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lee101

69 karma · joined September 7, 2013

Creator of http://bitbank.nz http://www.wordsmashing.com a word puzzle game http://bigmultiplayerchess.com.com a giant chess game and http://www.addictingwordgames.com a word games portal. http://leepenkman.appspot.com Online C.V. http://how.nz Tech Blog
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lee101··on Ask HN: Secure and simple way for secret/credential management in a startup?
I think a password manager like 1pass for all secrets (definitely not confluence) plus a cloud hosted secret system like Aws secretsmanager for secrets that need to be accessed programmatically e.g by various IAM roles.

Devs, once assumed a role, download the secret env files from secretsmanager.

You might see where I'm going with this, you have two systems to store secrets in, one for general use and one for programmatic use. It's not ideal but pragmatic and do consider if your in a security sensitive domain, then you would want to customise this process e.g. by only having one storage system and shorter access etc.

Someone of the two infra people would have the ability to assume a role/get a set of expiring "deploy" keys that they would paste into CI To start a deployment (still in ci just doing stuff that CI normally doesn't have permission to do)

lee101··on LocalBitcoins will discontinue its service
Not sure why they're not just axing a whole bunch of staff like everyone else.. fees on-top of this marketplace is still a profitable concept and/or you could find a buyer
lee101··on Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?
Speaking about opportunity cost of folks pursuing AI like a mad crowd... I started a ChatGPT competitor https://text-generator.io let me know what you think .. or if it's too much...
lee101··on We compete with GitHub. Bing does not show our website
Looks like this post is flagged too... I'm also competing with you/co pilot with https://text-generator.io but I'm on Bing, take a deep look into your site/SEO etc and tip of the day for generative companies like ours is that we can generate a whole bunch of examples for SEO.

Normally HN and Reddit are less moderated than other sites that do a lot of shadow banning, condolences for getting stomped on by large co's and also welcome to the internet

lee101··on ChatGPT is a data privacy nightmare
For a text generator that doesn't store data you give it checkout https://text-generator.io it's also open AI compatible and self hostable so and easy migration
lee101··on ChatGPT3 Prompt Engineering
Nice great principles, really interesting how creative writing is now seeing a huge resurgence as a marketable skill.

Those principles also work well in other AI text generators like https://text-generator.io

lee101··on Use GPT-3 incorrectly: reduce costs 40x and increase speed by 5x
Checkout https://text-generator.io for embeddings for search, they are better because they are cheaper/faster/take into account linked images (actually embed text images and code in the same space)

https://text-generator.io/blog/embed-images-text-and-code

Your training trick is neat/great innovation but also keep in mind it is likely overfitting meaning when you get a bit of new data you need to index and search that model isn't going to do well at all at embedding it, said differently that training works well if you can cover the types of data you're going to see in production really well at training time. If not there's a big accuracy drop for unseen data due to overfitting

lee101··on We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it
Try https://text-generator.io the bs generated is about the same tbh... But much cheaper, and combines a web crawler so it can speak about links and images which makes it a lot better at lots of things like making a believable conversation about designs/invoices/reciepts/emojis.
lee101··on We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it
I run the cheaper self hostable OpenAI alternative https://text-generator.io I've been working on automating this manual verification of everything, with a few components we already have like a search engine and an edit API we can both detect and correct most of these errors to at least be reflective of what a reliable source says like Wikipedia, still a lot of reasoning, logic and math issues will remain, but there's a big step up coming soon in factual generation
lee101··on Ask HN: How do you plan on making money with Open AI API?
I built my own OpenAI compatible alternative, https://text-generator.io to help with that pricey ness. Also self hostable which helps people cut costs.

