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Comment by neodymiumphish | Hacker News Reader

Presumably for cross-device interactivity. If I interact with ChatGPT on my phone, then open it on my desktop. I might be a bit frustrated that I can't get to the chat I was having on my phone previously.

OpenAI could store the chat conversation in an encrypted format that only you, the user, can decrypt, with the client-side determining the amount of previous messages to include for additional context, but there's plenty of user overhead involved in an undertaking like that (likely a separate decryption password would be needed to ensure full user-exclusive access, etc).

I'd appreciate and use a feature like that, but I doubt most "average" users would care.

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Syncthing could do that, if the software is designed to store locally.

Ever since I put the effort into Syncthing across my all devices (paired with restic on one of them for backup), I can't help but see how cross-device functionality and cloud this are the Sysco hash potatoes that balloons Big Corp services' profit margins.

Not saying it's easy to set up. But when you get there it's so liberating and you wish all software was bring-your-own-network.

SyncThing syncs only when both clients are running at the same time. Nobody who edits a document on a website expects that they'll need to leave that browser window open in order to see the document in a different browser.

Am I missing something? Is this seriously a heated HN debate over "why does this website need to store the text it sends to people who view the website?"?

We're not talking about collaborative tooling, just a record of what you've asked an AI assistant. If it doesn't sync right away, it's not the end of the world. I find that's true with most things.

And the clients don't need to be running at the same time if you have a third device that's always on and receiving the changes from either (like a backup system). Eventually everything arrives. It's not as robust as what Google or iCloud gives you, but it's good enough for me.

Chatgpt.com is essentially a CRUD app. What you're saying here amounts to saying that it could conceivably have been designed to work dramatically differently from all other CRUD apps. And obviously that's true, but why would it be?

It's a website! You submit text, that you'll view or edit later, so the server stores it. How is that controversial to a HN audience?

Also:

> the clients don't need to be running at the same time if you have a third device that's always on

An always-on device that stores data in order to sync it to clients is a server.

> An always-on device that stores data in order to sync it to clients is a server.

Yes. But it's my server. I burden myself to operate it so that persistence does not come at the cost of control.

I think we might be tilting at different windmills here.

TBH it sounds like you're just imagining a very different service than the one openAI operates. You're imagining something where you send an input, the server returns an output - and after that they're out of the equation, and storing the output somewhere is a separate concern that could be left up to the user.

But the service they actually operate is functionally a collaborative document editor - the chat histories are basically rich text docs that you can view, edit, archive, share with others, and which are integrated with various server-side tools. And the document very obviously needs to be stored on the server to do all those things.

It's great that you'd enjoy a significantly worse product that requires you to also be familiar with a completely unrelated product.

For some reason, consumers have decided that they prefer a significantly better product that doesn't require any additional applications or technical expertise ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Facebook messenger tries to marry end to end encryption with multi-device access and it's a horrible mess with some messages not being delivered to some devices for hours , days or ever.

I absolutely want OpenAI to keep all of my chats and I absolutely don't want them to share them ( voluntarily or by force) with any private agent.

I have exactly the same expectation of any document or communication platform. It's been long established as accepted compomise between security and convenience.

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