Hurray market competition and what capitalism was meant to be. Go above in providing a service or the customer leaves.
What I read on social media about people and these resets gives off literal worst kind of addiction vibes. I've literally seen people talking about "Oh I had an existential crisis without Fable/GPT-5.6"
These people legitimately need help, or alternatively a social life.
Maybe its different on my end because I just use a sub outside of work for fun stuff. At work its not my money so I don't really care. I go to work, maybe use these subs at home every once in a while for a fun personal project and if I hit the limits (I rarely even do) I play video games or hang out with my wife/family.
People are borderline tying their identities to these models it seems, and yet most people aren't even building anything interesting.
Yes, 100%. The author seems to be describing, quite lucidly, how he is getting sucked into a gambling-like addiction to these LLMs… although he seems unaware of the implications of that.
1. The end of unlimited token subsidization and a new status quo of metered usage limits.
2. Adding to the above, self-initiated usage limit resets give you some control and again help lessen the sting of the end of subsidization.
Right now though, I think Anthropic and OpenAI are in open MAU war ahead of their respective IPOs and that might be a bigger factor.
He's eagerly awaiting his next hit of dopamine from his favorite model. He's setting timers to be ready for when his next hit comes available. He's spinning up unnecessary queries just to start the timer ticking on new models.
You could basically write the same article about some guy who sits in a casino all day eagerly awaiting double-your-winnings bonuses or similar.
This one just makes sense though. If you have a body of work to do that you know will exceed your 5 hour limit, then sending a message 3 hours before you start so that the reset happens in the middle enables you to do a task in one sitting.
"Not wanting to waste money" is the polar opposite of gambling.
Your post literally describes your fascination with trying to figure out the pattern of a "random" reward that you get, and trying to maximize the value you get out of it.
I put "random" in scare quotes because I strongly believe that—just as slot machine payouts are carefully structured to keep you playing—these LLM resets are structured to keep heavy users like you coming back to max out their usage, and to progressively upgrade it.
Several other commenters have also stated this same suspicion about the pattern of resets you're describing.
> "Not wanting to waste money" is the polar opposite of gambling.
From everything I've read about gambling addiction, particularly Jay Caspian Kang, that seems wrong.
The desire to "not waste money" and "get back to even" seems like a huge part of what motivates gamblers to keep gambling.
As someone who had family members go through gambling addiction this is the primary mechanism behind it.
Addicts don't see it as "cool fun dopamine kicks" but instead find it the only way they can get back to normal/where they are supposed to be
Logically, gambling is like going to the movies. You expect to pay x currency for y value of entertainment. If y falls short of expectations you might feel like you wasted your money, but who becomes addicted to going to the movies to try to get even? There is probably someone who has, but I’ve never heard of it and it doesn’t seem to be common; not like gambling addictions. For all intents and purposes it doesn’t happen.
But gambling addictions do happen, fairly regularly. Perhaps it is loss aversion coupled with the aforementioned dopamine hit associated with gambling that makes it so prevalent?
Like the LLM getting the solution right?
- 80% of prompts get everything correct and are confirmed correct with manual validation
- 19% of prompts make a minor mistake based on an ambiguity of the original prompt (user error not LLM error), but then reliably fixed in a followup prompt
- 1% of prompts causes more problems than it solves and is more pragmatic to just revert
For 99% good output, there isn't much of a dopamine rush when there is good output. The dopamine rushes are for the <1% odds.
From the other replies on this post, I suspect no one believes me, but I am offering these numbers in good faith.
I think many people who don't believe you just haven't built-up the kind of prompt history & MCP / CLI tooling etc that lets you get to the point where things work at that level of accuracy.
Hope it helps to know that at least some of us here understand and are seeing the same thing. And if it's anything like my experience with Fable, "always be more ambitious". The capabilities of the models are often limited only by what you're brave enough to ask for. I keep finding I'm not ambitious enough.
This right here. Any gambler would recognize that statement.
I've been researching LLM prompt optimization for longer than ChatGPT has existed; I was successfully optimizing the output of GPT-2 back in 2019.
Some of these things are only possible to really see in hindsight. Yes, you've been working on these things for a while, but these systems are notably different in their capacity and strings they pull on us.
Be well, please.
Every single prompt worked without issue, and it got most of the way on the first try with the initial prompt (+ a couple visibility bugs due to the agent not having Computer Vision to see said menu bar app) such as:
> Create a SwiftUI menu bar app named `swiftmote` using theto create the most user friendly app following Apple's HID guidelines for creating a remote that can operate a Apple TV on a local network. Instead of reimplementing the protocols needs to interface with an Apple TV, use the Python package `pyatv` and host it within the SwiftUI app as a sidecar along with a Python installation.
I have my own Apple TV I can manually verify that it worked as expected, which is notable because the agent can't test or lie about this pipeline because it does not have access to the Apple TV.
That is not hallucination or psychosis. If you want, I can release all the prompts I used. (EDIT: Sure, why not, here are the prompts. If I don't complain about something in a followup prompt, assume it worked correctly: https://gist.github.com/minimaxir/30fa820daa1392da13026ec6aa... )
Might be the case here, but just setting a timer and being generally hyped about something is not enough for that.
Very weird how convinced some here seem to be that addiction is involved while they apparently don't know anything about the diagnosis criteria.
you're projecting, it's just insanely irritating to work with a tool that 1) limits its' own use 2) with a random interval.
keeping in mind that plenty of people are making money on token use..
this guy sets a timer to wake up for work; he appears to be addicted to work.
I also have a Netflix subscription. I watch a couple of things on it and stop. I don't think to myself I need to maximize my subscription so let me watch movies all the time and wake up at 2 AM to make sure the next movie starts.
Do you understand how the psychological response to the "random" disappearance of an annoyance is pretty much exactly the same as the psychological response to the "random" appearance of a reward?
I put "random" in square quotes because neither are in fact totally random, but both are clearly quite carefully engineered to provoke the desired response.
> you're projecting
I am not projecting. My total lifetime gambling consists of maybe 10 or 15 cash poker games with high school friends, ten minutes at a casino in Montréal which I found a revolting experience, and receiving a few $1 scratch lottery tickets as party favors.
I cannot fathom the idea that one is warping their work on a given engineering problem around the availability of a magic next token predictor box.
Anthropic's game is over.
WHen it doesn't turn out that way, it opens up options.
At the same time if other model providers were anticipating Anthropic or someone else to have problems at launch, and were waiting in the wings with their own models to launch competitively, it sets off a capacity release competition.
One might lower prices, one might give it away, or just make it available, and then there are users on other platforms with limits, or free until a certain day, etc.