It also analyses linked web pages and image content automatically so helps people build these web integrations or auto img alt tag describers or reiept analysers etc without doing as much of the prompt engineering/crawling themselves.

lee101··on Ask HN: How do you plan on making money with Open AI API?
I'm doing this with https://text-generator.io OpenAI is fairly pricy and has heaps of gaps, some of which text-generator.io also solves like image and link analysis. Also does speech to text
lee101··on Ask HN: How to ensure your water is safe to drink?
I'm on a rain water tank so would also appreciate some advice there for DIY style where you don't have access to municipal water..
lee101··on Ask HN: What API's do people wanna buy/pay for?
Side note about rapid API, I originally built https://text-generator.io on rapid API but I got 0 customers there, you would think you could just look on rapid API to see the gaps, there wasn't and still isn't a good alternative to text-generator.io on there but that doesn't guarantee anything, market research takes a lot of thought and the product needs constant marketing just like all businesses, I had to launch it as its own website for it to get users, so there's a lot more that goes into it than just building the right API.

I've also had customers scared off or investors not want to invest because it is a plain API platform and not B2C...

To answer the question market research is kind of the only way to know, Google adwords keyword planner and Google trends are quite good, as well as researching the companies in the same space well and what gaps there APIs have.

As an example https://text-generator.io distinguishes itself from OpenAI by including automatic analysis for input links, linked images, documents etc and doing speech to text/self hosting/embedding images, text and code in the same space, so isn't just an API clone

lee101··on Ask HN: How to Prepare for the AI Apocalypse?
What I'm doing is building a self hostable OpenAI alternative to help bring the AI costs down https://text-generator.io I've also been thinking of lots of other forms of content generation like 3d etc.

You have to be careful with the rate technology progresses and be the one riding the wave of progress and not left behind.

At this point we best believe there will be robots capable of doing near everything we can, but better including sports, trades, war, looking after people, and these are not that far away and will happen in our or kids lifetimes.

Don't listen to the nay sayers, people used to argue hard that computers would never play chess, humans will keep redefining the goalposts including creating new distinctions of what intelligence is like the difference between thinking and writing until machines are just plain better than us at all of it and we will invent a whole bunch of hateful slurs for them

lee101··on [dead]
Hi,

Text-Generator.io is now self hostable, It's priced at $1000 USD per instance per year to self host.

The service runs on a single 24GB VRAM GPU, and runs all services including speech to text, text and code generation for almost all languages and generating embeddings too.

The text generator also downloads and analyses any input with links including documents, images, images with text inside and webpages for better understanding and to generate better text.

It's a great alternative to OpenAI and has a compatible API making switching easy.

Let me know what you think and if there's anything i can do to help!

All the best. Lee Penkman - Founder Text-Generator.io

lee101··on Ask HN: What have you created that deserves a second chance on HN?
https://text-generator.io an API compatible alternative to OpenAI GPT, it's more affordable and also researches linked web pages and analyses image content, also reads images with text in them so it can do extra things like explain about receipts or how people respond to emojis or images etc.

It also does speech to text over 8x cheaper than Google Cloud, there's a nice free teir, I'm surprised more people aren't taking advantage of it

OpenAI is doing well recently so the next step is to do more things they don't do and let people self Host etc.

lee101··on Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
LLMs like ChatGPT E.g. https://text-generator.io that combines then with image/web link content understanding, so it can answer questions about pictures with text in them like reciepts or simulate how people would talk about documents or respond to emojis/content.

It's apparent in the future machines will have a deep level of understanding and it will be easy to extend/build upon and also affordable

lee101··on Large Transformer Model Inference Optimization
Hey all, I used most of the tactics here to optimise Transformers so y'all don't have to :-)

try https://text-generator.io It also works with code and in multiple languages and is OpenAI compatible so a one line change. There's a few other things that it does too like linked image understanding.

lee101··on Why is Chat GPT so expensive to operate?
Basically gpu/compute costs being so expensive. Probably just the chat cost itself. also a whole boat load of Development costs will eventually be passed on to consumers, for a cheaper alternative try https://text-generator.io It also analyses images which OpenAI doesn't do
lee101··on New and Improved Embedding Model for OpenAI
Also check out the embedding model from https://text-generator.io

