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by fenomas 213 days ago
SyncThing syncs only when both clients are running at the same time. Nobody who edits a document on a website expects that they'll need to leave that browser window open in order to see the document in a different browser.

Am I missing something? Is this seriously a heated HN debate over "why does this website need to store the text it sends to people who view the website?"?
1 comments
gausswho 213 days ago
We're not talking about collaborative tooling, just a record of what you've asked an AI assistant. If it doesn't sync right away, it's not the end of the world. I find that's true with most things.

And the clients don't need to be running at the same time if you have a third device that's always on and receiving the changes from either (like a backup system). Eventually everything arrives. It's not as robust as what Google or iCloud gives you, but it's good enough for me.

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fenomas 213 days ago
Chatgpt.com is essentially a CRUD app. What you're saying here amounts to saying that it could conceivably have been designed to work dramatically differently from all other CRUD apps. And obviously that's true, but why would it be?

It's a website! You submit text, that you'll view or edit later, so the server stores it. How is that controversial to a HN audience?

Also:

> the clients don't need to be running at the same time if you have a third device that's always on

An always-on device that stores data in order to sync it to clients is a server.

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gausswho 212 days ago
> An always-on device that stores data in order to sync it to clients is a server.

Yes. But it's my server. I burden myself to operate it so that persistence does not come at the cost of control.

I think we might be tilting at different windmills here.

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fenomas 212 days ago
TBH it sounds like you're just imagining a very different service than the one openAI operates. You're imagining something where you send an input, the server returns an output - and after that they're out of the equation, and storing the output somewhere is a separate concern that could be left up to the user.

But the service they actually operate is functionally a collaborative document editor - the chat histories are basically rich text docs that you can view, edit, archive, share with others, and which are integrated with various server-side tools. And the document very obviously needs to be stored on the server to do all those things.

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handoflixue 213 days ago
It's great that you'd enjoy a significantly worse product that requires you to also be familiar with a completely unrelated product.

For some reason, consumers have decided that they prefer a significantly better product that doesn't require any additional applications or technical expertise ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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