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Some may not agree with this, but I think this is a golden opportunity to fix tech’s original sin, which is the majority of consumer facing tech being ad suppor

Some may not agree with this, but I think this is a golden opportunity to fix tech’s original sin, which is the majority of consumer facing tech being ad supported. In essence, our existences have been sponsored by wealthy benefactors for years now. Meanwhile consumers have been trained to expect software to be free, and to lower their expectations on it doing what they want. Many social issues involving people and the intersection of technology, eg social networks, in many ways can I’m part be argued to be 1st or 2nd ordered effects of these ad supported existences. And moreover, it has removed the expectations consumers have built that they have a voice based on where they take their business, due to the zero-sum game in each major vertical (search, social, etc…) In short, I have believed for a long time that one of the simplest things we can do as a society to removing impediments that block us from addressing the human-specific relates problems is simply paying for things. ChatGPT is in general a really nice interface for talking to a software. I could see this essentially being the next greatest general purpose computing paradigm since excel. A lot of emphasis is put on all the things ChatGPT can do for you, all the while missing the point, which is it giving you a reasonably competent interface to help you do things for yourself. This experience could legitimately be compelling enough, I imagine, and enough people are fed-up enough with the current status quo of ad-sponsored tech that is user hostile, that it just may be able to break the vice grip that the monopolies have on computing and change the paradigm all together towards people paying for tech. This would in effect create a more efficient feedback loop between customer and maker, perhaps bring back meaningful competition, and unlock the most important next computing interface since iPhones and excel.

onion2k 4y ago
ChatGPT is in general a really nice interface for talking to a software. It is when you're just messing around and don't need an accurate answer quickly, so you forgive the fact you need to iterate on your prompts. If you really had to get something fast it'd be awful.
- asimpletune 4y ago
  That is true, and to me the test of any ai hype has been “ok, let’s do some work with this”, usually leading to readjusted expectations. But ChatGPT was the first that gave a glimpse of passing this test, and I could imagine a successor that ran entirely locally on device and had native access to your data (assume privacy and anonymity are solved). You could essentially build applets by taking to this ai, and it would be centered around your data. If you don’t like what it’s doing then you talk to the ai to modify it. Each applet has a forked instance of the ai and is snapshotted, so it keeps context permanently. E.g “a run tracker: I just went for a run, show the route I just took. Graph incline vs my hear rate. Stitch together a street view version of my run, and animate any frames missing with your best guess. Make sure the weather matches today’s, here’s a picture of what it was like outside (snaps photo). Now show this run side by side with yesterday’s. (Etc…)” Idk, I could imagine it being a big deal. Although I have no idea how portability between applets could work. Like, if I make an applet it would be the only one in existence like it, so any networked communication between applets with interfaces would be weird/dangerous. I guess if you just stick to portable formats (text, tables, photos, etc…) and just throw it on the other side of network, you could let the recipient deal with parsing it. Anyways, something like this gets my imagination turning, and I think this + AR is going to be a new paradigm for sure. Hopefully we get the economics right this time around.

onion2k 4y ago

ChatGPT is in general a really nice interface for talking to a software. It is when you're just messing around and don't need an accurate answer quickly, so you forgive the fact you need to iterate on your prompts. If you really had to get something fast it'd be awful.

asimpletune 4y ago
That is true, and to me the test of any ai hype has been “ok, let’s do some work with this”, usually leading to readjusted expectations. But ChatGPT was the first that gave a glimpse of passing this test, and I could imagine a successor that ran entirely locally on device and had native access to your data (assume privacy and anonymity are solved). You could essentially build applets by taking to this ai, and it would be centered around your data. If you don’t like what it’s doing then you talk to the ai to modify it. Each applet has a forked instance of the ai and is snapshotted, so it keeps context permanently. E.g “a run tracker: I just went for a run, show the route I just took. Graph incline vs my hear rate. Stitch together a street view version of my run, and animate any frames missing with your best guess. Make sure the weather matches today’s, here’s a picture of what it was like outside (snaps photo). Now show this run side by side with yesterday’s. (Etc…)” Idk, I could imagine it being a big deal. Although I have no idea how portability between applets could work. Like, if I make an applet it would be the only one in existence like it, so any networked communication between applets with interfaces would be weird/dangerous. I guess if you just stick to portable formats (text, tables, photos, etc…) and just throw it on the other side of network, you could let the recipient deal with parsing it. Anyways, something like this gets my imagination turning, and I think this + AR is going to be a new paradigm for sure. Hopefully we get the economics right this time around.