First of all, I absolutely love using Descript, but it is pricey at the level I want to use it at($600/year). I tried OBS studio and although that works for many, it is just not a good fit for me. So my question is: What is a good/compatible Descript alternative? I want to easily edit transcripts/video (podcast) and create clips in various social media formats, but I want to find a one-time payment alternative (ideal) or something less expensive. Does anyone have any suggestions? Trying to find something before Descript comes up for renewal.

Please see an update for me this morning in the comments. This disaster is going to make me a much better founder. I got up at 3:45 AM today to begin rebuilding my company. Original post follows: I’m standing here writing this in tears, and I want to give a very sobering warning to anyone who is considering upgrading from ChatGPT plus to a business Team’s account on ChatGPT. There is a a glitch that was unknown to me before I started this process, but is apparently well known in the open AI developer community that all of your data is deleted when you migrate it and you can’t get it back. Everything I’ve been building for months is just …. Gone. Other than what I had saved and backed up in my personal files, my entire ChatGPT history has been zeroed out, and it really hurts because this was like my external brain for both home and my business that I’m building. Open AI acknowledged that their company documentation failed to include a warning that all of my personal data would be deleted and everything that I have been working on since day one in my accounts has been deleted, and there’s nothing I can do to get it back even though I followed their exact instructions on merging my personal and business accounts, to the letter. I just paid $618 to upgrade my account to two seats on a business plan and merged the data from my personal account to my business plan. Within a minute or two of that transaction going through as I was following the step-by-step worksheet that ChatGPT itself printed out for me. My accounts froze, and I had to log out. I logged back in everything was blank. When I used my previous emails that I had my accounts tied to to log back in ChatGPT opened free tier accounts using my business email that I just paid $618 to open my business account on. I’ve escalated this to ChatGPT Support and they were extremely unhelpful. Basically they said sorry it’s a known issue and there’s nothing we can do. I was planning on shipping a product today using the ChatGPT business plan because it offers a secure link so that I’m not sending out raw proprietary JSON code.

I recently watched a podcast about where the AI race is heading. My notes: What's the "WHY" of the leading AI companies? “When I really grill them on why they’re doing this, they retreat into three things: - determinism, - the inevitable replacement of biological life with digital life, and - the idea that this will be a good thing anyway. At its core, it’s an emotional desire to meet and speak to the most intelligent entity they’ve ever encountered. They also have a kind of ego-religious intuition that they’ll somehow be part of it. It’s thrilling to them – like starting an exciting fire. They feel they’ll die either way, so they prefer to light it and see what happens.” (Image for this post was generated by Nano Banana only on the basis of this direct quote above.) Other key takeaways: "If you show me the incentive, I will show you the outcome" (Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner). Some leaders privately admit they would "clearly accelerate and go for the utopia" even given a 20% chance that "everybody dies and gets wiped out by this," a choice made without the consent of 8 billion people. AI presents a danger far exceeding previous automation cycles because it automates all cognitive labor. It is like a "flood of millions of new digital immigrants" working for less than minimum wage. The current path leads to creating mass joblessness without a transition plan, resulting in high likelihood of mass outrage and public riots. The definition of wisdom in any tradition involves "some kind of restraint," not racing as fast and narrowly as possible. Tristan Harris argues that this dystopian outcome is not inevitable, and humanity must exercise agency by making AI a "tier one issue" for politicians, demanding mandatory testing and common safety standards, and fostering a "massive public movement" and international coordination to choose a path of "narrow AIs" and restraint rather than racing toward an uncontrollable digital god. You'll find the video by searching for a podcast by Steven Bartlett with the leading AI expert on ethics, Tristan Harris.

My family asked me to create an app which will give them short daily reflections for Advent. So I opened Lovable and built Lumen Adventus. It's an Advent calendar with "candles" to light every day - short reflections and meditations, Act of Kindness for the day, a quote. It took me literally 1.5h from the idea to this version, and most of that was just the system "thinking". It's very simple, because I had no time so I followed Lovable's templates - it does all of the work for you, you just need to divide it into logical steps. It's in 4 languages (English, Spanish, French, Polish) because my family are all over the world. It's all free, unrelated to any business, just for practice, and only for 1-24 December. It's my second vibe-coded app. The texts were Ai generated, in the future I will customise them but I used only AI to see what it comes up with. I'd be happy to share it with you and answer any questions about building it but I assume the admins would not allow it and would delete the post. So, I'm only showing you a screen shot, and only one piece of advice - just have fun as a creator, learn by playing :)

There was a one time payment of $1 for signing here with the VIP option to get more details and access to info (including a book). Are you charging an extra $37 ? What’s the reason to that if there’s no approval to do it ? Why is that happening these days ?