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.
Sure, but with some things, the increase in productivity pays off the price easily - you end up earning more, or working way less.
$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.
> especially when you're a freelancer
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.
But for anyone in IT or related fields? $20/month feels like a nobrainer if you're in the West.
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.
> $20/month feels like a nobrainer if you're in the West.
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 ChatGPT saved you 4 hours a day, you could be less stressed and have more time to do other stuff like exercise
No I would still have to sit at work waiting for the clock to be at the right time to be allowed to leave.
You're not part of the target market, then. Think of it like any other recurring service, e.g., pickup/drop off laundry. It costs way more than doing laundry at the neighborhood laundromat and doesn't save very much time, maybe a couple hours a week. But, if you don't enjoy doing laundry, and you don't have an in-unit washer dryer, it may be worth it.
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?
My point was that I'm not a rarity, not everybody makes 100k+ a year even in the "West", there are a lot of people like me that have to watch carefully what they spend.
You're severely underpaid, juniors with 1 year experience can get more in Poland after tax.
I have 14 years experience, same job. But as I said in another comment I have aging parents that I have to take care of and I live in a small town without opportunities.
I had found a high paying job in Switzerland that was close enough but it was canceled due to Covid.
Well, I'm talking about remote jobs which are absolutely prevalent here, so where you live does not matter.
2000€ per month? In France? That's slightly less than software devs earn in Poland, with way lower living costs!
Is this a norm in your country? Which part of France do you live in, if you don't mind me asking?
I live in Belfort in eastern France near the Swiss and German border. It's a small town, there's not many opportunities here but I have aging parents I have to take care of so I can't move.
And you decided to not work remotely and 10x your income instantly, because you'd miss your office and colleagues. Got it!
If it saved you 4hrs/day you could serve more clients if you we’re working as freelancer and therefor more than offset the cost.
If you’re an employee then use that additional 4hrs to focus on other things.
Everything is relative. I'm in IT - in fact in a decently high paying and relevant part of it, being a devops specialist - in the West (in Italy) and I make ~1700 euros a month, and this is with 10 years of experience in the sector. I'm not getting ripped off, this is by far the highest salary I've had and I make about as much as my parents do after working for 45 years.
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.
So you making only 1700 euros a month? Sorry I think you are getting ripped off, as a programmer in Poland/Warsaw you would make around 5k+ euros per month. Change you work you are worth much more.
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'm not getting ripped off, this is by far the highest salary I've had and I make about as much as my parents do after working for 45 years.
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.
You’re making 2.5x the UK average salary. That’s not what happens to an average dev in an average role here; are you a consultant or doing 100 hour weeks or have expertise in some specialist field?
The general average salary is low everywhere as most jobs don't require any kind of "higher" education, so of course devs earn more. I'm earning 4-5x of Poland's average but that's meaningless. I sure as heck don't earn more than an average UK dev, because I've worked with some of them and I know their rates.
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. 1700 EUR net (i hope net) would be 8k PLN which is about what my car mechanic friend without a degree earns in my city... and what I earned 1 year after my degree. It's perfectly fine to begin with, but we're talking about 10+ years of experience and that's baffling.
> But for anyone in IT or related fields? $20/month feels like a nobrainer if you're in the West.
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.
I see what you mean, but I wouldn't compare $20 for work to e.g. $20 for Netflix Pro Gold Premium; it's business vs entertainment.
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.
For me, ChatGPT also has a psychological benefit. It makes me feel like there’s someone that I can fall back on when I‘m stuck. It might be wrong (often the bot is not super helpful), but this is not about rationality.
I'm finding ChatGPT may be wrong, but it's answers are often enough to point me in the right direction - particularly when I'm working in a new domain where I'm not yet experienced enough to be able to ask google the right questions.
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
I had this happen then I was stuck on a small side project that was slightly out of my wheelhouse.
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.
If I'm at work and stuck on a problem I can hardly afford to wait around for a few days to be unblocked by a lucky forum answer.
Well put, it’s really similar for me.
You should probably not be thinking about it in that way.
Anthropomorphising statistical models is a bad idea...
Oh I‘m not antropomorphising. It feels more like a GPS - a tool I wouldn’t like to be without when driving unknown places.
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.
You meant "something to fall back on" instead of "someone". If you write it like that suddenly you're not anthropomorphizing anymore =)
I agree, I noticed this too late. Apologies to GP
We are anthropomorphizing NPCs in video games for decades - it's ok.
