After their recent change in tune to retain data for longer and to train on our data, I deleted my account.
Try to do that. There is no easy way to delete your account. You need to reach out to their support via email. Incredibly obnoxious dark pattern. I hate OpenAI, but everything with Anthropic also smells fishy.
We need more and better players. I hope that XAi will give them all some good competition, but I have my doubts.
I think it's fair to call out a dark pattern for account deletion (which, for better or worse, is common practice) - but the data training and data retention thing can both be disabled...I was much more surprised that they DIDN'T train on data as long as they did, when every other LLM provider was sucking in as much data as they could (OpenAI, Google, Meta, and xAI - although Meta gets a pass for providing the open-weight models in my head).
Anthropic has made AI safety a central pillar of their ethos and have shared a lot of information about what they're doing to responsibly train models...personally I found a lot of corporate-speak on this topic from OpenAI, but very little information.
The author seemingly had a lot of judgement and blame for the dad before finding this out. It sounds like they are seeking understanding. I think the last line makes that clear:
> the evening we found the love letters. his entire life, and mine as well
And it's not to say someone can't attach judgement to characters, or that no one should hold blame. But I think it's important to honor what the author is seeking.
This is the first I've heard this statement (not necessarily the idea), but I found it incredibly beautiful in it's simplicity - thanks for sharing!
Are there origins to this that you're aware of? With some searching I found some adjacent thread lines to stoicism and Buddhism, but nothing quite the same.