How to Use AI to Do Stuff: An Opinionated Guide
oneusefulthing.org
oneusefulthing.org
- permit themselves to store and use your inputs essentially as they see fit, for essentially any purpose
- have mechanisms designed to "prevent abuse", without defining what that actually means
- are engineered to "keep you safe", without stating clearly what they want to keep you safe from, and without any option to disable those so-called safeguards
- have been carefully tuned to align their outputs with the Upper Middle Class U.S. West Coast Tech Scene political zeitgeist of the day, and that is what you'll get from them, even if it is completely inappropriate in your own cultural environment.
Caveat emptor.
As others have mentioned, the data retention aspect is specifically /not/ an issue with OpenAI (and other vendors’) APIs.
I don’t really get the saltiness so many on this site have towards LLM vendors. It just sounds entitled.
we need them to ensure an equitable and sustainable world, but they do not drive progress. i bet they are also as a group far less successful and happy throughout their miserable lives. most will just impotently fart their misery unto others, and only a rare few will actually do something about it…
…at which point they wrap around back to becoming makers of imperfect things for the next round of criticism.
And the prior poster is right, OpenAI API eula/tos clearly state data is not retained by default. I've been involved with legal counsel reviews, on that point there's zero ambiguity.
No, the point of ChatGPT is to provide a UI to chat with GPT models. Taking the data generated by users and using it for commercial purposes without consent is very likely to be illegal in the EU. Unfortunately they often take years to tackle this kind of stuff.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-ftc-opens-investigatio...
Currently, it's opt-out, and doing so destroys your chat history. They did manage to satisfy Italian regulators but I expect they'll get called out on this more thoroughly in the future.
Or maybe they just changed the way this works for Italy?
I guess I can see why you would trust AWS/Azure/GCP over OpenAI, since they are bigger companies arguably with more to lose.
Instead of anticipated trades, all these nontechnical power users with novel ideas will make the mistake of telling them to an AI-- and had their ideas stolen and rushed to market by whoever paid for access to mine the logs companies told us they weren't collecting.
We already don't trust cloud providers not to spy on our infrastructure. There is little consequence in lying to us. AI will bring us IP theft at scale.
Don't discuss anything sensitive or groundbreaking with cloud LLMs. No Google Collab, no OpenAI, nothing.
Make do with a local LLM in the form of a Vicuna 13/30B GGML. And even there, you have to watch out for backdoors in Gradio/posthog or weird models that insist on you enabling remote code execution. This domain is unbelievably shady and I can only assume it's because of the low-level access it provides to our collective stream of consciousness.
This is going to turn out to be bad news long term. Don't trust cloud LLMs.
Also, biased opinion on my part: I'm especially interested in watching how these things affect data science and data literacy as a whole. Code interpreter is a game changer in my opinion, the most powerful tool that I think deserves all the press it is getting. Also: I released an open source code-interpreter for data (https://github.com/approximatelabs/datadm) and even though I know how to code and use Jupyter daily, I still find myself doing analysis with it instead.
All in all, it does seem like the different models and agents are gaining "specialization" skill is actually good for the user (rather than just using a single jack of all trades super chat model). Even though GPT-4 takes the language model crown, there's still specialization that matters and improves quality for different tasks as discussed here.
I wonder if in 2-5 years we'll all use "a single" AI chat interface for everything, or every specialization continues to "win at its own vertical" and we just have AI embedded inside of every app
At the moment it's only the fact that public documentation is available for so many tools that it's proving useful for so many things. But what about massive, closed source, boutique enterprise systems? You can feed it docs as context, but it would be better if it were trained on docs, support tickets and internal forums then properly aligned.
There are a lot of ways to search through docs and support tickets now. The ability of an LLM to draw inferences and summarize all of that information comes from being trained on a very large amount of data with billions of parameters. The data can be highly specialized. There just needs to be several thousand gigs of it for the AI to do things that are rare and useful.
As an aside, Claude 100K looks very cool, but how many people even have access? Our CTO reached out to Anthropic directly they wouldn't even give him the time of day. It seems like if you aren't planning on spending 5 figures monthly on it it's a lost cause. I get it, but, lame.
Their API still has an opaque waitlist though.
OpenAi's Whisper is the most accurate transcription model that I know of. The weights are open-sources, so it can be self-hosted, or you use the API. The downside is that you have to roll your own diarization (seperating the text between speaker A/B). I used pynote audio.
Paid services like fireflies, and transcription tools built into your call software, are much easier to use, but lead to some transcription quality dropoff.
What motivates people to write on such platforms? Is sun stack like Medium? Do they pay the authors for content?
At the least I wish HN had a tag on posts like [$] for pay walled content, and [Ad] for walled by login content so that I don’t waste my attention..
