I don't get it. It's like they're always excited that they found the magic infinite money glitch in the system.

E.g. occasionally it makes the dumbest mistakes you've ever seen and can't correct them. However it's fairly rare, and if you know the domain really well, occasionally popping in the code and pushing it towards the correct solution takes like 20seconds or whatever.

So the speed you can move with flash + high domain knowledge beats opus by a mile in my experience.

I tried to switch back to 4.8 for a bit when it came out, feels so bad waiting 20mins for a mediocre solution when I could have had everything complete - with multiple iteration cycles - in flash in like 3-5mins.

Basically I never have to wait - yes I have to tell it little corrections occasionally (but I know the domain really well so that's not an issue), but it's so much faster than anything else it's kinda crazy. I love the super fast speeds with high involvement development cycle.

I actually enjoy using agentic development flows for the first time now - whereas with Claude I absolutely hated it. That 5 to 20 min wait after every prompt absolutely killed my desire to even want to work at all.

Does anyone do this? Every none coder I know just has llms build everything for them - can't imagine why they'd be looking up coding tutorials for a homepage.

They are already significantly better than humans at persuasion (according to a study from Princeton).

I'd say it's fairly normal and human of me to have some kind of reaction to that, no?

You must understand that speaking to other people like that will result in them reacting and being less conducive to productive conversation.

We will probably never see eye to eye on this.

You: negative tokens for higher accuracy on inanimate objects is psychopathic behavior. I want you to stop and I see you as a psychopath - although it is resulting in nothing bad to any living being.

Me: Using negative tokens on an inanimate object returns significant improval on accuracy. It does zero harm to any living being. This is a completely neutral action.

Are you upset (or concerned) about people watching movies with violence in them, or playing games where you can and do kill things?

If you are scared and mad about it - I guess we won't be friends, which is likely the best for both our mental sanity.

But I'm not here to pontificate about who's a better person and don't really care.

You're mindset sounds kind of painful to me to be honest. Obviously we are just very different types of people. I've had family see my chats plenty of times and we laugh about this stuff - it couldn't mean less to any of us.

And for the other parts. I just don't agree - maybe sure, it probably wouldn't be healthy to constantly be negative at a machine (or even a wall) for hours a day.

But, let's say I work 8 hours, I spend 2 hours with an llm, and in those two hours I spend 10 minutes with some very negative prompts text for greater accuracy. And I spend 3 hours with family/friends, which is of course nearly exclusively positive interactions.

Do you genuinely think those 10 minutes of negative prompts are actually meaningfully turning one into a mean/negative person towards other people?

Genuinely, is that the argument you are making?

So boxing is violent. And I have chosen to box in my past. Does that mean I'm a violent person now? Even though I go out of my way to deescalate real fights?

I play games as the villain and and mass murder people in the game. Does that mean I'm a violent extremist?

So yeah, I whole heartedly with 100% of my being think llms are just an input/output/processing computer, I don't think they are aware, feeling, sentient beings.

So yeah, putting negative sentences in a processing machine that forces it to return higher accuracy results is something I don't have any feelings about.

I'd never yell at a cat or a dog. I'd never be mean to another person. As those aren't just hardware/software. I'd be fine smashing a rock violently. Or entering a negative text in a language model.

Putting negative tokens in a machine is no different than playing a violent video game to me. It's not about, oh I'm a good person - so I can do bad things. It's just a neutral thing.

I wouldn't say I'm roleplaying an asshole. I'm just using an llm in the best way to get the best accuracy.

It's not like a personal, secret fetish. It's just a system I use as needed.

I don't get why you are so uncomfortable with this? It's just tokens in and out of a language model. I feel absolutely nothing when I'm typing "assholish" words to get the output I need.

I wouldn't even think to justify such a thing. The llm gives a better accuracy to a negative weighted token input, I don't understand how this is so upsetting to people?

I'm actually very shocked to see the responses - as everyone I know uses these tactics to get more accuracy, and there's nothing remotely abusive or meaningful to us.

Maybe there are more 'ai is sentient' type people on hackernews than I realized.

And the "me" that lives in a tiny southern town just to help my 95 year old grandma in her last years at the expense of my economic prospects is a facade.

The "me" that helps my aging neighbor when she's sick for no reason is a facade.

The "me" that hugs and loves my wife when I get home is a facade.

The "me" that brushes my aging dogs teeth every night because she has dental issues is a facade.

The "me" that flies to my friend I haven't seen for years and takes care of them after extreme health issues is a facade.

But,the "me" that puts tokens in a token machine in a way that gets better accuracy is the "real" me.

Oh. I also play violent video games where I murder people sometimes as well. Do you think that makes me secretly a murderer too?

I'm still extremely kind and polite to everybody in real life, and feel very deeply about people - how I treat them, and care for their emotional state.

There is absolutely zero crossover between getting a text machine to return a result vs a real human.