It supports some things that openAI can't do, it retrieves any linked images of web pages, analyses the images or images with text inside to help the embedding model

lee101··on Show HN: I fine-tuned Flan-T5. Can it cook?
Awesome! checkout https://text-generator.io which is a language model as a service similar to OpenAi that can cook but much cheaper

I would recommend for vast majority of people to experiment around with these pretrained models first before getting the dedicated GPU/training etc, but cool that your company helps with it

lee101··on Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable
I just like to call out Starlink for not supporting ipv6, massive headache as calls to various ipv4 only sites fail in python then you need to set a timeout in your request to trick python into falling back to ipv4, also no public adresses on Starlink made self hosting https://text-generator.io a pain but CloudFlared tunnels helped
lee101··on Tell HN: Tired of Hearing about ChatGPT
I kind of understand about stable diffusion, but ChatGPT seems like just a progression, something you can already do with promoting if I'm not mistaken...

There's companies that offer orders of magnitude of cost savings over OpenAI for text generation too e.g. https://text-generator.io in excited about that going the way of stable diffusion e.g. there's bloom and bloomz for instruct, there should probably be the same excitement when bloom comes out with E.g. ChatBloom, but idk why open source and other co's don't get the press that OpenAi does

lee101··on Show HN: Domain Name Search with AI
For cost of OpenAI try this demo using https://text-generator.io that does the same thing but much cheaper than OpenAI :-) https://replit.com/@LeePenkman/Domain-Name-Generator

Switching is also very easy as text generator is OpenAI compatible/one line change of the base url/API key

lee101··on Ask HN: What are some examples of cloud lock-in?
Micro example is that you can't scale rds/cloud db disk size downward easily, only upwards, so if you haven't sorted out go archiving before hand you may be stuck paying more for storage until you have both migrated data away and done the extra leg work to scale back down.

Macro examples: cases where there are incentives to use for a period e.g. sustained use or yearly discounts Incentives to use proprietary technology such as S3 or dynamodb being cheap. Situations where migrations are hard (data), expensive (cold storage) or dangerous/slow to recover such as changing the DNS

lee101··on Ask HN: Is there an AI service to interpret a collection of articles?
https://text-generator.io is like a cheaper gpt-3 but also crawls/interprets links to images, webpages, images with text in them, it's OpenAI compatible so if you get it working with OpenAI switching is easy
lee101··on Upcoming price increases for Cloud Storage
Best to Checkout alternatives e.g. https://text-generator.io does text to speech over 8x cheaper which is crazy, cloud storage costs going up a lot but compute costs have always been high esp for managed services/ml so shop around and on a code level, ideally use a wrapper around your Cloud usage to make switching easier
lee101··on Show HN: AI generated puzzles from Wikipedia articles
this is awesome! i made a conversational 20 questions with ai game https://www.addictingwordgames.com/play-game/20-questions-wi... that mostly shows off how easy it is to build AI/text generators with https://text-generator.io

the supposed game there is to get it to admit you are right about what its thinking, but theres lots of meta games you can play with it and break out from it.

i was thinking some bartering games with characters/making money running a shop type game would be awesome, so much endless useful potential for games/apps to be able to talk to a real life like character.

lee101··on Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
That's funny it reminds me a lot of an awk script we used to use to push zone files... when I worked at domain name registry in New Zealand. It was wrapped in a lot of pearl for extra job safety, lots of weird issues with special characters, working in the DNS space is very interesting, lots of security overlap and problems like trying to stop people using the system for botnet command and control centres.
lee101··on Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
On the ethical side I built a paywall for a billion dollar news company and stoped people from bypassing it, then they change the cancel button for a call customer support button to effectively steal money from the elderly etc who signed up but don't want to go through the long cancel process
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