Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

"Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name

jkap.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 249 posts

Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name

#61

Post by BoxFour »

Aurornis wrote: post #56
BoxFour wrote: post #24

I wish the author had stuck to the salient point about work/life balance instead of drifting into the gambling tangent, because the core message is actually more unsettling. With the tech job market being rough and AI tools making it so frictionless to produce real output, the line between work time and personal time is basically disappearing. To the bluesky poster's point: Pulling out a laptop at a party feels awkwa…

> With the tech job market being rough and AI tools making it so frictionless to produce real output, the line between work time and personal time is basically disappearing. This isn't generally true at all. The "all tech companies are going to 996" meme comes up a lot here but all of the links and anecdotes go back to the same few sources. It is very true that the tech job market is competitive again after the post-…

It would never show up as some explicit rule or document. It just sort of happens when a few things line up: execs start off-handedly praising 996, stack ranking is still a thing, and the job market is bad enough that getting fired feels genuinely dangerous.

It starts with people who feel they’ve got more to lose (like those supporting a family) working extra to avoid looking like a low performer, whether that fear is reasonable or not. People aren’t perfectly rational, and job-loss anxiety makes them push harder than they otherwise would. Especially now, when "pushing harder" might just mean sending chat messages to claude during your personal time.

Totally anecdotal (strike 1), and I'm at a FAANG which is definitely not the median tech job (strike 2), but it’s become pretty normal for me to come back Monday to a pile of messages sent by peers over the weekend. A couple years ago even that was extremely unusual; even if people were working on the weekend they at least kept up a facade that they weren't.

Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name

#62

Post by Aurornis »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #18
ctoth wrote: post #11

The gambling analogy completely falls apart on inspection. Slot machines have variable reward schedules by design — every element is optimized to maximize time on device. Social media optimizes for engagement, and compulsive behavior is the predictable output. The optimization target produces the addiction. What's Anthropic's optimization target??? Getting you the right answer as fast as possible! The variability in…

> The gambling analogy completely falls apart on inspection. Slot machines have variable reward schedules by design — every element is optimized to maximize time on device. Social media optimizes for engagement, and compulsive behavior is the predictable output. The optimization target produces the addiction. Intermittent variable rewards, whether produced by design or merely as a byproduct, will induce compulsive be…

> Intermittent variable rewards, whether produced by design or merely as a byproduct, will induce compulsive behavior, no matter the optimization target.

This is an incorrect understanding of intermittent variable reward research.

Claims that it "will induce compulsive behavior" are not consistent with the research. Most rewards in life are variable and intermittent and people aren't out there developing compulsive behavior for everything that fits that description.

There are many counter-examples, such as job searching: It's clearly an intermittent variable reward to apply for a job and get a good offer for it, but it doesn't turn people into compulsive job-applying robots.

The strongest addictions to drugs also have little to do with being intermittent or variable. Someone can take a precisely measured abuse-threshold dose of a drug on a strict schedule and still develop compulsions to take more. Compulsions at a level that eclipse any behavior they'd encounter naturally.

Intermittent variable reward schedules can be a factor in increasing anticipatory behavior and rewards, but claiming that they "will induce compulsive behavior" is a severe misunderstanding of the science.

Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name

#63

Post by Aurornis »

roblh wrote: post #29
ctoth wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I will go out and I will plant a pepper plant and take care of it all summer long and obsessively ensure it has precisely the right amount of water and compost and so on... and ... for some reason (maybe I was on vacation and it got over 105 degrees?) I don't get a good crop. Does this mean I should not garden because it's a variable reward? Of course not. Sometimes I will go out fishing and I won't catch a…

It's a not a binary thing, it's a spectrum. There are many elements of uncertainty in every action imaginable. I'm inclined to agree with the other commenter though, the LLM slot machine is absolutely closer on that spectrum to gambling than your example is. Anthropic's optimization target is getting you to spend tokens, not produce the right answer. It's to produce an answer plausible enough but incomplete enough th…

> Anthropic's optimization target is getting you to spend tokens, not produce the right answer.

The majority of us are using their subscription plans with flat rate fees.

Their incentive is the precise opposite of what you say. The less we use the product, the more they benefit. It's like a gym membership.

I think all of the gambling addiction analogies in this thread are just so strained that I can't take them seriously. Even the basic facts aren't even consistent with the real situation.

Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name

#64

Post by sweetjuly »

8note wrote: post #41
roblh wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a not a binary thing, it's a spectrum. There are many elements of uncertainty in every action imaginable. I'm inclined to agree with the other commenter though, the LLM slot machine is absolutely closer on that spectrum to gambling than your example is. Anthropic's optimization target is getting you to spend tokens, not produce the right answer. It's to produce an answer plausible enough but incomplete enough th…

im on a subscription though. they want me to not spend tokens. that way my subscription makes money for them rather than costing them electricity and degrading their GPUs

Wouldn't that apply only to a truly unlimited subscription? Last I looked all of their subs have a usage limit.