Yeah, they hate it.
Tools are an investment.
Entertainment is an expense.
Sure, there's wiggle room in each but in a nutshell, that's the framework.
> you end up earning more, or working way less.
Unless you are salaried?
Still might be worth it. My strategy for getting "raises" always was:
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.
>>you end up earning more, or working way less.
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.
Indeed. People in developing countries might learn what the public school system should have taught them, with a free private tutor that is ChatGPT or similar.
ChatGPT can't even reliably tell how many times a letter is in a word. I doubt it will be a reliable tutor
The ability to tell letter occurrence in a word is not a good measure for the quality of a large language model.
Anecdotally, it's less reliable when it comes to verifiable fact; but highly useful for brainstorming and sussing out creative solution.
Your results may vary.
That, and the thousands of numbskulls who waste their time trying to get ChatGPT to do math problems that a $1 calculator (or worst case, free Google Sheets) could do, is the most pointless waste of computing power, and I say this as someone who remembers Flash ads.
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!
If a tutor tried to teach how to count letters instead of a useful skill I'd fire them.
Natural language is ambiguous and ChatGPT can handle that pretty well, if you want to count letters use Python or something.
When I tested it on subjects I knew, it gave better answers than teachers in my high school (Poland, but I guess it might be similar elsewhere in the West)
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.
The public school system in my country still teaches that the tongue has areas sensitive to specific tastes.
Let's say you make $10 / hr. To break even, a $20 tool needs to save you 2h a month. Divided over 20 workdays and it must save you 6m per day. If a tool can't save you 10-15m per day, it doesn't deserve a "throughout the day" slot IMHO.
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.
For me problem with many tools is subscription model, not that I have to pay. You build your workflow around a few subscription tools, then something bad happens. You need to cut expenses. Apart from shitty situation in general, your workflow falls apart and you're unhappy about lowered standard of living, making it more probable to further worsen your life. It simply feels bad.
That works out if you are a freelancer. Otherwise the $20 comes out of your pocket, and the productivity gains go to your employer.
The monetary aspect doesn't apply for many (most?) freelancers either. I work and bill the same amount of time every day regardless of how much I achieved. Brain fog day is worth the same as an uninterrupted flow day.
It does make me more efficient which is something I do care about.
If you're paid by the hour like that, doesn't saving 2 hours per week mean you are getting paid $20 less per week?
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.
If anyone on this site working as a Dev is making 10/hr I question whether they can even navigate to the ChatGPT website by themselves in the first place. At a real number like 50/hr you only need to save 1.2 minutes per working day for it to break even. Which is trivially easy. You could save that by having ChatGPT write your emails for you alone.
When I tack on subscriptions I review other ones I cannot justify since you only consume so many services at once right? Then I cancel accordingly.
That's a good idea and probably a healthy habit to build! I might try and start doing that..
>>all the services you forget to unsubscribe from even though they've ceased to provide enough value to you to make them worth while.
I suffer from this. Currently paying $30/mo for midjourney but get zero value. need to go delete that sub.
On a website where the majority of people are SWEs living in HCOL areas where their daily lunch and coffee is probably $20+ the argument against a $1/day productivity tool seems lacking.
> The issue is how they all accumulate over time
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!
With tillerhq.com, you can set up a pretty nice workflow to review your spending daily, weekly, or whatever cadence makes sense to you across all of your accounts, and it's only $79/year! :)
Why not just put all the subscriptions on one credit card and I dunno, spend 5 minutes at the end of the month reviewing the credit card statement to cancel subscriptions?
You are using a service, that must pay for infrastructure and personnel. How do you think a on-off purchase would cover it. Your salary you want every month on your account, but for the others, nah, not so important
except this is $20 a month with the expectation that it’s saving you time. it’s fundamentally different from say, netflix, where you pay for it and have to give it your time
If it saves my time working, it doesn't mean I get to spend that else where though. Just more work.
don’t… don’t let them know you are more productive, instead post more here
> How I went from working 40h/w to 38w/h, making the same money (medium.com)
You must have no deadlines.
Alternatively, they have far more work allocated than time saved would exceed.
And how much is it in your local currency that you’re getting paid for.
Well said
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.
