7 ms·

Sure, 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

Sure, 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 ago
Tools 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 ago
  Indeed. 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 ago
    ChatGPT can't even reliably tell how many times a letter is in a word. I doubt it will be a reliable tutor
    - kolinko 4y ago
      When 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 ago
      The ability to tell letter occurrence in a word is not a good measure for the quality of a large language model.
    - chiefalchemist 4y ago
      Anecdotally, 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 ago
      The public school system in my country still teaches that the tongue has areas sensitive to specific tastes.
    - alpaca128 4y ago
      If 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.
    - xp84 4y ago
      That, and the thousands of numbskulls who waste their time trying to get ChatGPT to do math problems that a $1 calculator (or worst case, free Google Sheets) could do, is the most pointless waste of computing power, and I say this as someone who remembers Flash ads. If you really are staring at strings and wanting those letters counted, you can easily ask it to write you a Python, JS, Ruby program that will do so, and in my experience for a task like that it will NAIL that task perfectly 100% of the time, and can even explain how it works to boot!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
manmal 4y ago
For 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 ago
  You should probably not be thinking about it in that way. Anthropomorphising statistical models is a bad idea...
  - EugeneOZ 4y ago
    We are anthropomorphizing NPCs in video games for decades - it's ok.
  - manmal 4y ago
    Oh 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 ago
      You 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 ago
  Still 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 ago
  But 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.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - KptMarchewa 4y ago
      You're severely underpaid, juniors with 1 year experience can get more in Poland after tax.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

Tools 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 ago
Indeed. 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 ago
  ChatGPT can't even reliably tell how many times a letter is in a word. I doubt it will be a reliable tutor
  - kolinko 4y ago
    When 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 ago
    The ability to tell letter occurrence in a word is not a good measure for the quality of a large language model.
  - chiefalchemist 4y ago
    Anecdotally, 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 ago
    The public school system in my country still teaches that the tongue has areas sensitive to specific tastes.
  - alpaca128 4y ago
    If 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.
  - xp84 4y ago
    That, and the thousands of numbskulls who waste their time trying to get ChatGPT to do math problems that a $1 calculator (or worst case, free Google Sheets) could do, is the most pointless waste of computing power, and I say this as someone who remembers Flash ads. If you really are staring at strings and wanting those letters counted, you can easily ask it to write you a Python, JS, Ruby program that will do so, and in my experience for a task like that it will NAIL that task perfectly 100% of the time, and can even explain how it works to boot!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

manmal 4y ago

For 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 ago
You should probably not be thinking about it in that way. Anthropomorphising statistical models is a bad idea...
- EugeneOZ 4y ago
  We are anthropomorphizing NPCs in video games for decades - it's ok.
- manmal 4y ago
  Oh 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 ago
    You 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 ago
Still 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 ago
But 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.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - KptMarchewa 4y ago
    You're severely underpaid, juniors with 1 year experience can get more in Poland after tax.