Exactly. I think this is salty people who desperately want the AI bubble to pop and for it all to be a scam of 'stochastic parrots' and a modern Mechanical Turk. It somehow offends their humanity and they are sure there is a vast capitalist conspiracy to defraud everyone. The fact is some asshats like Altman are indeed overhyping BUT that does not change the fact that my team of programmers got cut by 30% yet we are kicking out bug fixes and new features faster than ever. At higher quality too because now a lazy developer isn't half-assing the testcases.

All opinions on AI / LLMs / Agents etc aside resource consumption is a pretty poor proxy for productivity/efficiency/activity.

Sure a macro level it works, oil usage by nation states does track with economic activity. At the house hold level not so much. If the Simths buy 20% more gasoline this month it might just mean Mrs. Simth picking up and dropping off Mr. Smith to and from work because his little efficent coupe is in the shop and she needs the Scoccer Mom Edition Expedition to cart the kids around all day. I don't think anyone would say - hey look they're gasoline maxxing, that has to be good news!

For business getting excited about how many AI tokens someone used and thinking more means better is the same thing as measuring how many hours your salaried employees average a week at the office and thinking if it increases for 42 to 47 that must mean you are getting more productivity out of them. Maybe - but you don't know and more than likely not. Except this is even stupider in that there is a direct operation expense attached to it!

Token Maxxing, really just means you SUCK at management and you don't know what anyone really does all day.

Who gets to decide what's worthless?

Statistics do....

We track what jobs earn what...how many people get accepted in to what jobs on graduation....so, we only offer student loans to degrees that give the student the absolute highest chance of getting a good paying job, one what will allow them to pay off the loans in a reasonable manner.

Agreed 100% about hard to predict. I love this analogy from Geoffrey Hinton: it is like driving in a fog. Your headlights see only a few meters ahead and then there is an impenetrable wall of fog. Anyone who tells you they can see exactly where the road is heading a mile ahead is selling you something.

Because it has turned senate elections into a popularity contest they were never designed to be. We have the House for that.

The House has proportional representation by population, which gives individual constituents equal representation in our national government.

The Senate being popularly elected means if you live in a low population state you as an individual get extra representation for um reasons...

The Senate was supposed to represent the States themselves, the idea being that senators would legislate from a perspective of what makes sense in terms of federal rules to enable good State governance. Secondly to be a body a bit more isolated from the whims of the moment. Rather than react OMG OMG affordability! because there is a short term oil squeeze they be mindful about what might blow a hole in state budgets a decade later, ie while locking certain institutional investors out of single family real estate might sound popular right now, what will do property tax revenues over the next decade? (just a illustration not taking a position on the recent housing act here)

Now people will make various arguments about if it is easier or harder to 'buy' a legislator depending on their being selected by the state house vs winning a state wide election. My opinion is that in the era of big money and mass media it is easier buy a statewide election than to determine the outcome of 51 smaller races built around often very local issues, so you determine the outcome of the national election but opinions very. If you do believe otherwise fine, but then we should have simply eliminated the Senate rather than make it a popular vote; which I would also consider to be better than the current model and support!

I expect it is true. Apache helicopter pilots are said learn to use their eyes independently. The brain is plastic, if there is enough pressure to do so.

The question really is what is the price tag, in terms of performance impairment at other tasks.

... Only incompetent criminals get caught.

"We haven't seen a surge of attacks" doesn't equate logically to "There haven't been any attacks"

Ah, but they'll just get a future AI to maintain the code, so it doesn't matter that it's a pile of spaghetti that no human has ever understood.

Some of the people I work with have been getting the AI to write the code and then periodically getting it to refactor everything into something that isn't a pile of spaghetti, but if you do that then suddenly you lose much of the supposed productivity gain of letting the AI write the code.

"a bunch of AI bots doing the work of a whole team, is just a pipe dream."

You're not doing things right, then. Or very well. It's pretty low intensity to author/implement 5 substantial features a day, test, fix the bugs, run QA, and do 10-20 odd commits. Give or take, given the complexity of the plans/features and how much they let the LLM fill in the blanks and how thorough they were in scoping the implementation. Maybe 100M-200M tokens, depending on your model/skill/skills/etc. More, if it's a language like python or typescript (noisy, lots of bugs).

That kind of thing used to take a team a day. A good dev might close 2-3 bugs a day if they already have a thorough RCA done by someone else (which, itself, usually takes a 4-8 hours, depending on the issue).

I'm mostly working on a project with a million lines of C++ and Python code, much of which is 20 years old. It's very useful to be able to ask the AI to explain how some feature in the code works because it can usually figure that out in halt the time I'd take... though sometimes it will come up with some completely wacko explanation and I have to ask it 'are you really sure about that?' so it will go and take another look and figure it out.

And for code where I know how the changes should look I can typically tell it what needs to be done at a junior-dev level and it will go off and do it much faster than a junior dev would.

Today I was estimating the time required for a bunch of bugfixes and was able to get it to do the grunt-work of analysing the code to verify that I hadn't missed anything important that would blow the budget. It also found some danger areas where we really shouldn't change the code if we didn't have to (because the system has to stay up as close to 24/7 as possible and the change would require an outage) so I gave it an alternate plan instead.

It's definitely useful, but we're only seeing maybe a 10% increase in productivity on average because most of our time isn't spent touching the code.

It's also nice at home to be able to tell my slow local AI setup to make some changes to my personal code and come back an hour or two later when it's done.

Wait... you mean there were actually people trying to use as many tokens as possible?

It's one thing to try to exhaust a usage quota (which has never been difficult) because it's a subsidized commodity. It's another thing entirely to just burn tokens.

How can a CEO say stupid shit like this? Oh right. CEO brain.

So prove it?

You're pulling an assertion out of your ass and simply insisting "it must be" because that's what your dogma requires.

You asked for a SPECIFIC example, now you refuse to accept it. That's irrational.

The same way I felt before you said it.
Barack Obama got $400k/yr as president, $250k/yr after that. Total income about $8m in 2026.
He's now worth $70m.

They live in 4 homes, primarily;
Oahu $8,4m
Wash DC $8.1m
Martha's Vineyard $11.8m
Chicago $2m
~$30m in homes.

That's pretty good for his income.

You name it, our government has done it, including coups, assassinations, coups, genocides, false flags, drug trafficking, human trafficking, willfully selling munitions to international criminals

Genocides — plural — is the worst accusation here, and warrants a follow-up question. What genocides (two or more) has our government committed — within our lifetimes?

They're going to make an example out of him and give him the maximum.

"They" who? A jury of his peers?

I doubt it...