This is how I'm thinking about it. If I save an hour a week, will I really clock out at 4PM on Friday and say "in the counterfactual world without ChatGPT, I would still be working, so I'm free to clock out now". No, probably not. Will I work on another task for extra hour to productivity-maxx? Also, probably not. Probably the rest of my tasks will magically expand to fill that time. Or I will spend it fiddling around with something else of dubious value. There's a whole psychological element to it. If I was a perfect min/max-er and allocated my time perfectly based on ROI, I would probably already be a millionaire by some other means.
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.
Those are great arguments against everything that could make a persons job easier and increase their productivity.
No, and it's a bit frustrating when several people explain in great detail the components of a programming day and how they combine and what the combination tendency is and then someone comes back with the same "but mah productivity". It's also typical for a certain mindset, of course.
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.
> versus my API-hacky-solution for $2, versus ChatGPT free, for $0.
Haha, exactly my thoughts (https://github.com/rikhuijzer/ata). Davinci is nicer (more succinct) than ChatGPT anyway.
> there's no guarantee that a code generator will make my life more pleasant - the time saved typing may be absorbed by meetings
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?
Seems to me like ChatGPT could assist you in the "thinking deeply" part just as much (or more) as it could help you do rote typing tasks. Or do you think your creativity is beyond its abilities?
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.
I don't care what they're getting as much as I care about what I'm getting.
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?
Fair enough! I don't fully agree but it's a matter of opinion ultimately. Was just answering your question as I see it.
I haven't worked in an office in years, but in my case it's travel. The company has travel policies that are what they are. If I'm going to spend my own money and points to upgrade to travel that is outside of policy, well I'll do that. I might object if company policy were to travel baggage-class but it's really not. So I'll pay out-of-pocket here and there.
For a while it was company policy that all international flights had to be business class.
It all got restricted due to covid, and I doubt they’re going back :/
I wouldn't mind getting fired if I worked for a corporation that can't even provide proper screens for employees. Not getting equipment from employer is only acceptable for startups low on cash.
Especially when you can get half decent 120hz ones for like $400-$600 now. If they can't pony up for that then there's a lot more to the story or they are going to be a pain in the rear to deal with whenever you need resoures.
There's sometimes more to the story.
Another lesson from my career: No place is perfect. Don't make simplistic judgements.
I didn't say there can't more to the story, but I'm not going to just assume they always have a good reason either. It's not a simplistic judgment, it's simply working with the information I have on hand. If they have a good reason for not giving me the resources I need to do my job better than I'm all ears. I sincerely mean that. Maybe they can't get me the $3000 thing I want, but a $1500 one instead that is a suitable compromise. That being said I'm not just going to hear "no" and then buy what I think I need for the company.
I've done a lot of work in nonprofits, education, and government domains, and this can be a bit cumbersome. My experience is that in most cases, this comes down to administrative or bureaucratic issues which make sense on an organizational level, but very little sense on an individual contributor level.
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.
I was a freelancer/production company owner for a decade. I worked with plenty of non-profits and such. I actually am very sympathetic to the many reasons their hands can be tied. I assure you this is not a lack of imagination or understanding.
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.
I think you're failing to make a distinction between equipment that is critical to your job and equipment that simply helps you by making it more enjoyable and comfortable. Yes, the company should buy the equipment that is critical. Could I actually do my job on a 19" monitor? Yes, absolutely. Could I do it at a desk with no personal effects or decorations? Yes, absolutely. Both the monitor upgrade and pictures of my kids are things that are worth the expense to me to make the job more enjoyable. Would it be nice if the company sprang for enormous monitors for everyone? Yes indeed, that would be something to applaud. Is it necessary? No.
My Red wasn't critical and they had a crappy camera on-hand so it's not like I couldn't have done the job, just so we are clear. I don't need my lights, or my primes, or any of my stuff. They had the very bare minimum. But it was garbage so I negotiated accordingly. And we all won in the end!
Negotiating an increased salary for the use of your capitalized equipment is a terrible use of resources. The fact that they agreed to that tells me that they detected it was a touchy subject for you and went the appeasement rout. If they cared about the equipment they would have preferred to purchase/finance it or lease it.
>The fact that they agreed to that tells me that they detected it was a touchy subject for you and went the appeasement rout.
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.
I also think a big factor is what kind of equipment we're talking about. If you expect the equipment's value to be impacted by the use, as your "my gear isn't there for them to joyride" comment touches on, this is a bigger issue. I would never use my personal computer (or expensive camera equipment) for work without some sort of compensation because that usage implies a certain amount of deterioration (physical wear/damage) and/or compromise (corporate software/policies imposed on my machine). This seems pretty negligible for a monitor.
