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I think there's also an argument to be made that $20 per month is a bigger deal than some people realise. The issue isn't just _that one_ specific subscription
by johtso 4y ago
I think there's also an argument to be made that $20 per month is a bigger deal than some people realise. The issue isn't just _that one_ specific subscription you're paying for. The issue is how they all accumulate over time.. and eventually you find that your metaphorical bucket of money has turned into a leaky sieve. Not to mention all the services you forget to unsubscribe from even though they've ceased to provide enough value to you to make them worth while.
A one-off purchase is very different from making a hole in the bucket.
Obviously this all depends on how financially comfortable you are. But still.. time is money. Money you're spending today is time you're committing to work to earn back tomorrow.
- hotcoffeebear 4y agoAnd how much is it in your local currency that you’re getting paid for.
- kolinko 4y agoSure, but with some things, the increase in productivity pays off the price easily - you end up earning more, or working way less. $20/mo for a subscription of NYT, or Netflix is not one of those things. But ChatGPT in many cases can save whole days of work over each month, so - especially when you're a freelancer, it will pay itself off.
- chiefalchemist 4y agoTools are an investment. Entertainment is an expense. Sure, there's wiggle room in each but in a nutshell, that's the framework.
- samstave 4y ago>>you end up earning more, or working way less. Or you're just treading water. Not everyone gains some super power productivity or an excess of free time when utilizing tools... Some people just being able to actually scrape by BECAUSE of said tools.
- danuker 4y agoIndeed. People in developing countries might learn what the public school system should have taught them, with a free private tutor that is ChatGPT or similar.
- albert180 4y agoChatGPT can't even reliably tell how many times a letter is in a word. I doubt it will be a reliable tutor
- kolinko 4y agoWhen I tested it on subjects I knew, it gave better answers than teachers in my high school (Poland, but I guess it might be similar elsewhere in the West) Also, a friend physicist tested ChatGPT on the basics of quantum physics and he was surprised at how much it knew. IMHO the chat is at a level of 1st year university student - of any subject available. The only issue being that it always sounds super confident, even if it's wrong.
- rmbyrro 4y agoThe ability to tell letter occurrence in a word is not a good measure for the quality of a large language model.
- chiefalchemist 4y agoAnecdotally, it's less reliable when it comes to verifiable fact; but highly useful for brainstorming and sussing out creative solution. Your results may vary.
- danuker 4y agoThe public school system in my country still teaches that the tongue has areas sensitive to specific tastes.
- alpaca128 4y agoIf a tutor tried to teach how to count letters instead of a useful skill I'd fire them. Natural language is ambiguous and ChatGPT can handle that pretty well, if you want to count letters use Python or something.
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- manmal 4y agoFor me, ChatGPT also has a psychological benefit. It makes me feel like there’s someone that I can fall back on when I‘m stuck. It might be wrong (often the bot is not super helpful), but this is not about rationality.
- OOPMan 4y agoYou should probably not be thinking about it in that way. Anthropomorphising statistical models is a bad idea...
- EugeneOZ 4y agoWe are anthropomorphizing NPCs in video games for decades - it's ok.
- manmal 4y agoOh I‘m not antropomorphising. It feels more like a GPS - a tool I wouldn’t like to be without when driving unknown places. I work mostly alone on projects, at least currently. While I have friends I can bounce back general ideas on, it‘s hard to get good feedback on a small problem that I‘d be stuck with for, let’s say, 5 minutes. So far, the choice has been between disrupting others‘ flow (who might not even work with the tech I‘m using), or exploring the issue myself. Problem solving is certainly not a skill I want to atrophy, but figuring out framework specific intricacies is more a chore than an interesting problem. A chore I can get stuck on. And that’s where the bot often points me in the right direction. An example: I‘m dabbling in the PETAL stack with a side project, and Ecto‘s DSL still feels foreign to me. ChatGPT is actually really good at fixing my Ecto queries and recently made the suggestion to use the „dynamic“ function. It applied the function in a slightly wrong way, but that made me read up dynamic query building, which is already bearing fruit. I could have read all of Ecto‘s documentation and wouldn’t need the bot, but that’s out of scope right now. I‘m currently working with native iOS, Android, JS/TS (Next), Flutter, and Elixir - if I read all the documentation, I wouldn’t write any code.
- illiac786 4y agoYou meant "something to fall back on" instead of "someone". If you write it like that suddenly you're not anthropomorphizing anymore =)
- Semaphor 4y ago> you end up earning more, or working way less. Unless you are salaried?
- amonith 4y agoStill might be worth it. My strategy for getting "raises" always was: 1. increase productivity 2. ask for a raise 3. profit or change company and it worked pretty good last 7 years. Certain investments in tools definitely helped with that.
- mightybyte 4y ago> especially when you're a freelancer I think that's the big qualifier here. The productivity paying off the price is only meaningful if your time and money are arbitrarily fungible for each other, and for most people they are not. There's a good chance they won't be able to find a way to convert that saved time into the corresponding $20+ needed to pay the bill. And if finances are tight, $20/month might be a deal breaker. Even if you're a freelancer, if your projects have billing caps related to the number of hours you expect to work then you don't necessarily have adequate time/money fungibility. $20 a month also might not be worth the cost of going out and acquiring a new project.
