It’s bad that this is against the TOS in the first place, and reeks of anticompetitive behavior. Why does Anthropic care what frontend I use as long as I pay for their model?
Huge benefits: the ability to run any website as an app (dramatically cutting back on development costs and allowing us to finally replace Electron with PWAs), 30% cheaper apps (no Apple tax), ad-blocking, and better performance since WebKit will finally have some real competition.
> 1) Apple loves USB-C
Sure, that's why they refused to adopt it for almost a decade after it became the standard and fought the EU regulation tooth-and-nail.
> I don’t think one company should own all the stuff that Google does. It gives them way too many perverse incentives over the web.
Does it? It might give them perverse incentives in some cases, but in others it perfectly aligns their incentives by letting them internalize their externalities. The whole selling point of Chrome to executives, and the reason it's introduced so many nice features, is that consolidating means they have an incentive to invest in things that make their websites work better (a better Chrome means a better Google/Gmail/YouTube/Drive).
We all think of them as Google but let’s face it, they’re DoubleClick.
Google feeds DoubleClick. Gmail does too. YouTube is a pure ad play.
Drive/Docs/etc. I’d say drives Chrome and undercuts competitors.
And Chrome? It drives Google. And Google also helps drive YouTube.
They all end in ads.
If Chrome wasn’t owned by an ad company that owned all that other stuff I wouldn’t be as worried. I still don’t like the idea of a Chrome monoculture. But if it was independent I’d be less alarmed.
I think they might be, but only as long as it stays open-source (assuming we mean it works on Chromium and not Chrome). Honestly, I fundamentally don't have a problem with an open-source browser having a monopoly, because the open-source nature means that if things get bad you can always just fork it and make something better.
It's amazing how you can literally start a nonprofit to code a billion-dollar browser, give it away for free, and let people modify it however they want and then HN users will still find a way to act like this is being evil and exploitative. It's as if they care more about whining than they do about their supposed open-source principles.
I downloaded my archive and completely ended my GPT subscription last week based on some bad computer maintenance advice. Same thing here - using other models, never touching that product again.
Oh, it was DUMB. I was dumb. I only have myself to blame here. But we all do dumb things sometimes, owning your mistakes keeps you humble, and you asked. So here goes.
I use a modeling software called Rhino on wine on Linux. In the past, there was an incident where I had to copy an obscure dll that couldn't be delivered by wine or winetricks from a working Windows installation to get something to work. I did so and it worked. (As I recall this was a temporary issue, and was patched in the next release of wine.)
I hate the wine standard file picker, it has always been a persistent issue with Rhino3d. So I keep banging my head on trying to get it to either perform better or make a replacement. Every few months I'll get fed up and have a minute to kill, so I'll see if some new approach works. This time, ChatGPT told me to copy two dll's from a working windows installation to the System folder. Having precedent that this can work, I did.
Anyway, it borked startup completely and it took like an hour to recover. What I didn't consider - and I really, really should have - was that these were dll's that were ALREADY IN the system directory, and I was overwriting the good ones with values already reflecting my system with completely foreign ones.
And that's the critical difference - the obscure dll that made the system work that one time was because of something missing. This time was overwriting extant good ones.
But the fact that the LLM even suggested (without special prompting) to do something that I should have realized was a stupid idea with a low chance of success made me very wary of the harm it could cause.
> ...using other models, never touching that product again.
> ...that the LLM even suggested (without special prompting) to do something that I should have realized was a stupid idea with a low chance of success...
Since you're using other models instead, do you believe they cannot give similarly stupid ideas?
I'm under no misimpression they can't. But I have found ChatGPT to be most confident when it f's up. And to suggest the worst ideas most often.
Until you queried I had forgotten to mention that the same day I was trying to work out a Linux system display issue and it very confidently suggested to remove a package and all its dependencies, which would have removed all my video drivers. On reading the output of the autoremove command I pointed out that it had done this, and the model spat out an "apology" and owned up to ** the damage it would have wreaked.
** It can't "apologize" for or "own up" to anything, it can just output those words. So I hope you'll excuse the anthropomorphization.
reply