I'm confused what you were disagreeing with me about then tbh. Sure you can argue a monitor doesn't rise to that level but clearly we agree that there is some line here, even if we don't agree on where it is.
Was I disagreeing with you? I don't think so. I was just making a distinction between the use cases since you objected to the monitor purchase by comparing it to the use of your camera.
Depends. With stuff like mice and keyboards it's really not worth bothering anyone, in my opinion. Those are personal preferences.
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
> you are contributing to a workplace culture where employees buy what they need
This is nevertheless a great point. This culture is coming if it isn't here already especially when you add WFH to the mix
I’ve stuck to my guns a little more lately with WFH. When they want something done on a certain time table, if there’s some resource I know that they failed to get me and need, I remind them that it’s going to take longer because I don’t have ______ when they ask “why?”
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Also, a better monitor can improve my job performance which can lead to better reviews! Working effectively is important to your own bottom line.
> - It can preclude opportunities for learning and even teach you entirely false things under the guise they are true
An example? The OP was talking about purchasing a monitor/keyboard/mouse.
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.
I pay more than that for electricity and fuel. It's not strictly renting and there are no ad pop-ups, but it's a recurring expenditure and prices can (and did) increase. Once I use it, it's gone - I can't resell or rent it either.
It still makes sense for me to pay because I get more value compared to if I didn't.
I would gladly pay $20/mo for a high quality monitor service that randomly stopped by and improved the display on my desk periodically.
Reminds me of the Built to Spill lyric. “It's barely yours on loan What you think you own”
He/She owns the monitor. But the resale is instantly 10-20% of the purchase price once opened. So we're sinking money very fast either way - through owning or "renting".
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 :)
At another FAANG people would regularly tote around Mac Pros, monitors, or full desktop towers, including packing them in their car to work from home for a day or two. Security sees so many things, that just not looking suspicious (even without a badge) is often enough.
> 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 :)
Not wanting to spoil it, I’ll just say that if you haven’t seen this show then you’re in for good laugh:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=8d-bM-Whsmk
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.
In my experience most have standard equipment and some are so cost-driven they'll do anything to avoid any outlay whatsoever.
Spending $10k/month on your salary is fine, a 25k yearly bonus, no problem, but god forbid they’d need to make a one-off $5k purchase.
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.
Connecting a screen is against security? Or procuring your own 28” laptop is?
The screen is fine, but connecting doing work with something other than the company issued laptop isn't allowed. It isn't really that bad in the winter, but in the summer the fan will go off a lot, a desktop would be quiter, and I would have room for a second large monitor (right now I'm at one large monitory + 16" laptop screen).
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.
Screw that. The employer wants me to dig trenches? They provide me with a shovel. The employer wants me to do computer work? They provide me with a computer. Quality of my work will be directly proportional to quality of the tool.
This is increasingly less feasible with fleet managed corporate devices.
You can let your personal laptop be managed, but it’d kinda be a waste of money right?
Quite often there's simply no profile for certain hardware/software configurations. And yes, good luck resuscitating it once it was bricked one Friday with a surprise lay-off.
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.
I'm a TablePlus fan as well, it's soooo good.
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.
Or as you used a non sanctioned tool in a corporate environment with murkiness around IP and copyright and quite likely exposed confidential information to a 3rd party you get disciplined or fired.
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.
There's a lot of people who have cheated in life an not been punished for it. Many people just get promoted.
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.
Yep sorry I wasn’t thinking of chatgpt specifically when I wrote that so much as AI assistants in general. Def everything you said need to be considered.
Not if you ask first.
The odds that this will be the difference all other variables held the same strike me as unlikely. I've used it a lot for programming in my personal time and get where he's coming from. It's fun and cool but didn't spike my effectiveness at programming enough vs. just googling things that I'd expect it to be noticable when reviews come around
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.
Most jobs require you to be available for 8 hours. So you can't work hyper productively and then quit for the day at 2PM. You need to show up for the 4PM meeting as well as the continuous storm of incoming chats.
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.
For people that are hyper competitive and ambitious, it's a way to tackle more and bigger challenges. Fine.
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.
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.
> 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.
The older I get the more I feel it doesn’t really matter. Somehow we’re all getting paid healthy salaries for playing office all day..
