alt Hacker News> So yes, it is free.
This sounds pedantic, but I think it's important to spell this out: this sort of stuff is only free if you consider what you're producing/exchanging for it to have 0 value.
If you consider what you're producing as valuable, you're giving it away to companies with an incentive to extract as much value from your thing as possible, with little regard towards your preferences.
If an idiot is convinced to trade his house for some magic beans, would you still be saying "the beans were free"?
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I don't think that's true. It's not that has zero value, it's that it has zero monetizable value.
Hackernews is free. The posts are valuable to me and I guess my posts are valuable to me, but I wouldn't pay for it and I definitely don't expect to get paid.
For YC, you are producing content that is "valuable" that brings people to their site, which they monetize through people signing up for their program. They do this with no regard for what your preferences are when they choose companies to invest in.
They sell ads (Launch, Hire, etc.) against the attention that you create. You ARE the product on HackerNews, and you're OK with it. As am I.
Same as OpenAI, I dont need to monetize them training on my data, and I am happy for you to as I would like to use the services for free.
I understand the point people are trying to make with this argument, but we are so far into a nearly universal scam economy where corporations see small (relative to their costs of business) fines as just part of normal expenses that I also think anyone who really believes the AI companies aren't using their data to train models, even if it is against their terms, is wildly naive.
I should add a section to the site/guide about privacy, just letting people know they have somewhat of a choice with that.
As for sharing code, most of the parts of a project/app/whatever have already been done and if an experienced developer hears what your idea is, they could just make it and figure it out without any code. The code itself doesn't really seem that valuable (well.. sometimes). Someone can just look at a screenshot of my aicodeprep app and just make one and make it look the same too.
Not all the time of course - If I had some really unique sophisticated algorithms that I knew almost no one else would or has figured out, I would be more careful.
Speaking of privacy.. a while back a thought popped into my head about Slack, and all these unencrypted chat's businesses use. It kinda does seem crazy to do all your business operations over unencrypted chat, Slack rooms.. I personally would not trust Zuckerberg to not look in there and run lots of LLMs through all the conversations to find anything 'good'! Microsoft.. kinda doubt would do that on purpose but what's to stop a rogue employee from finding out some trade secrets etc.. I'd be suprised if it hasn't been done. Security is not usually a priority in tech. They half-ass care about your personal info.