The current state of the ecosystem is such that getting someone to subscribe is extremely important for ongoing engagement, and ongoing engagement is often the prerequisite for continued writing.
If you're a reader interested in the kind of content the author is writing, and if you want to find more of this kind of content going forward, an easily escapable call to action is in the user's interest.
Is it annoying? Also yes. But in a world where everyone runs an ad blocker and social aggregators are fragmenting, it's better than a fully erected paywall, and better than nothing at all.
I don't want to be part of the ecosystem. I want to read the article, leave, and never come back. It's not in this user's best interest to be bothered by a popup.
In fact, I believe it's actually the best interests of the author that's being looked after, not the users or readers, by using a modal popup to interrupt somebody's reading. It's as rude as walking up to someone while they're reading a book and waving your hands between their eyes and the book they're reading to get their attention if you noticed they were reading a book you personally wrote in an effort to sell them more books or to ask them for their email so you can send them special offers.
I suppose I could stop going to the park where authors think this is acceptable to do and limit my reading to parks where "ecosystem" authors avoid, but eventually other people start using their annoying tactics and you can't escape it no matter where you go.
We're part of that ecosystem whether we want to be or not.
As the beneficiaries of free content, it seems like a complete non-issue to just say "no thanks" when alternatives include: no content, or fully paywalled content. If you're just expecting free content that caters to you in every way possible way, I'm curious how this is sustainable for any author, or why authors should be expected to work this way.
> it's actually the best interests of the author that's being looked after, not the users or readers
There are no users/readers if there is no content. There is no content if there are no engaged users/readers. My point is that actively building an audience (good for the author) is actively good for the reader, because it makes continuing to write a viable thing for the author to spend their time on.
If you're just coming for a single article and you'll never return again, that's understandable and your prerogative, but you're now a double beneficiary: of the author, and of the readers who do return.
> It's as rude as walking up to someone while they're reading a book...
I couldn't disagree more. Perhaps the moment you pay for the blog post you'd have more standing to complain about the conditions surrounding its presentation.
And I'm also not saying the state of the ecosystem is good, or that I like it. I'm also not saying that the ecosystem can't or shouldn't change. But I think it's unreasonable to expect writers not to have self interests, while taking a stance that is wholly self interested.
speaking for myself, i mostly look for content that the author wanted to produce (just by/for himself). not for me or any engagement metrics.
> There is no content if there are no engaged users/readers.
this is plainly false
> If you're just coming for a single article and you'll never return again, that's understandable and your prerogative
not only is it my prerogative, it's the norm.
> Perhaps the moment you pay for the blog post you'd have more standing to complain about the conditions surrounding its presentation.
thou criticism is still allowed for the unwashed masses, not only because it's popular.
This really depends on the blog. If it's a person who is making their living off of a newsletter, then readers = content.
I'm not saying that there are no blogs without readers, and somewhat awkwardly was trying to make the point that an author taking steps to create an engaged audience may be doing so as a condition of continuing to write. This is obviously not universal. My personal blog has not many readers. I still write. I don't ask them to subscribe.
>> If you're just coming for a single article and you'll never return again, that's understandable and your prerogative
> not only is it my prerogative, it's the norm.
This quote cuts out the only point of that sentence: even if someone is visiting a blog with the sole purpose of leaving and never returning, there is no standing to be upset when the author providing them with content at no cost simply asks if they'd like to subscribe. This violates basic notions of reciprocity and seems rather...childish, frankly.
This is not to imply that there's any expectation that someone should subscribe. I rarely do.
YouTube ads interrupt the middle of your video and they're not a "dark pattern".
A lot of people, when faced with that box, will miss the "continue reading" button and assume they have to subscribe to finish reading the article.
Is “dark pattern” the new “monopoly” on HN - ie “anything a company does that I don’t like”?
Dark pattern is a well defined term too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern
I agree there's a bunch of people who call anything they don't like a 'dark pattern', but I think this crosses the threshold for 'dark pattern' to be a reasonable description.
Unlike Medium, Substack's purpose is literally to let authors get money for their writing.
And you can dismiss that modal by pressing Esc, or by clicking "continue reading".
How hard can it be to have a dark mode?[1]
If someone's self hosted blog doesn't have a media query for dark mode, that's fine, but a platform that sells a itself as the authoring platform should make that minimal effort to prove a second colour palette.
[1] Maybe this has changed since I last read a medium article.
So hard that most of the internet doesn't have it. Easier to just use a dark reader extension that inverts colours.
Probably they know or measured that immediately showing pop up on a page load gets ignored and closed so they sneaked in the middle of reading, together with the small print dismission text they look pretty UX evil.
How is that a bias? That's reality