You don't need to complete the work. Your employer needs you to complete the work. If your employer gives you tools that make you work less optimally, they get less optimal work in return.
Exactly. It's entirely employer's responsibility to provide tools and equipment for the work, except perhaps stuff that you can keep, like tables, chairs and screens for home office. Only freelancers/entrepreneurs should pay for something like ChatGPT with their own money.
Can you ask your boss to expense it?
Maybe! They already expense Copilot, so I don't think it would be too out of bounds. I haven't asked yet, considering this just came out today. I'm guessing they will allow it, the marginal ROI calculation actually makes sense from an employer perspective.
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.
It could be cheap, or you could be too willing to part with your money.
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.
I was under the impression that teeth should only be professionally cleaned every 6 months
This guy is a fool and doesn't have a good system for evaluating value.
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.
Which toothbrush is so much better than a regular one that it would be the difference between tooth decay or not? It's mostly up to how often you brush and floss, not how many LED's your toothbrush has.
You have misread his comment. Look at the last bit:
> 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.
I think you have misread my comment. A regular toothbrush + toothpaste costs pennies a day, add floss and mouthwash and it would still not reach $20/month. If I can take care of my teeth by using all of those costing so little, what on Earth would I gain by paying more?
At least you understood my comment.
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.
> 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?
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 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.
But I don't need a mechanical keyboard when a standard cheap one works just as fine. What would I possibly gain from paying more?
If you really think you won't get anything out of it then no it does not make sense. I can only speak for myself, but I prefer the feel of my current keyboard over any I had previously. If you happen to be fine with the rubber dome response then sure, but mechanical has a much wider range of options. I also find it easier to clean (by taking off the keycaps) and more resistant to liquid splashes (collects under the keycaps and doesn't tend to get into the actual switches unlike my previous rubber dome keyboard where any water getting into the caps meant having to take it apart and drying the rubber layers before you could use it). But those points aren't something a cheaper keyboard couldn't inherently manage as well.
the cost of your phone plus the call/text/data plan is less than $20/month?
Yep, easy. I pay 8€/month for 3GB, which is plenty since I'm connected to Wifi most of the time.
And I paid 220 for my phone, which easily lasts 2 years.
That said: As a self-employed programmer, I think 20$/month for increased productivity is a steal!
Yes, why would it be any higher? My phone plan is around a tenner a month and over the lifetime of my phone, the cost per month is definitely less than that.
No, just the phone. I use the call/text/data plant so little since I'm mostly on wifi anyway, so I left that out.
[dead]
> 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.
I'm guessing they wouldn't stop doing it, they would instead get a 3€ brush
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.
I agree, it's stupid to pay $20 for something you can get for 2 cents
$20/mo, for the people in this situation, is not an amount of money worth thinking about.
> I agree, it's stupid to pay $20 for something you can get for 2 cents
> $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).
For some people.
Your perception of money really isn't consistent with the vast majority, I'd imagine.
Frivolously throwing money at unnecessary subscriptions isn't something for me.
You get to call this frivolous, but my perception of money isn't consistent?
Interesting.
> consistent with the vast majority
As ever the whole sentence is important, rather than just picking out a part of it.
What part did I miss?
> with the vast majority
For most use cases, normal GPT-3 provides just as good results as Chat-GPT (though Chat-GPT is a better interface). So I guess if you don't use it much, or you can use one of the less powerful versions, the pay-as-you-go model of GPT-3 is much cheaper. On the other hand, it's certainly possible to spend more than $20/month on GPT-3.
GPT3 also doesn't have the same restrictions. It might be preferable if you're tired of getting "I can't do X I'm a large language model" even if it wasn't cheaper.
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...
Copilot is worth it. Even with a Jetbrains license.
Right? $1/workday and you still get to use it evenings and weekends. No wonder b2b is the way.
I mean, I can pay 0$ and still use it. It's free.
Using a rock to pound a nail is free, but a hammer is still worth its cost.
Except when you can't. It's routinely over capacity for free users.
For now
So what you are saying is it's not worth $20, for now.
Obviously if they start charging for the free version, they may also jack the price for the premium one.
They'll probably just shut down the free research preview, or at least make it very restricted
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.
ha yes I remember running into that crash: https://community.folivora.ai/t/runshellscript-javascript-tr...
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?
I get it now, my API key is for GPT-3($$) and it isn't free like ChatGPT for personal use.
> 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.
