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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

#201

Post by co_king_5 »

shafyy wrote: post #120
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only matters if the rivals have same performance. Opus pricing is 50x Deepseek, and like >100x of small models. It should match rival if the performance is same, and if they can produce model with 10x lower token usage, they can charge 10x. Gemini increased the same Flash's price by something like 5x IIRC when it got better.

I bet that the actual "performance" of all the top-tier providers is so similar, that branding has bigger impact on if you think Claude or ChatGPT peforms better.

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

#202

Post by co_king_5 »

estimator7292 wrote: post #199

It seems like some of us treat tokens as the level of fuel in the code machine. When it runs out, you simply go do something else. What's wild to me is that there's a whole other segment of people that treat tokens as, I dunno, some kind of malicious gatekeeping to the magical program generator. Some kind of endorphin rush of extracting functional code from a naive and poorly formed idea. To the former group, the gam…

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

#203

Post by co_king_5 »

mikkupikku wrote: post #124
samrus wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats a bit naive. Anthropic makes way more money if they gey you to use past your plans limit and wonder if you should get the next tier or switch to tokens

The price jump between subscription tiers is so high that relatively few people will upgrade instead of waiting a few more hours, and even if somebody does upgrade to the next subscription level, Anthropic still has an incentive to provide satisfactory answers as quickly as possible, to minimize tokens used per subscription, and because there is plenty of competition so any frustrated users are potential lost custome…

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

#204

Post by BatteryMountain »

HolyLampshade wrote: post #151

I know I'm running a bit late to the party here, but maybe someone can provide some color that I (on the slightly older end of the spectrum when it comes to this) don't fully understand. When people talk about leaving their agents to run overnight, what are those agents actually doing? The limited utility I've had using agent-supported software development requires a significant amount of hand holding, maybe because…

Spin up a mid sized linux vm (or any machine with 8 or 12 cores will do with at least 16GB RAM with nmve). Add 10 users. Install claude 10 times (one per user). Clone repo 10 times (one per user). Have a centralized place to get tasks from (db, trello, txt, etc) - this is the memory. Have a cron wake up every 10 minutes and call your script. Your script calls claude in non-interactive mode + auto accept. It grabs a new task, takes a crack at it and create a pull request. That is 6 tasks per hour per user, times 12 hours. Go from there and refine your harnesses/skills/scripts that claude's can use.

In my case, I built a small api that claude can call to get tasks. I update the tasks on my phone.

The assumption is that you have a semi-well structured codebase already (ours is 1M LOC C#). You have to use languages with strong typing + strict compiler.You have to force claude to frequently build the code (hence the cpu cores + ram + nmve requirement).

If you have multiple machines doing work, have single one as the master and give claude ssh to the others and it can configure them and invoke work on them directly. The usecase for this is when you have a beefy proxmox server with many smaller containers (think .net + debian). Give the main server access to all the "worker servers". Let claude document this infrastructure too and the different roles each machine plays. Soon you will have a small ranch of AI's doing different things, on different branches, making pull requests and putting feedback back into task manager for me to upvote or downvote.

Just try it. It works. Your mind will be blown what is possible.

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

#205

Post by NeutralCrane »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #82
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…

> What's Anthropic's optimization target??? Getting you the right answer as fast as possible! What makes you believe this? The current trend in all major providers seem to be: get you to spin up as many agents as possible so that you can get billed more and their number of requests goes up. > Slot machines have variable reward schedules by design LLMs by all major providers are optimized used RLHF where they are opti…

My (possibly dated) understanding is that OpenAI/Anthropic are charging less than it costs right now to run inference. They are losing money while they build the market.

Assuming that is still true, then they absolutely have an incentive to keep your tokens/requests to the absolute minimum required to solve your problem and wow you.

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

#206

Post by cootsnuck »

candiddevmike wrote: post #183
HolyLampshade wrote: post #151

I know I'm running a bit late to the party here, but maybe someone can provide some color that I (on the slightly older end of the spectrum when it comes to this) don't fully understand. When people talk about leaving their agents to run overnight, what are those agents actually doing? The limited utility I've had using agent-supported software development requires a significant amount of hand holding, maybe because…

Maybe it's the programmer equivalent of rolling coal.

Fellow Midwesterner?

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

#207

Post by squeefers »

wiseowise wrote: post #166
squeefers wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Books are net positive for you, slop smoothens your brain IF you completely outsource your thinking to it. It’s not a rocket science.

unless the book contains instructions on how to do things... then youre just outsourcing thinking to the book right? people have to remember less with the printed word full stop. so whats the difference?

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

#208

Post by irishcoffee »

mikrotikker wrote: post #153
HolyLampshade wrote: post #151

I know I'm running a bit late to the party here, but maybe someone can provide some color that I (on the slightly older end of the spectrum when it comes to this) don't fully understand. When people talk about leaving their agents to run overnight, what are those agents actually doing? The limited utility I've had using agent-supported software development requires a significant amount of hand holding, maybe because…

I wrote a program to classify thousands of images but that was using a model running on my gaming PC. Took about 3 days to classify them all. Only cost me the power right?

Power, gaming rig, internet, somewhere to store the rig, probably pay property taxes too.

You can draw the line wherever you want. :) Personally, I wish I'd built a new gaming rig a year ago so I could mess with local models and pay all these same costs.

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

#209

Post by irishcoffee »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #110
delusional wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is nation-states funding private corporations "cut-throat competition"?

Ok, to be very honest I wrote that in the middle of having a couple of drinks. I guess, what I mean is, countries are funding AI labs because it can turn into a “winner-takes-it-all” competition. Unless the country starts blocking the leading providers. Private companies will turn towards the best, fastest, cheapest (or some average of them). Country borders don’t really matter. All labs are fighting to get the best…

> countries are funding AI labs because it can turn into a “winner-takes-it-all” competition.

Winner takes what exactly? They can rip off react apps quicker than everyone else? How terrifying.

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

#210

Post by hattmall »

BatteryMountain wrote: post #204
HolyLampshade wrote: post #151

I know I'm running a bit late to the party here, but maybe someone can provide some color that I (on the slightly older end of the spectrum when it comes to this) don't fully understand. When people talk about leaving their agents to run overnight, what are those agents actually doing? The limited utility I've had using agent-supported software development requires a significant amount of hand holding, maybe because…

Spin up a mid sized linux vm (or any machine with 8 or 12 cores will do with at least 16GB RAM with nmve). Add 10 users. Install claude 10 times (one per user). Clone repo 10 times (one per user). Have a centralized place to get tasks from (db, trello, txt, etc) - this is the memory. Have a cron wake up every 10 minutes and call your script. Your script calls claude in non-interactive mode + auto accept. It grabs a n…

So is this something you do with a monthly subscription or is this using API tokens?
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