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Comment by mnky9800n | Hacker News Reader

I paid for it, then stopped paying for it. It seemed to be completely novel and fun to use but after a while it just became a pain. I tried writing a library to act as a code assistant for data science but trying to get it to write the codes that were useful to me took around the same amount of time as writing them myself. What you say is completely correct, it gets to around 70% of whatever you ask it to do then you have to finish the job for it. Which I guess is nice. But I'm not going to pay 20$/month for something that i can just use for free that amounts to slightly better intellisense.

For text generation, it is much better for tasks like

* letter writing * rewriting my writing so i don't plaigerize myself * summarizing several paragraphs into one

but all of that is available in the free version.

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>> I'm not going to pay 20$/month for something that I can just use for free

Well, it works until it doesn't because the website is overloaded. $20 gets you in through the VIP door and you don't need to wait along with the rest of the peasants.

You also get (throttled) GPT 4 which is much better at many tasks. That’s why I paid. We’ll see if the novelty lasts for very long but right now it’s a exciting product that I use multiple times a day and the most sci-fi invention of my life so far so I don’t mind paying

I didn't see any difference between 3.5 turbo and 4 for the data science app that I wrote. Another thing is that it's stochastic. So you could actually get a prompt that works well then you run it again and the identical prompt that generated codes that work now has generated codes that don't work. Of course, I could have my data science app cache codes that worked so if the prompt doesn't change it already has the generated code but I didn't want to have an ever growing repository of cached codes. Anyways.

In my experience 3.5 is so far away from 4 that it makes it makes 3.5 useless. I'd give another shot to gpt 4 if 3.5 was almost working for you (what did you use it for, anything for specific?)

Generation of data transformation pipelines in python. The problem is that a prompt that produces working code doesn't always produce working code.

If you use it through the API you can get very far with much less than 20$

free version is an order of magnitude worse than the paid version. It is still good though.

Yes, some of the transformation mechanisms are nice if you need to dump info into it and want it reorganized or processed into something else as well. But outside of that it's hard to justify spending $20 month so you can be bullshitted by some know-it-all toddling proto-skynet when you need factual information.

You can use bing chat for free. Supposedly powered by gpt4.

Bing gives you much shorter answers, often without code examples

I've found that phind.com is pretty good, although I'm not sure which LLM it's backed by and I only use it for hobby projects.

"Expert" uses GPT-4.

phind.com claims they use GPT4 but you have turn Expert mode on. Otherwise it's their home baked model. It's explained here:

> Expert mode is our most advanced searching mode, powered by GPT-4. This mode hallucinates less and writes better code. We highly recommend that you use it for advanced questions. Whenever the "regenerate" button is pressed, Expert mode is used to increase the odds of a high-quality answer.

https://www.phind.com/tutorial

I'm sorry but I have to end this conversation, I have been a good Bing and you have been a bad user. Thank you for your cooperation. Goodbye.

Sydney's quick to get into a bad mood when you say something bad about AI.

The cheap version does all of that much worse. I don't understand how people can be so cheap.

There are so many subscription products these days that it makes sense to assess the value of each carefully before committing.

If you're like me you tend to forget you're paying for something, and have to do a yearly purge.

It's very easy to slowly but surely rack up hundreds of dollars a month in subscription services.

My habit is to cancel right away when I start a subscription. You can still use the service for the month you paid for, and it's easy to restart it if you do still find yourself attempting to use it a month later.

Substack disappointed me because you can't do this. They remove content access if you do not have an "active" subscription. You don't have to pay again to "reactivate", but the paid content is locked until you do. This is obviously intended dark behavior because when I went to fully unsub later in the month they gave me a special dialog and a free month hoping for me to forget again this month. Very lame.

Oh, you haven't seen darker behavior of many Japan based services:

- Payment cycle closes always on the 1st of the month (which means, if you sign up on the last day of the month, you get 1 day of service for full month of payment. No proration, or anything.)

- If you cancel the service, you'll immediately lose access, doesn't matter if it's 1st day of the month, or very end of the month, it's gone. To reenroll, you often have to pay again.

I've been using Privacy.com cards for years to avoid this. Set a limit of 1 month on the card, and if I'm actually using the sub I'll fix/update it when the sub runs out.

I had a boss I didn't like a while ago, but one of the things he did that I did like was set a calendar reminder to unsubscribe. Too bad; it would've been easier on me mentally and emotionally if he were completely irredeemable, but I admit to using this trick myself now.

I don't think it's cheap to pay for a service, test it out for a month, find that in the beginning you used it everyday, and by the end of the month you forgot it existed. Then decide to not keep paying for it.

Probably for the next proposal I write, I'll pay for it again. It's super useful to take care of all the bullshit things you have to write for science to not plaigerize yourself.

I also tried using it as a dungeon master like that blog post from a couple weeks ago. But gpt4 didn't seem to remember things with regularity enough to actually work. Basically there was an uncanny valley because gpt4 doesn't have a pad of paper to write things down on like any person would have.

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