1,551 karma · joined February 24, 2017
See: Google's AI studio. Its built on Google Cloud infrastructure so billing updates are slow which peeves users used to instant billing data with Anthropic and OpenAI.
Not to mention the dark patterns that attempt to trick you into backing up your entire photo library, over and over again.
Or the inability to exclude folders from the backup process.
Maybe get the basic expectations of a Photo app right before adding features nobody asked for.
I guess that's the game, but they do seem a lot more cavalier about it of late. Increasingly resembles the crypto 'community' (derogatory).
Not an experience I can relate with, and I'm pretty well traveled. A cynic might say that you're projecting a personal view here.
Google were late to the game but they've built perhaps one of the easiest cloud platforms to work with.
Natural for Cursor to nudge users towards their paid plans, but why provide the ability to use your own API keys in the first place if you're going to make them useless later?
Fix this and I'd be back in a flash.
Assistants that work best in the hands of someone who already knows what they're doing, removing tedium and providing an additional layer of quality assurance.
Pilot's still needed to get the plane in the air.
But even if the output from these tools is perfect, coding isn't only (or even mainly) about writing code, it's about building complex systems and finding workable solutions through problems that sometimes look like cul de sacs.
Once your codebase reaches a few thousand lines, LLMs struggle seeing the big picture and begin introducing one new problem for every one that they solve.
Some instructions that worked for me:
- Specifics instead of high level
- Approach from non-critical perspective
- Dont be philosophical
- Use direct quotes often
- Focus on the details. Provide a lesson, not reflections
- Provide a 'sparknotes' style thorough understanding of the subject
Same experience here. I'm a beginner swimmer and got caught in a rip tide in Bali.
The thing was, it was terrifying yet so calm at the same time. Everybody on the beach continued to bathe, unaware, and a few metres away I was frantically but silently fighting for my life.
The helplessness is especially haunting. You exert this primal will to life, and the force of nature just brushes it aside.
Anyway, I made it out, spent that evening binging Youtube videos about rip tides, and have developed a healthy aversion to ocean water.
Similar spec Samsung laptops (Galaxy Books) come with a regular USB-C cable and a fast charging power adapter that looks like any other plug.
Anybody know why Samsung can do this and Microsoft can't?
Only having to lug around a single cable and charger for all devices is a dealbreaker.
It's an uncomfortable title, but it's a truth that must be confronted. How have once downtrodden countries like Korea, China, and large swaths of Eastern Europe been able to turn rags into riches while most of Africa has so far failed to?
GDP is not everything of course. But even on measures of safety, why is Africa so much more violent than equally poor Laos or Cambodia?
South America shares some of Africa's woes, so perhaps it's not a uniquely African problem. But it seems less bad, and the region has produced success stories.
I've heard it said that Africa has yet to have its naissance. Maybe, hopefully, that's it and things will get better over time. But with the current corrupt institutions and leadership that looks to be a gargantuan task.
Great way to frame it. Somewhat similarly, I view it as path dependency: your current choices are constrained by previous choices, meaning the further you deviate from the person you wish to be the harder it is to turn things around if the future you so wishes to.
I saw the exact same commentary around the no-code hype of the past few years and it made me increasingly cynical. No-code tools made it super easy to create a boilerplate website that looked pretty but was not fit for purpose. Meanwhile it was advertised as "Build an AirBnB clone without code!".
OK fine, hyperbole as a marketing tactic. But many people handed over wads of cash for courses that promised results that were in reality no more than cardboard cutouts of actual websites.
The Internet appears to have an endless ability to create markets for don't-do-the-work-and-still-enjoy-the-reward snakeoil.
And now we have ChatGPT- an instant boilerplate-creating machine. Watch as a new (or in many cases the same) class of charlatans grease up this technological wave too.
I shared this opinion no more than a month ago. Then I decided to keep a ChatGPT-4 tab open for a week and lean on it for questions. I'm around 3x more productive. It's wild.
Anyone that uses a computer for work will benefit from this technology, or be upended by it.
I agree though, Google has the ability to catch up. But will they? They're a big boring company now. Slow and risk averse.
Any insights on what's happening when user visitor clicks 'Go'? Is the video transcribed via OpenAI Whisper and then passed through GPT?
Have we? For many people, ChatGPT3 is a curiosity. Talking to a bot is inefficient, requiring 'prompt engineering' and a tedious back-and-forth to get a legible response (that's often wrong!). Most people are not going to tolerate such a poor and slow user experience.
For now using LLM-based chatbots is like having unlimited credits for Fiverr, with all the quality issues and frustrations that comes with that.
All this bated breath reporting reminds me of the noise about a Facebook "Gmail-killer" back in 2010. Instead we got Messenger while Gmail users increased 5x since.
