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

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

#131

Post by mikkupikku »

evmaki wrote: post #67
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.

[flagged]

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

#132

Post by mikkupikku »

xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #111
delegate wrote: post #102

It's very tempting to agree to the 'gambling' part, given that both a jackpot and progress towards the goal in your project will give you a hit of dopamine. The difference is that in gambling 'the house always wins', but in our case we do make progress towards our goal of conquering the world with our newly minted apps. The situation where this comparison holds is when vibe coding leads nowhere and you don't accompli…

> The difference is that in gambling 'the house always wins', but in our case we do make progress towards our goal of conquering the world with our newly minted apps. What? Your vibe coded slop is just going to be competing with someone else's vibe coded slop.

The motivations for wanting to make the slop could be commercial profit, or it could be simply you trying to solve a problem for yourself. In either case, the slop is the goal and, if the agent isn't giving you complete trash, you should be converging towards your goal. The gambling analogy doesn't work.

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

#133

Post by mikkupikku »

squeefers wrote: post #117
delegate wrote: post #102

It's very tempting to agree to the 'gambling' part, given that both a jackpot and progress towards the goal in your project will give you a hit of dopamine. The difference is that in gambling 'the house always wins', but in our case we do make progress towards our goal of conquering the world with our newly minted apps. The situation where this comparison holds is when vibe coding leads nowhere and you don't accompli…

[flagged]

Sounds like you've had too much TV. It really does rot your brain, this is obvious to anybody who doesn't watch TV, but completely imperceptible to those who do.

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

#134

Post by mikkupikku »

mh2266 wrote: post #94

what kind of lame parties is the bluesky poster going to? is this a San Francisco thing?

Yeah, honestly seems like that guy is looking for a scapegoat to blame for himself being lame. If you can't put work down and let loose, that's a you problem, not a technology problem.

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

#135

Post by aljarry »

This does seem like a person getting hooked on idle games, or mobile/online games with artificially limited progress (that you can pay to lift). It's a type of delayed gratification that makes you anxious to get next one.

Not everyone gets hooked on those, but I do. I've played a bunch of those long-winded idle games, and it looks like a slight addiction. I would get impatient that it takes so long to progress, and it would add anxiety to e.g. run this during breaks at work, or just before going to sleep. "Just one more click".

And to be perfectly honest, it seems like the artificial limits of Anthropic (5 hour session limits) dig into similar mechanism. I do less non-programming hobbies since I've got myself a subscription.

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

#136

Post by RGamma »

Aerroon wrote: post #128
RGamma wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we're still in the expansion phase, so LLM life is actually good... for now.

It's not going to get worse than now though. Open models like GLM 5 are very good. Even if companies decide to crank up the costs, the current open models will still be available. They will likely get cheaper to run over time as well (better hardware).

That's good to hear. I'm not really up-to-date on the open models, but they will become essential, I'm sure.

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

#137

Post by sph »

krackers wrote: post #70
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…

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.

In human physiology/psychology as well, the chance of addiction itself is a function of timescale. This is why a nicotine patch is much less addictive than insufflated nicotine (hours to reach peak effect vs seconds), or why addictive software have plenty of sensory experiences attached to every action, to keep the user engaged.

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

#138

Post by baq »

enraged_camel wrote: post #109
baq wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

try codex 5.3. it's dry and very obviously AI; if you allow a bit of anthropomorphisation, it's kind of high-functioning autistic. it isn't an oracle, it'll still be wrong, but it's a powerful, completely different from claude tool.

Every time someone suggests Codex I give it a shot. And every time it disappoints. After I read your comment, I gave Codex 5.3 the task of setting up an E2E testing skeleton for one of my repos, using Playwright. It worked for probably 45 minutes and in the end failed miserably: out of the five smoke tests it created, only two of them passed. It gave up on the other three and said they will need “further investigatio…

moral of the story is use both (or more) and pick the one that works - or even merge the best ideas from generated solutions. independent agentic harnesses support multi-model workflows.

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

#139

Post by sph »

aljarry wrote: post #135

This does seem like a person getting hooked on idle games, or mobile/online games with artificially limited progress (that you can pay to lift). It's a type of delayed gratification that makes you anxious to get next one. Not everyone gets hooked on those, but I do. I've played a bunch of those long-winded idle games, and it looks like a slight addiction. I would get impatient that it takes so long to progress, and i…

I’d rather grind Runescape at this point, than become addicted at trying to automate away my job.

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

#140

Post by squeefers »

mikkupikku wrote: post #133
squeefers wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Sounds like you've had too much TV. It really does rot your brain, this is obvious to anybody who doesn't watch TV, but completely imperceptible to those who do.

> It really does rot your brain, this is obvious to anybody who doesn't watch TV, but completely imperceptible to those who do.

how do you block video on your PC? or do you literally mean audiovisual information broadcast onto actual television sets is the evil?

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