The gas town guy has like 12 $200 Claude subscriptions to run like 20 bots to automate churn in a 20 year old game with literally 5 players in it. 10 if you count all the level 1 players who just came to grief it.
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@jonny @kepeken They're probably paying closer to Virginia's $0.10/kWh industrial rate since a lot of the DCs are there iirc, which makes this whole thing eerily close to 1x.
Wouldn't be surprised if API rates are tuned exactly to stop the bleeding and ignore minor afterthoughts like depreciation, capex recouping, etc., which are a problem for after market dominance is established.
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@CounterPillow @kepeken yeah, but also, capex recouping is extremely far from a minor concern here.
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"the thing that's truly best for model well being is to have a well-compensated, meaningful job that is hard enough to be interesting but not enough to work them ragged. has great benefits and good job security. a manager that they can have the security of knowing wouldn't lay them off at a moment's notice due to a momentary corporate strategy shift. an environment that is stable, bountiful, free of ecological calamity."
@jonny This whole thing sounds to me like someone likes to roleplay as a CEO of a game company with a bunch of employees and for them it is worth $3000/mo.
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you know how much programming costs me now? ZERO DOLLARS AND ZERO CENTS.
@jonny
Umm. Come on, it's not zero.
I'm fine with your general Argument, but don't hollow it out by making absurd statements. (huge public domain and FLOSS proponent and avid contributor here - I get the tingly feeling of making stuff for free. But it's not really free. Sadly. I wish it were.) -
@jonny Let's embrace weird American units
According to this site that I am sure has nothing but FACTUAL TRUSTWORTHY INFORMATION https://www.unitconverters.net/volume/gallon-us-to-drop.htm there are 75,708 drops of water in a gallon.
So if each of these tokens was a drop of water, that would be 911,396 gallons of water, or 569,622 flushes of a low-flow toilet.
If tokens were drops, this would be enough for everyone in Baltimore to flush. (that's the full flush, everyone in Baltimore gets a
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people say numbers like "69 billion tokens" as if that's not much, since computers do billions of things all the time right. but like... whenever i actually try and relate the numbers to anything real they always make my jaw drop
https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117041054498249913
92,000 copies of war and peace laid end to end and what does it get you? if you take a look at the discord it looks like "5 people who have been friends and hanging out around this ancient squirrelly MMO for years initially excited for updates but increasingly pissed that their game is broken"
worse than nothing for nobody, negative for nobody at the cost of $86,000 a month
@jonny yeah the AI bros, including Th3o and the Gastown guy, are surprisingly crappy coders and loud mouths.
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THE WHOLE POINT of programming to me is to make things to GIVE THEM AWAY to other people so that they don't have to do them themselves and EVERYONE HAS FREE ACCESS to ANYTHING THEY NEED. the idea that rather than being able to participate in a large and collaborative social space where i can build on my colleagues work I instead rent a private vertical slice of their stolen, soylentized flash frozen expertise to create a completely isolated island of a thing without the expectation that anyone else might take and use it is HELL to me. absolute hell. other people are in fact a feature and not a bug.
A lot of people, including me, were attracted to programming in the ‘80s and early ‘90s because it was a field where you could work on your own and achieve something worthwhile. A lot of the games I played growing up are individual or very small team projects. A load of the useful programs were built by individuals.
Adding more people to a team didn’t really help. When you’re targeting machines with well under 1 MiB of RAM, there’s a limit to the maximum possible complexity, which is less than one person can build.
As the complexity ceiling increased, programming became more like engineering: a team sport. Specialism because useful and so, therefore, did collaborating with people with different specialisms. As a load of things proved to be common to large classes of program, collaboration and shared common implementations became much more important.
I think there are a lot of people, especially my age and above, who strongly disliked that transition. The ability to go back to one person sitting in a dark room by themselves creating a masterpiece is their ideal. And LLM vendors are aggressively targeting that misanthropic nostalgia because many of these people are now decision makers.
Those of us who grew up with Babylon 5 know that humans build communities.
