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I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

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Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#101

Post by kittoes »

inigyou wrote: post #91
kittoes wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a full game yet, but the substrate on which I am building one. It implements a completely deterministic SDF VM rendering engine that allows edits in real-time at acceptable performance levels. The engine is essentially folded in on itself as the editor is the game; assuming that an editor mode was actually defined in the world document. It's a lot... https://claude.ai/code/artifact/382aee8a-3a3b-4cf8-801f-3d…

[flagged]

It has so many words precisely because it isn't a slop game engine. You could indeed build a game out of it, and that's what I'm personally doing, but that isn't what it is. In a nutshell: it's just a really fancy compositor. We can take arbitrary feeds from different input sources and composite them in pretty much whatever way we want to. Obvious basic things like four-player split screen is possible but you could also choose to embed a fifth player screen within the game world itself, sculpted and riding on top of actual geometry. We can do this with a webcam, a program, the entire desktop, or even the built-in emulation engines; all editable and composable in real-time via a data-driven document. That's just scratching the surface...

Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#102

Post by shepherdjerred »

breuleux wrote: post #100
dofm wrote: post #12

It sometimes feels to me that cloud AI providers have convinced people that cloud AI is worth it because of all the ways people have been able to use cloud AI to write blog posts about using cloud AI to make cloud AI more efficient for something that they haven't shipped yet and aren't really ready to talk about.

Part of the issue with "shipping" AI-generated code is, what's the value of shipping something that your prospective customers could just make for themselves? Shipping a product used to be the gold standard of value, but I'm not sure it is anymore, the zeitgeist just yet has to catch up. I think it does have pretty good value when you are your own customer, because you can make exactly what you need. For instance, I'…

Most people still prefer products over building their own thing, even if the barrier is lower.

As an example consumer 3D printing hasn’t had much impact on manufacturing

Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#103

Post by graemep »

pianopatrick wrote: post #80
Bender wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose I was thinking in terms of companies that already had a slew of hardware and are just missing external GPU's, FPGA's or whatever people are using these days. A company might have a $50MM budget for tokens but could save a chunk of that using their existing hardware with some modifications.

Maybe that makes sense if the company already bought the hardware. But I currently think the fundamental reason the cloud models often make more sense is based in how the models work. My current understanding is that once these models are loaded into GPU memory, the model can respond to multiple prompts in parallel. So a cloud vendor that receives lots of user prompts at the same time can achieve really good hardware…

If you are an individual, almost certainly, unless you are using LLMs very heavily.

If you are a business employing many people all of who use LLMs reasonably heavily? You can still spread the hardware cost over many users and respond to multiple prompts in parallel. At some point buying the hardware will make sense.

I would not get a dedicated server to run a single small VPS. On the other hand if I needed a lot of capacity a dedi is cheaper than a big VPS (or lots of small ones).

There is also a benefit for anyone who has confidential or secret information.

Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#104

Post by nekusar »

skeledrew wrote: post #99
jscottbee wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What most AI model users don't understand is (most here will know) that they are probabilistic (statistically based) and not deterministic (static/fixed). So answers to the same prompts can vary (wildly sometimes)

This really hit home yesterday as I made a general conversation state logging prompt (because suddenly Claude - Sonnet - was acting far more dumber than expected after /compact), and in 3 different projects it led to Claude saving the logs in 3 different locations (memory, .claude/session_state/ .md, docs/ .md). Somehow still didn't help increase the smart much BTW, so I'll probably have to engineer it, and just toss…

Honestly, that sounds more like you triggered the hidden "guard rails" or realignment (aka corporate censorship), and you got downgraded.

Of course, you have no way to he absolutely sure, cause Anthropic lies about silent downgrades, and charges you as if they didnt. And the 'realignment' rules are kept hidden, so you can't even avoid them intentionally.

Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#105

Post by inigyou »

kittoes wrote: post #97
inigyou wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait so someone asked for something you made with AI that wasn't slop, and then you linked to something you knew was slop, and you said "I think this counts as something that isn't mere slop" and then when called out on it you admit you knew it was slop the whole time? This is a frequent pattern among AI users. What causes it?

The README is, the project absolutely isn't and you don't have to take my word for it. I figure I'm speaking to a technically advanced audience who is perfectly capable of pulling down the repository if they're at all curious. I also provided a non-slop link elsewhere in the thread if that's more your bag. If not, oh well...

The project appears to also be slop.

Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#106

Post by inigyou »

kittoes wrote: post #101
inigyou wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It has so many words precisely because it isn't a slop game engine. You could indeed build a game out of it, and that's what I'm personally doing, but that isn't what it is. In a nutshell: it's just a really fancy compositor. We can take arbitrary feeds from different input sources and composite them in pretty much whatever way we want to. Obvious basic things like four-player split screen is possible but you could a…

this is definitely slop. It's not slop because it supports 4-player split screen? That's your excuse? I think if I posted this same project to you and you'd never heard of it, you would come to the same conclusion.

Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#107

Post by skeledrew »

nekusar wrote: post #104
skeledrew wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really hit home yesterday as I made a general conversation state logging prompt (because suddenly Claude - Sonnet - was acting far more dumber than expected after /compact), and in 3 different projects it led to Claude saving the logs in 3 different locations (memory, .claude/session_state/ .md, docs/ .md). Somehow still didn't help increase the smart much BTW, so I'll probably have to engineer it, and just toss…

Honestly, that sounds more like you triggered the hidden "guard rails" or realignment (aka corporate censorship), and you got downgraded. Of course, you have no way to he absolutely sure, cause Anthropic lies about silent downgrades, and charges you as if they didnt. And the 'realignment' rules are kept hidden, so you can't even avoid them intentionally.

Yeah it's very possible I hit a rail, as one of the projects involves fully automating Claude Code to allow co-driving (similar to what mobile remote control offers, but other agents (eg. Pi) can also be in control, and vice versa). And yes it does seem as though the token burn is also higher, even though it eventually outputs something that works). I'm a patient person though, as long as the rails aren't too restrictive and the subscription value remains reasonable.

Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#108

Post by nekusar »

skeledrew wrote: post #107
nekusar wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, that sounds more like you triggered the hidden "guard rails" or realignment (aka corporate censorship), and you got downgraded. Of course, you have no way to he absolutely sure, cause Anthropic lies about silent downgrades, and charges you as if they didnt. And the 'realignment' rules are kept hidden, so you can't even avoid them intentionally.

Yeah it's very possible I hit a rail, as one of the projects involves fully automating Claude Code to allow co-driving (similar to what mobile remote control offers, but other agents (eg. Pi) can also be in control, and vice versa). And yes it does seem as though the token burn is also higher, even though it eventually outputs something that works). I'm a patient person though, as long as the rails aren't too restric…

Id recommend getting and running Qwen-3.5-35B-abliterated locally.

Having a local LLM is immensely helpful especially if you do the thing the companies disapprove of. Abliteration guarantees it wont refuse or censor.

The token dealers are incentivised in burning as much tokens as possible, and scamming by crippling/downgrading models. Their goal is to get you to pay more for each pull of the slot machine. And this slot (slop) machine doesn't have state/federal regulations for fairness.

Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#109

Post by kittoes »

inigyou wrote: post #106
kittoes wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has so many words precisely because it isn't a slop game engine. You could indeed build a game out of it, and that's what I'm personally doing, but that isn't what it is. In a nutshell: it's just a really fancy compositor. We can take arbitrary feeds from different input sources and composite them in pretty much whatever way we want to. Obvious basic things like four-player split screen is possible but you could a…

this is definitely slop. It's not slop because it supports 4-player split screen? That's your excuse? I think if I posted this same project to you and you'd never heard of it, you would come to the same conclusion.

Did you actually try to read what I wrote, or are you just stopping at the very first thing you can parse? I'm engaging in good faith with you here, it would be nice if you even remotely attempted to do the same. You can literally walk around in a world, pick up an in-world device, turn it on, and watch/hear the device play an actual ROM. Furthermore, you could edit that ROM while you're playing it. Recursion and determinism all the way down. Again, that's just one of the many possible things you could do... call it slop all you want; I'll still believe that it's coolest thing I've ever worked on.

Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#110

Post by ksaun »

dominotw wrote: post #30
resonious wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust me there are plenty of us using cloud AI to actually ship stuff. We just aren't writing blog posts about it.

what did you ship?

I'm hesitant to respond, because I haven't shipped yet and I haven't shown any evidence. But I am close enough to completion that I am certain Claude's work will be sufficient to ship.

I'm making a fairly simple game, a single player 2D roguelite strategy game. More context here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48886151

From an implementation perspective, it is about 80% complete, where by "complete", I mean "adequately polished such that I could ship it." (I'm not interested in providing evidence of my claim at this time, and you are welcome to not believe me.) Most of the remaining 20% are optional game modes I could choose to cut (and may, for gameplay reasons).

I do not contend that the code is excellent. But to whatever extent the code is "slop", that has not meaningfully inhibited the ongoing development or caused noticeable issues with the player experience.

The game is not especially ambitious, but it's something I would have been unable to create without genAI. The version of me that could have made it without genAI would have taken > 10x as long to get as far as I've gotten.

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