piece of software!
[1] https://folivora.ai/
Thank you so so so much for this tool, it’s always the first install on a new mac for me!
using BTT since discovered in 2016 and it's essential. Time for a lifetime with a new version, there a lot of things how you can make Mac more pleasant for your use. Thank you for the app!
That code didn’t work for me mind giving a better example?
> And it's cheaper than $20/month,
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.
He's a programmer. They re cheaper than scrooge. They'll write a tool themselves in 6 months rather than spend 10 dollars.
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.
Oh right. A bunch of "new features" with exactly zero explanation as to what they are and "priority access" when the API responds nearly instantaneously. But keep drinking that kool aid to justify your $20 purchase.
The API already still works in peak times. That's not exclusive to this offer!
ChatGPT struggles with out-of-distribution problems. However, it excels at solving problems that have already been solved on the internet/GitHub. By connecting different contexts, ChatGPT can provide a ready solution in just a few seconds, saving you the time and effort of piecing together answers from various sources. But when you have a problem that can't be found on Google, even if it's a simple one-liner or one function, then in my experience ChatGPT will often produce an incorrect solution. If you point out what's wrong, it will acknowledge the error and then provide another incorrect answer.
This is the expected behavior. It's a language model trained to predict the next word (part of words actually) after all.
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.
$20/month is too much? When I filled in the "pro" survey, I said I'd pay $200/month. This thing is a cheap-as-hell technical writer, fact checker, information cruncher, and more.
It's like an employee, but for $20/month.
I agree that it's very useful, but I'd be careful about "fact checker". GPT is perfectly happy to confirm falsehoods as facts and hallucinate convincing lies. A good fact checker verifies from multiple sources and uses critical thinking, neither of which ChatGPT can do.
Wow, I just implemented this in BTT and it's amazing how quickly it's become an indispensable tool. Just highlight any text I type and get the "answer" to it. Thanks for the tip!
> "cleaning up" rough bullet points into a coherent paragraph of text
As a reader of people's paragraphs, please don't. Stick to bullet points.
I'm sure you can have ChatGPT turn a paragraph into bullet points for you. Repeating that n times would be an interesting variation on the game of Telephone.
> model: "text-davinci-003"
I was surprised at first, but I notice you're using GPT-3 model, not chatGPT (no API so far)
I'm not convinced that there's any substantial difference between the two.
i used the same API but for an ios shortcut. it's not the same thing as chatgpt, as the completions api doesn't know about context. but it does feel a lot snappier.
> 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.
Try asking code-davinci-002 instead of text-davinci-003.
This returned:WYDM exactly by iOS shortcut? I use a Mac but only an android phone. Do you mean for mobile usage?
> 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.
Yes, we want everything for free /s
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.
(Self promotion, sorry!)
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)
Some reason, this code doesn't work. I cleaned up the 's and have a api key. It says
TypeError: undefined is not an object (evaluating 'data.choices[0]')
Is ok I got it fixed, by asking chatgpt to write me some new code.
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Does anyone know if this can be done in other macOS automation apps too? (like Keyboard Maestro, Hammerspoon, Raycast, Alfred, ...)
Of course. I use this in Hammerspoon. The API call is simply in Lua.
20 is definitely questionable especially considering competition is coming right around the corner.
Obviously, they'll start charging for the API - and probably in such a way that your use will cost > $20
It seems worth it if you find it helpful enough to use it on a daily basis.
Note it's actually:
"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR API KEY HERE"
Yep, good catch. I'll edit the post to include so nobody gets confused.
is there a different or free app to use instead of BetterTouchTool just to highlight text and run it through an API and reinsert?
Is there any advantage to this over copilot?
Also note that this is GPT-3, not ChatGPT.
Have you been able to find uses for chatGPT where it’s better than the top result in Google?
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.
My only issue is that GPT training set is locked like 1-2 years ago. I often find myself looking for recent stuff in Google.