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Comment on Ask HN: What tasks cost money through a UI but are free in code?parent

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I get your gist, but I'm not looking at this as a developer but as a journalist. The reason I specified tasks is it broadens the scope to "What I can use" from "What I must pay for".

For example, most people - and especially in my field where many journalists have old laptops - assume you could never run AI models yourself. Finding out Google Colab exists and has a liberal free tier was kinda crazy.

Another: the most privacy-safe way to transcribe interviews would be Whisper on-device, but the second best might be Whisper in a Colab doc. The uploaded files are deleted after each session and you can terminate the runtime and start a new one. AFAIK the data is relatively safer than other approaches (I prefer running transcription locally myself.) It only takes a line of code and a code block to get Whisper running, but few do this and for them, the space after that - Turboscribe, Notebook, etc - relies on compromising your data in some way or the other.

You've hit on it. Your own needs and experiences as a journalist are quite different from other users. It's very likely that good tooling for that audience is non-existent, and that might be worth writing or writing about.

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