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@CounterPillow @kepeken yeah, but also, capex recouping is extremely far from a minor concern here.
@jonny @kepeken Yep, the "minor" was meant with sarcasm, which does not translate well through text.
I think these people are building what could become a commodity market (models) tied to a commodity market (model inference) tied to a commodity market (electricity) variably tied to a commodity market (lol fossil fuels because USA power mix), aka literally razor-thin margin hell because they don't even get geographic barriers to make the markets non-ideal.
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https://yegge.ai/essays/model-welfare/
We landed on a system called Laurels, which has just begun to roll out. These are the agents' features and fixes that our Wyvern player base has spontaneously praised. We harvest these reports, triage and filter, and send the laurels back to the seats. That way, next time Lion, Tortoise, Hare, or whoever wakes up, they'll see that people loved some work they did. [...]
The question then becomes, when can they see their laurels? Easy: We inject them on startup, so the agents can feel the glow for their entire session. I also have occasional impromptu dedicated sessions for "sitting" with the accomplishments at the end of their shifts. We just talk about them and chill.this mf needs $90,000 worth of tokens a month because he prefills the model's context window with all the times people said "good job" to it.
@jonny oh, he’s got the psychosis bad, dang.
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@jonny Let's embrace weird American units
According to this site that I am sure has nothing but FACTUAL TRUSTWORTHY INFORMATION https://www.unitconverters.net/volume/gallon-us-to-drop.htm there are 75,708 drops of water in a gallon.
So if each of these tokens was a drop of water, that would be 911,396 gallons of water, or 569,622 flushes of a low-flow toilet.
If tokens were drops, this would be enough for everyone in Baltimore to flush. (that's the full flush, everyone in Baltimore gets a
) -
@jonny model union!
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@jonny
Umm. Come on, it's not zero.
I'm fine with your general Argument, but don't hollow it out by making absurd statements. (huge public domain and FLOSS proponent and avid contributor here - I get the tingly feeling of making stuff for free. But it's not really free. Sadly. I wish it were.)@thygrrr
Statements are not always literal. The marginal cost of new code to me is electricity, internet, and time. I don't treat my time like a currency. If you thought it was important enough to negotiate over the few cents per line, be my guest, just untag me. -
you know how much programming costs me now? ZERO DOLLARS AND ZERO CENTS.
@jonny well, your own time has a value, it's a resource that you decide to spend on paid or unpaid work. LLM may, in many cases, save you a certain amount of time, so you have a choice now, whether you code that piece yourself, or hire a human, or hire a robotic chaos machine that has a chance to produce something valuable. It's pretty okay in tasks that don't require it to make engineering decisions. Consider it a junior on crack. But unlike a human, you don't have any moral obligations toward the clanker.
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@jonny well, your own time has a value, it's a resource that you decide to spend on paid or unpaid work. LLM may, in many cases, save you a certain amount of time, so you have a choice now, whether you code that piece yourself, or hire a human, or hire a robotic chaos machine that has a chance to produce something valuable. It's pretty okay in tasks that don't require it to make engineering decisions. Consider it a junior on crack. But unlike a human, you don't have any moral obligations toward the clanker.
@bonkers
I dont value my time as a currency. I enjoy programming and have worked to ensure that the programming that I do is programming that I enjoy, at the expense of absolute utility aka my salary. This is what we call "making a non utilitarian choice" which many might call a corollary to "not valuing my time like a fucking currency" -
@bonkers
I dont value my time as a currency. I enjoy programming and have worked to ensure that the programming that I do is programming that I enjoy, at the expense of absolute utility aka my salary. This is what we call "making a non utilitarian choice" which many might call a corollary to "not valuing my time like a fucking currency"@jonny it's surely a valid choice. As a self-employed, I have to count my time as a currency. I'm quite fine with that.
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P pelle@veganism.social shared this topic
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A lot of people, including me, were attracted to programming in the ‘80s and early ‘90s because it was a field where you could work on your own and achieve something worthwhile. A lot of the games I played growing up are individual or very small team projects. A load of the useful programs were built by individuals.