This is partly because in English we literally lack the word required. Free is both “gratis” and “libre”. Software should be free, but software does not need to be free.
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
The industry has come up with a few phrases for this
"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.
Can you be more specific?
Suppose a new word was introduced. What would the dictionary definition be?
Well it's hard to add a new word to mean either "gratis" or "libre" in english because free would still mean both things.
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.
I think your interpretation of "free as in beer" is the opposite of the mainstream (where my understanding is it means "free of charge")
It is - but the mainstream “free as in beer” makes no sense. Who gives away free beer? Beer is free as in libre, not free as in gratis!
But you’re correct - the mainstream meaning of that term is the opposite - which I find bizarre.
I think it makes sense in the "beer is tangible" and "speech is not" sense (to my brain anyway). If I saw a "free beer" sign in a window I'd probably be inclined to think (albeit suspiciously) that there might be a frosty mug inside at no cost to me. Whereas if I saw a "free speech" sign, I'd assume they support my right to say whatever I want (or I suppose maybe that there's a lecture going on inside with no admittance fee).
We all got different brains though, shoutout learning from others perspectives, ty for sharing yours.
There's nothing to learn from his incorrect perspective. It means available at no cost.
> It is - but the mainstream “free as in beer” makes no sense. Who gives away free beer?
The quote references it because it is (or was) a cliché promotional offering.
Try this on for size: "open as in bar".
I’m paying about €200/year for Jetbrains Toolbox. This gives me a set of IDEs, one of which I’m using daily. And that’s less money than ChatGPT is asking.
Yeah but JetBrains isn't writing your code for you. This is a whole other level of technology that you cannot compare to something that exists already.
ChatGPT isn't writing correct code. But it is making the copyright ownership open to lawsuits.
$10 is much different than $20/month.
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.
Probably prices will be pushed down eventually, Google, Apple, maybe Facebook and Chinese companies will all offer competing products.
The Chinese version would have to complies with party guidelines, so not for me. But I am curious what sort of service Microsoft will offer when this will be integrated in Bing. Or the Google's version.
> I bought Intellij idea for $400 like 12 years ago and got made fun of at work even though it made me substantially faster than eclipse.
And? You have 400$ less than them.
What is the benefit of cash you never use?
The benefit is to use for something else that benefits them :P
Like IntelliJ?
More like the lego castle.
Oh man, now I want that.
Was IntelliJ Community Edition free at the time?
I think so but I wanted some of the paid features. Even still, if you look at the costs it's NOTHING. Lets just say it's $400/year. That comes out to about $1.5 a day. I'm earning at that time $284 per day.
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
> 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.
> 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?
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.
> 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/
...
> 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.
> But here's the rub - all those people whining about how cheapskate developers are because they don't want to shell out $5/day for ChatGPT/IntelliJ/Whatever aren't deriding people who are not using these paid for replacements.
> It's only ever the people using IDEA or Visual Studio or similar who develop superiority complexes over their choice of rentals.
Hmm, that's an interesting point, though I feel that sometimes we forget two aspects of software development (or also game development, to take a popular hobby as an example as well):
Sometimes I'm stunned at indie games that are sold at 10 - 20$ and people are still up in arms about it being "too much", when the drink or meal that they enjoyed didn't take thousands of hours to create (although possibly is only cheap because of subsidies for certain ingredients, but that's besides the point), whereas software or a game did. The same goes for developers that want all of their software to be free, as if it should fund itself, albeit I also appreciate the free software movement.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).
Some plugins (such as PHP) are not free, and the free ones have some limitations (no integrated Django support in PyCharm etc).
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.
Plus the fact that no AI of this kind can explain why it produced the output it did, it denies any amount of accountability/dependability. Maybe it's my academic/scientific background that shaped me this way, but using an information that can't be sourced/repeated as experiment/proven from axioms and theorems is a liability and often a cause for gross negligence or misconduct.
It strikes le that most people don't see that as fundamentally problematic.
Very true, however, you verify "facts" by doing research and crunching data, you do that by Googling and searching, and this AI is just another way of searching and presenting that information.
Caution is always required.
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.
I have long joked/theorized that the future of communication is bots writing for bots.
I think the most important lesson of anyone's first job is that you have to stop writing like you're in school. There is no minimum word requirement. Only maximum.But so many writing assignments in jobs have word minimums and hence the problem.
Do they? Even my high school English teacher said "If you write more than N words, I'm stopping at N".
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.
> 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.