The biggest complication with visual scrapers is all the edge cases. The selector algorithms usually become a mess on any complex website especially if there's uneven data.
Then you have css selectors no longer working and so on. Very brittle.
That argument fails to consider that much of the drudgery of modern employment consists of large swaths of nonsense.
ChatGPT is auto-complete for bullsh*t jobs. A fancy boilerplate generator that has seen it all before and mirrors the exact sequence of word combinations we've trained it to believe is valuable.
Are there any other services that make it this easy? DigitalOcean functions have a UI for quick prototyping but afaik Google Cloud, Vercel, Cloudflare etc wrap similar functionality inside projects or similar idiosyncrasies which adds friction if all you're after is a function and an endpoint.
The outliner[0] feature allows you create someting similar to notado.
> I used Stripe for about a year to run a small cell phone store in Denver, CO area. In the case of my business, I never had an issue processing my small payments for cell phones, ranging from a couple hundred dollars up to $1000. All of a sudden, we run a charge for $3300 because our primary processor in my business was down, and we had a large transaction to fulfill. Stripe flagged the transaction and is now holding the money from me for "at least 120 days"
> It is one thing to say this is a red flag, fine... I hear you... no problem. a transaction multiple times the size... sure. I get it. However A normal payment processor would then query you for documents authorizing the charge, bank statements, financial statements, some sort of procedure to remedy the issue. Stripe provides NO SUCH METHOD TO RESOLVE these issues.
> I am concerned because there are reports of Stripe continuing to add "30 days" to the reserve hold past the initial 120 days, indefinitely. One article detailed a hold that was surpassing its 240th day. Stripe is taking advantage of a lack of regulation in this space to steal small merchant's large transactions. They see a big, outlier transaction and lick their chops, hiding behind KYC and "Fraud prevention" To hold your money indefinitely.
> You cannot call Stripe. They do not have a phone number. Their support page on their website has Phone call and messaging grayed out. You can only email. If you email, you get robots. Even in the same email thread, a different "agent" (with a different name and everything) answers each time with not prior knowledge of your history. There are no ticket numbers to your support request; nothing tracking it. The robots respond with what is quite obviously a template response.
> If you do a little bit of research about this topic, you immediately see this is a prevailing issue. Reports of Stripe taking up to $31,000 are all over the internet! Again, Stripe gives no manner to remedy this. There is NO ONE you can call. NO ONE you can talk to. More disconcerting, it seems that anyone who posts about this issue on reddit gets downvoted and teamed up against by established Reddit accounts, that I have to imagine are owned by Stripe. These account have some established reddit history on them, mainly talking about coding in PERL. It's a little sus. In my case, I sent my EIN letter, Sales Tax Receipt, Articles of Org, Statement of Trade Name, Certificate of Good Standing, Bank Statements, Website links, Signed transaction receipts, and anything I could think of to Stripe to review. I just received robot-responses; never got anything cleared up.
> I challenge reddit to connect me to a human being at Stripe that can tell me how to resolve the issue. I'm convinced It can't be done. This is a big problem and should be brought to the attention of small business owners, and regulators!
> TL;DR : I used Stripe to process my business transactions. They saw a large transaction come through and used their twisted TOS to steal $3,000 from my small business. They use gray area contract loopholes to be able to hold your money from you indefinitely. While you lose out on your working capital and ROI, they collect free interest on your money; potentially never returning it.
> Eliminating toil allows people to focus on the inherent complexity of the difficult, interesting problems at hand, rather than the incidental complexity caused by choices made along the way.
> Toil can be eliminated...by drawing the system boundary a bit differently. When we use an external service instead of an external library, we’re moving the code outside of our system – thereby outsourcing the entropy-fighting toil to some third party. Not our entropy, not our problem
[0] https://www.stedi.com/blog/excerpts-from-the-annual-letter
And while he's featured a few conspiracy theorists, they're a minority and are balanced out by credentialed 'serious' scientists.
That's all beside the point though - purging conversations from the internet is bad, and the culture that cheers this on is worse.
It's likely that the TikTok video was simply downloaded using the download button, no trickery required. In contrast to Instagram and Google's walled gardens, TikToks videos are easily shareable and so often end up being uploaded onto these platforms[0] - with the branded watermark leading viewers back to the original source.
Part of the reason for their success I think.
[0] https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/instagram-will-now-lim...
Running a successful solo-business is a lonely route by definition. Few people are on a similar path, fewer still reach the summit. For me, thinking back to how much lonelier it felt to sit in a busy office knowing that there's got to be a different way, provides perspective.
Besides, perhaps loneliness is the cost of admission: a business is a path to wealth, freedom and possibly meaning. Happiness is not included.