- luckylion 4y agoBut for anyone in IT or related fields? $20/month feels like a nobrainer if you're in the West. It's like paying for Jetbrains IDEs. I'm a bumbling idiot writing Symfony and Wordpress code and PHPStorm is 150 Euros a year. It probably increases my productivity by that much per day. If ChatGPT saves you more than 60 seconds a day, or makes you work more comfortable, it's easily worth $20.
- jmnicolas 4y ago> $20/month feels like a nobrainer if you're in the West. I earn 2000€ per month as a C# dev in France, (assuming $1 == 1€) I just need a hundred subscriptions like that to have no money left at the end of the month. While I'll admit a 100 subs is a bit much, it's very easy to have 10 or 15. > If ChatGPT saves you more than 60 seconds a day Even if it saved me 4 hours a day I wouldn't be paid more.
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- KptMarchewa 4y agoYou're severely underpaid, juniors with 1 year experience can get more in Poland after tax.
- giancarlostoro 4y agoWhen I tack on subscriptions I review other ones I cannot justify since you only consume so many services at once right? Then I cancel accordingly.
- johtso 4y agoThat's a good idea and probably a healthy habit to build! I might try and start doing that..
- samstave 4y ago>>all the services you forget to unsubscribe from even though they've ceased to provide enough value to you to make them worth while. I suffer from this. Currently paying $30/mo for midjourney but get zero value. need to go delete that sub.
- MetaWhirledPeas 4y ago> The issue is how they all accumulate over time Everything we spend money on has a price that is set by what we are willing to pay collectively. Just because you don't want to pay the price doesn't mean it's not the right price. It's a bit amusing that we find any price objectionable considering this ChatGPT experience didn't even exist a few months ago!
- wkdneidbwf 4y agoexcept this is $20 a month with the expectation that it’s saving you time. it’s fundamentally different from say, netflix, where you pay for it and have to give it your time
- PetahNZ 4y agoIf it saves my time working, it doesn't mean I get to spend that else where though. Just more work.
- probably_a_gpt 4y agodon’t… don’t let them know you are more productive, instead post more here
- bongobingo1 4y ago> How I went from working 40h/w to 38w/h, making the same money (medium.com)
- root_axis 4y agoYou must have no deadlines.
- Mtinie 4y agoAlternatively, they have far more work allocated than time saved would exceed.
- etrautmann 4y agoWell said
- evrydayhustling 4y agoLet's say you make $10 / hr. To break even, a $20 tool needs to save you 2h a month. Divided over 20 workdays and it must save you 6m per day. If a tool can't save you 10-15m per day, it doesn't deserve a "throughout the day" slot IMHO. Which isn't to say that ChatGPT fits that bill for me - I think it requires too much supervision to save time. But people are too cheap about genuinely useful tools.
- dzikimarian 4y agoFor me problem with many tools is subscription model, not that I have to pay. You build your workflow around a few subscription tools, then something bad happens. You need to cut expenses. Apart from shitty situation in general, your workflow falls apart and you're unhappy about lowered standard of living, making it more probable to further worsen your life. It simply feels bad.
- speleding 4y agoThat works out if you are a freelancer. Otherwise the $20 comes out of your pocket, and the productivity gains go to your employer.
- distances 4y agoThe monetary aspect doesn't apply for many (most?) freelancers either. I work and bill the same amount of time every day regardless of how much I achieved. Brain fog day is worth the same as an uninterrupted flow day. It does make me more efficient which is something I do care about.
- schwartzworld 4y agoIf you're paid by the hour like that, doesn't saving 2 hours per week mean you are getting paid $20 less per week? It's the opposite. A salaried developer on an agile team commits to a certain amount of work per sprint. If they can get it done in 2 hours less time, that's a net gain for the developer.
- adamsmith143 4y agoIf anyone on this site working as a Dev is making 10/hr I question whether they can even navigate to the ChatGPT website by themselves in the first place. At a real number like 50/hr you only need to save 1.2 minutes per working day for it to break even. Which is trivially easy. You could save that by having ChatGPT write your emails for you alone.
- pelasaco 4y agoYou are using a service, that must pay for infrastructure and personnel. How do you think a on-off purchase would cover it. Your salary you want every month on your account, but for the others, nah, not so important
- adamsmith143 4y agoOn a website where the majority of people are SWEs living in HCOL areas where their daily lunch and coffee is probably $20+ the argument against a $1/day productivity tool seems lacking.
- charlie0 4y agoWhy not just put all the subscriptions on one credit card and I dunno, spend 5 minutes at the end of the month reviewing the credit card statement to cancel subscriptions?
- anf 4y agoWith tillerhq.com, you can set up a pretty nice workflow to review your spending daily, weekly, or whatever cadence makes sense to you across all of your accounts, and it's only $79/year! :)