Do you know if plain davinci-003 can continue long programming answers? I was using Chat to rewrite python scripts. It was it able to handle longish scripts easily by asking it to "continue", or simply "go on", if it ran out of room. But now they have blocked that ability since the Jan 30 update. It is quite a bit more painful now to have to break scripts up into chunks.
As far as I've seen, yes, GPT's output is quite long, and it could take anything I threw at it. If you try for your specific inputs, please let me know, I'm interested.
Thanks. I have managed to get chatGPT to continue again (90% of the time) by asking it
Oh I didn't think of that, thanks!
GPT-3's response can be as long as you are willing to pay for. The costs per request are based on how many tokens you want in the response.
No, it's limited to 4,000 or 8,000 tokens, and it will usually stop much earlier than that.
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:Pretty sure that regexp is wrong though?
Wouldn’t having ‘\b’ on both sides match beginning AND end? It’s got the parenthesis for the ‘|’ in the wrong place.
It’s definitely not doing what the prompt asked for.
https://regex101.com/r/ZNQa9X/1
The generated regex is the same as
https://regex101.com/r/vTtEU4/1I’m currently trying to figure out how to match a word starting with dog without using
because would proceed to eat the rest of the line.So I was thinking I could say
But that doesn’t work, it also ends up eating the rest of the line as well.Use \S which is the opposite set of \s which avoids eating word boundaries too.
You could also use a \B instead of a \S though there are different meanings there.It almost does the trick
https://regex101.com/r/sbpy8s/1
But this matches for example
as one single word.But I would like that it matches separately
and in this case.Likewise, I’d want for example
to be matched as two separate words and After a bit more reading online I thought that maybe the following regex would do what I want: https://regex101.com/r/1NT5Ie/1But that does not match
as a word.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...
Seems to behave exactly like I want.https://regex101.com/r/f3uJUE/1
Out of curiosity: if humans have trouble coming up with anything non-trivial, like regexes, why should something that has been trained on the output of humans do much better?
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.
After all, who needs wget when you have \wcat!
Agree; the ChatGPT answer is not correct, as the assignment is to match a word that starts with `dog` and ends with `cat`. You can make .* non-greedy by adding ? at the end, but it's not needed in this case, as the engine should backtrack. Something like this should work: /\bdog[\w_-]*cat\b/ (assuming _ and - should be allowed inside words). You can also specify word-separators ([^ ] instead of [\w_-]) if that's easier to read.
Yup. See my response to the other sibling comment. In particular:
Seems to behave exactly like I want.https://regex101.com/r/f3uJUE/1
Man, this thread is a great example for why I don't use regexes, lol
Yep. But it gave straight up code rather than trying to persuade a natural language LLM to write code.
The regex I was expecting would be
The key point is to ask the code model. Part of what ChatGPT does is it appears to categorize the question and then may dispatch it to the code model. If you know you have a code question, asking the code model first would likely be more productive and less expensive.That's not a good regex. The cat part is harder than the dog part.
you regex will match the whole line up to cat.
I don't claim it was good - just what I was expecting from the prompt.
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.
iOS shortcuts is basically a built in IFTTT service but with deep integration into apple products. For an example of chapt gpt3 integrating w/ it, check out this cool build. https://matemarschalko.medium.com/chatgpt-in-an-ios-shortcut...
Set this up on my phone without any of the home automation stuff just to have an alternative to Siri. Its pretty good, I wish I could have a back and forth conversation with it but I don't think I can do that inside of a Siri shortcut.
Wow, that's super cool. Thanks for the link.
> WYDM exactly by iOS shortcut?
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/shortcuts/welcome/ios
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.
I'm seeing the same error. How did you fix it? I don't understand what you meant by asking chatgpt to write you new code, I can't even open chatgpt due to high traffic.
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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.
How did you get the selected text in the focused app and replace it with the GPT response? I worked on it for hours and couldn't do it. I'd appreciate it if you could share that config.
If you want to go full circle you can send the ⌘-C and ⌘-V key events before/after they query. This will just send selected text and replace this with answer. I prefer not to do that, since queries are quite slow and I rarely block waiting for round trip. I also use vim and vim mode in lot's of apps, so replace works differently there.
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:
Thanks a ton! I'm going to test that. You have a good point about Vim. I tried the OP's method in Neovim and it didn't work exactly for the reason you mentioned. Clipboard as the exchange place sounds more reasonable.
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.