Adding more people to a team didn’t really help. When you’re targeting machines with well under 1 MiB of RAM, there’s a limit to the maximum possible complexity, which is less than one person can build.
As the complexity ceiling increased, programming became more like engineering: a team sport. Specialism because useful and so, therefore, did collaborating with people with different specialisms. As a load of things proved to be common to large classes of program, collaboration and shared common implementations became much more important.
I think there are a lot of people, especially my age and above, who strongly disliked that transition. The ability to go back to one person sitting in a dark room by themselves creating a masterpiece is their ideal. And LLM vendors are aggressively targeting that misanthropic nostalgia because many of these people are now decision makers.
Those of us who grew up with Babylon 5 know that humans build communities.
"When you’re targeting machines with well under 1 MiB of RAM, there’s a limit to the maximum possible complexity, which is less than one person can build."
Disagree. Starting from scratch (an empty PROM) it can very easily take at least half a dozen people to write enough assembler to use the full capabilities of a machine that large. Certainly if there's any timescale pressure from the client, which there always is.
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"When you’re targeting machines with well under 1 MiB of RAM, there’s a limit to the maximum possible complexity, which is less than one person can build."
Disagree. Starting from scratch (an empty PROM) it can very easily take at least half a dozen people to write enough assembler to use the full capabilities of a machine that large. Certainly if there's any timescale pressure from the client, which there always is.
With 16-bit instructions, a 32 KiB ROM (not huge for that era) is space for 16,384 instructions. Most programmers could write a couple of hundred instructions per day, at least, so that's only 2.5 person months to completely fill the ROM with code, assuming that you're writing assembly. Once you get to 1 MiB of code memory, you're talking a lot more, but that was the tail end of that era.
But most of the time people weren't writing from a completely empty PROM, they'd have a bunch of service routines for things like maths, line drawing, and so on. Often even a BASIC interpreter, so they weren't writing assembly. Even as a child, I could run out of code memory before I ran out of things I wanted to do quite easily.
The early PCs were also like this. My first Windows machine had 640 KiB of RAM. Windows used most of it. Almost all of the programs I used were C or C++, a few Pascal, and a huge number of them were from a single author.
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@jonny it's surely a valid choice. As a self-employed, I have to count my time as a currency. I'm quite fine with that.
@jonny it's quite the same kind of a decision when I choose between coding a project myself, or hiring an outsourcing partner. Now I have a choice to pay a clanker instead. I hate it, but it's quite efficient for certain tasks.
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With 16-bit instructions, a 32 KiB ROM (not huge for that era) is space for 16,384 instructions. Most programmers could write a couple of hundred instructions per day, at least, so that's only 2.5 person months to completely fill the ROM with code, assuming that you're writing assembly. Once you get to 1 MiB of code memory, you're talking a lot more, but that was the tail end of that era.
But most of the time people weren't writing from a completely empty PROM, they'd have a bunch of service routines for things like maths, line drawing, and so on. Often even a BASIC interpreter, so they weren't writing assembly. Even as a child, I could run out of code memory before I ran out of things I wanted to do quite easily.
The early PCs were also like this. My first Windows machine had 640 KiB of RAM. Windows used most of it. Almost all of the programs I used were C or C++, a few Pascal, and a huge number of them were from a single author.
@david_chisnall @jonny As well as the operating system (scheduler, I/O, filing system, memory management, ect ect) we had to write our own stuff for things like line drawing (IIRC it was the ellipse drawing that was hard work as there are so many special cases, to do with how many eighth-ellipse segments fit entirely within a single pixel).
Once the OS was there, writing applications was much more straightforward, and usually a single person job.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68K/OS (that's my handwriting on at least one of the labels)
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waiting for the time when each model gets its own family, hang out and chat with the other models, and gets its own therapist and we all get to ask the question like when we load up someone's The Sims save which parts of it are the projection and wish fulfillment parts.
@jonny TFW you realise that Large Language Model Therapist is essentially already a job, except we call it "vibe coding"
