
Hosting a GPT-2 autoresponder bot - luu
https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/190086745889/in-case-anyone-was-wondering-maybe-no-one-was
======
IfOnlyYouKnew
I seem to remember a pretty large pop up like “do not abuse and don’t run
bitcoin mining in collab” from the initial setup process?

In any case, Collab is a great tool, and I’m rather thankful to them. They may
have decided to monitor usage instead of trying to restrict it to make abuse
impossible.

I guess people these days belief that what is possible is also legal, and what
is legal is identical to being moral. To those people I point out: Google
noticing you is possible, shutting you down is legal, and banning you for life
is ethical if only by protecting users that don’t abuse free resources.

Doubly so, If you also blogbrag about it.

~~~
nostalgebraist
If you know what Colab's definition of abusive or disallowed use is (or even
whether they have such a definition), please let me know. This isn't meant as
a gotcha -- I actually haven't been able to find a full TOS or anything like
that, despite looking for one at the outset and then again while writing the
linked post. If it exists I want to know.

As I said in the post, the closest thing I can find is the FAQ at
[https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html](https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html)
(this may be what you're thinking of -- there is no "initial setup process,"
anyone logged in to a Google account can immediately connect to a runtime and
execute notebook cells). It says the following:

 _Why are hardware resources such as T4 GPUs not available to me?

The best available hardware is prioritized for users who use Colaboratory
interactively rather than for long-running computations. Users who use
Colaboratory for long-running computations may be temporarily restricted in
the type of hardware made available to them, and/or the duration that the
hardware can be used for. We encourage users with high computational needs to
use Colaboratory’s UI with a local runtime. Please note that using
Colaboratory for cryptocurrency mining is disallowed entirely, and may result
in being banned from using Colab altogether._

To me, this doesn't sound like "please don't use this wrong or too much, and
we assume you know what 'wrong' and 'too much' mean here." Consider how this
is written as an answer to a hypothetical user who has _already_ been
"temporarily restricted" and is looking for more info. They talk about this
restriction non-judgmentally, like it's a practical limitation of their tool
anyone might run into, not a moral line that "good" users will never cross
anyway.

(The part about cryptocurrency mining is different and perfectly
understandable, given the distinctive moral and perhaps legal facts of that
subject.)

See also my post [https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/190114849409/cloud-
ca...](https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/190114849409/cloud-candy) for
more thoughts on the subject. The screenshot there is from the 2017 conference
talk [https://gojko.net/2017/10/05/serverless-design-
gotocph.html](https://gojko.net/2017/10/05/serverless-design-gotocph.html)
which happily discusses unintended but economically rational use of AWS
products, like using IOT Gateway for non-IOT purposes where its pricing model
is convenient.

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
Your attempts to convince yourself somehow make it look even worse. At least
own the decision!

FWIW, whenever it takes you a long time to get something working, such as a
constantly running Collab with a static IP or automatically updated link to it
or DNS: that's a sign. Even more if, as in this case, what you are doing would
be trivial to enable/make easier if Google wanted to.

~~~
nostalgebraist
Serious question: did you read the post? You seem to be critiquing something
quite different from what I did.

------
MrEldritch
"shitpost engineering" seems like one of those wonderfully evocative terms
(like "premium mediocre") that seems to perfectly capture some aspect of our
age.

------
codetrotter
> Google seems to think I value avoiding some slight inconvenience at
> $1000/month, and what’s more, they’ve chosen to provide not a free trial of
> a convenient thing (a tried and true approach) but a free inconvenient
> version of a convenient thing, forever. This can’t even sell me on the
> convenience of the “real” thing, since I’ve never seen it!

Well, tbh my personal experience with so-called “free trials” is a bad one
because they often start to charge you after the free trial is over and when
you have a lot of things going then you forget to cancel which of course is
what they want but IMO a shady and immoral way of doing business.

I’ve been bitten by this a couple of times. Sometimes because I forgot to
cancel on time, other times because I thought I was signing up for something
with a one-time fee that turned out to be the monthly fee and they charge a
full year.

So with my bad experiences I am extremely unlikely at this point to sign up
for those kinds of trials if I can avoid it.

And when companies do that kind of stuff, depending on how they respond when I
discover what happened and get in touch with their customer service, if it
causes me grief then I will not do business with them again and I will tell my
friends and family to not do business with them either.

------
asparagui
Reach out to the TFRC team for some TPU credit:
[https://www.tensorflow.org/tfrc](https://www.tensorflow.org/tfrc)

They're definitely interested in people finding creative uses for TPU's and
blogging about the process, especially with code!

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mcemilg
Serving an app to 1k daily active user cost you for just $300/month but for
similar daily user with an nlp app will cost you $3000/month. I think the GPU
vms are overpriced because of the AI hype. Buying a GPU server like the old
days is much more cheap.

------
draugadrotten
TLDR; google provides computing resources for demo purposes for free, which
can be exploited for non-intended use by clever automation

~~~
skinkestek
Including some interesting reflections around both the author as well as
Google.

------
3wolf
What's the reasoning behind routing everything through your laptop rather than
just making the requests to Tumblr from collab? Do they block its IPs?

~~~
nostalgebraist
Just wariness about spreading around my tumblr credentials. There’s probably a
secure way to do it, I just haven’t thought about it much.

