I believe it is absolutely ridiculous to have token usage leader boards.

But isn't it also ridiculous for a rational human being to use as many tokens as possible regardless of whether or not that token usage is useful or valuable?

It seems obvious to me that AI service providers make more money the more tokens are used. It also seems obvious to me that companies who sell shovels during a gold rush stand to make a great deal of money, whether or not any gold is found. How is that a good thing writ large?

Anthropic, (and SpaceX), might IPO soon - a move that will grant them access to capital instantly. Capital that comes directly from the retirement plans of all of us.

All I'm saying is if you want to somehow sabotage the game somehow, this is definitely not the right strategy. Political influence would be far more effective.

What am I missing?

The more tokens you burn, the more demand for hardware there will be. More demand for hardware means higher stock prices -> more money in your employer's pocket.

The only question is how long that can last. If taken to an extreme, the output of the AI will get worse over time, and if it gets bad enough, for long enough, people will use it less and less, and demand will slowly evaporate.

My point is NOT: I hope this all comes crashing down.

My point IS: tokenmaxing is bad. AND weaponizing it will not have the intended effect, but in fact, it will, in the short term, do the opposite.

But when you factor in today's favorite business model of "make it shitty", perhaps this matters very little.

Agentic tools are "burglary tools" -> Younger folks should not study CS?

I LOL'd when I read "eternal ball of sadness".

https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/3952 https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/6076

I have also worked on projects (web apps) where GC pauses became annoying to end-users. I wouldn't say this is the fault of GC perse, but writing code without a GC, seems to prevent some performance problems for me, and can also make performance problems stand out sooner in the dev cycle.

I just feel like not having GC is sort of a deliberate, core design choice for the language. Having strict ownership rules and being forced to think about references feels like a feature not a bug you know? Adding GC feels analogous to the "++" in C++ to me.

Not that I have anything against the efforts people are putting into it though - I'm genuinely curious about what it lets me do better/faster within rust.