If you're on anything but their highest tier, it's not altogether unreasonable for them to optimize for the greatest number of plan upgrades (people who decide they need more tokens) while minimizing cancellations (people frustrated by the number of tokens they need). On the highest tier, this sort of falls apart but it's a problem easily solved by just adding more tiers :)

Of course, I don't think this is actually what's going on, but it's not irrational.

Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name

#65

Post by hyperadvanced »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #43
jazzyjackson wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Step 1: deposit money into an Anthropic API account Step 2: download Zed and paste in your API Key Step 3: Give detailed instructions to the assistant, including writing ReadMe files on the goal of the project and the current state of the project Step 4: stop the robot when it's making a dumb decision Step 5: keep an eye on context size and start a new conversation every time you're half full. The more stuff in the c…

> Step 4: stop the robot when it's making a dumb decision Yeah I can't stop myself when I'm about to make a dumb decision, just look at my github repo. I ported Forth to a 1980s sampler and wrote DSP code on an 8-bit Arduino. How am I going to stop a robot making dumb decisions? Also, this all sounds like I'm doing a lot of skivvy work typing stuff in (which I hate) and not actually writing much code (which is the bi…

The robot will output text like “Oh, I see, the user wants me to make a Lovecraftian horror with asynchronous subprocess calls instead of HTTP endpoints, so I better suggest we reinstall the dependencies that are already installed so we can sacrifice this project to Mammoth”

It is at this point where you can say “NONONO YOU ABSOLUTE DONKEY stop that we just want a FastAPI endpoint!!” And it will go “You’re absolutely right, I was over complicating this!”

Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name

#66

Post by coldtea »

verdverm wrote: post #44
coldtea wrote: post #36

Ironically the linked text by this Kellog guy is 100% AI slop itself

what's ironic? The conversation under the post adds a lot of color to Tim's thoughts

It's ironic that the linked thoughts in the post (the black and white text screenshots) lamening AI overtaking our lives are themselves written by AI

Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name

#67

Post by evmaki »

ctoth wrote: post #11

The gambling analogy completely falls apart on inspection. Slot machines have variable reward schedules by design — every element is optimized to maximize time on device. Social media optimizes for engagement, and compulsive behavior is the predictable output. The optimization target produces the addiction. What's Anthropic's optimization target??? Getting you the right answer as fast as possible! The variability in…

The LLM is not the slot machine. The LLM is the lever of the slot machine, and the slot machine itself is capitalism. Pull the lever, see if it generates a marketable product or moment of virality, get rich if you hit the jackpot. If not, pull again.

Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name

#68

Post by toss1 »

ctoth wrote: post #11

The gambling analogy completely falls apart on inspection. Slot machines have variable reward schedules by design — every element is optimized to maximize time on device. Social media optimizes for engagement, and compulsive behavior is the predictable output. The optimization target produces the addiction. What's Anthropic's optimization target??? Getting you the right answer as fast as possible! The variability in…

Doesn't the alignment sort of depend on who is paying for all the tokens?

If Dave the developer is paying, Dave is incentivized to optimize token use along with Anthropic (for the different reasons mentioned).

If the Dave's employer, Earl, is paying and is mostly interested in getting Dave to work more, then what incentive does Dave have to minimize tokens? He's mostly incentivized by Earl to produce more code, and now also by Anthropic's accidentally variable-reward coding system, to code more... ?

Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name

#69

Post by maplethorpe »

ctoth wrote: post #58
scuff3d wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. A platform who makes money the more you have to use it is definitely optimizing to get you the right answer in as few tokens as possible. There is absolutely no incentive to do that, for any of these companies. The incentive is to make the model just bad enough you keep coming back, but not so bad you go to a competitor. We've already seen this play out. We know Google made their search results worse to drive…

Please go read how the Anthropic max plan works. IF I USE LESS TOKENS, ANTHROPIC GETS MORE MONEY! You are blindly pattern matching to "corporation bad!" without actually considering the underlying structure of the situation. I believe there's a phrase for this to do with probabilistic avians?

What if I use zero tokens, as I'm currently doing? Do they get any money then?

Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name

#70

Post by krackers »

ctoth wrote: post #22
CGMthrowaway wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The gambling analogy completely falls apart on inspection. Slot machines have variable reward schedules by design — every element is optimized to maximize time on device. Social media optimizes for engagement, and compulsive behavior is the predictable output. The optimization target produces the addiction. Intermittent variable rewards, whether produced by design or merely as a byproduct, will induce compulsive be…

Sometimes I will go out and I will plant a pepper plant and take care of it all summer long and obsessively ensure it has precisely the right amount of water and compost and so on... and ... for some reason (maybe I was on vacation and it got over 105 degrees?) I don't get a good crop. Does this mean I should not garden because it's a variable reward? Of course not. Sometimes I will go out fishing and I won't catch a…

The timescale is one difference, it's hard to get "sucked in" in the gambling-like mindless state when the timescales are over seasons as opposed to minutes. There's a reason gambling isn't done in a correspondence format.
Post reply on HN