Hacker News: operatingthetan

New comment by operatingthetan in "Leaked financial docs show OpenAI is losing billions of dollars a year"

operatingthetan — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 22:51:03 +0000

>This is because people here are quietly realizing that they fell for the "token-maxxing" marketing drive which was complete BS for you to gamble more money on tokens as the big AI labs gave heavily subsidized token prices they cannot afford.

Good callout. All these "trends" in AI were definitely from the AI companies themselves in order to push the sales of more tokens. What's after agent orchestration? Whatever it is, it will involve a big spend.

New comment by operatingthetan in "Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society"

operatingthetan — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:22:35 +0000

I mean I can make a good meme with AI but it requires effort to ensure it is indistinguishable from a homegrown meme.

New comment by operatingthetan in "Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society"

operatingthetan — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:00:36 +0000

nope!

New comment by operatingthetan in "Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society"

operatingthetan — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:49:49 +0000

It's to the point where if you drop an AI meme or screenshot of text in chat people will mock you. I don't see that getting better?

New comment by operatingthetan in "Nobody clicks share buttons"

operatingthetan — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 20:15:24 +0000

It's sort of cargo-cult behavior to add them to non big corporate websites. Just like adding superfluous chat bots now.

New comment by operatingthetan in "Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?"

operatingthetan — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 19:46:11 +0000

>But looking more closely, Self-help had the steepest subcategory decline, with units down 26.3% year-over-year. Only two of 16 subcategories—crafts/hobbies/antiques/games and religion—grew at all (9.6% and 1.6%, respectively). The exceptions alone could make an interesting blog post for another time.

Self help being generally part of a larger grift pipeline for authors (for selling overpriced courses, seminars, retreats, infoproducts etc.), this is an actual positive silver lining for AI in society.

New comment by operatingthetan in "Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?"

operatingthetan — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:59:56 +0000

>“As per The Information, Meta employees used a total of 60.2 trillion AI tokens (!!) in 30 days. If this was charged at Anthropic’s API prices, it would cost $900M. Of course, Meta is likely purchasing tokens at a discount, but that could still come in at $100M+ – in large part from senseless “tokenmaxxing”.”

Holy shit, talking about perverse incentives!

New comment by operatingthetan in "Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?"

operatingthetan — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 23:14:11 +0000

Yep, the only way these things can have "memory" is by shoving previous conversations into the context window.

New comment by operatingthetan in "Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?"

operatingthetan — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 23:09:16 +0000

What then is your LLM "thinking" about between answers? The answer is nothing. Your definition of thinking does not match the one humans normally use.

>That how we know another person is thinking too. By their output. We don't put a debugger into their brain.

We know thoughts exist in their brain between the ones they choose to verbalize. Avoiding the distraction of solipsism.

For the LLM the "thinking" phase is just a preamble output for creating the answer. It just gets appended to the context window. Remove the context windows from your models and you will see how much of a mind they truly have. None.

New comment by operatingthetan in "Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?"

operatingthetan — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 23:04:08 +0000

Indistinguishable output does not mean thinking occurred. It simply means you have the appearance of thinking. I believe thinking requires agency, which the LLM does not possess. As in, it has zero stakes.

It does not receive dopamine as a result for a good answer, and a split second after finishing your answer the very same GPU is probably translated french or something for someone in another state. This is a language generator which has a corpus of information and has been tuned to appear correct.

New comment by operatingthetan in "Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?"

operatingthetan — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 23:01:03 +0000

Interesting take, LLMs then have a sort of 'communication culture.'

New comment by operatingthetan in "Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?"

operatingthetan — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:56:11 +0000

Are the discord servers you follow dead? Mine aren't.

New comment by operatingthetan in "Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?"

operatingthetan — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:52:53 +0000

These companies are pitching us a magic machine that can answer all our questions and the only catch is they are extremely manipulative and controlling of us. Most people don't seem to care, for now.

New comment by operatingthetan in "Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?"

operatingthetan — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:50:27 +0000

You seem to be suggesting I'm saying something that I don't believe I am, this is obviously not working. Hope your day goes well.

New comment by operatingthetan in "Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?"

operatingthetan — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:42:46 +0000

An explanation for your story.

New comment by operatingthetan in "Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?"

operatingthetan — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:39:24 +0000

These machines do not think and they do not have a mind. We may build such a thing in the future but these do not possess those qualities. It seems as if the majority of people do not understand this, which is why the public is so confused about why they produce output like they do.

New comment by operatingthetan in "Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?"

operatingthetan — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:34:08 +0000

Anthropomorphizing them is the true "AI psychosis."

New comment by operatingthetan in "Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?"

operatingthetan — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:30:58 +0000

The only point of "arguing" with an LLM is wholly for your own benefit, e.g. to check your biases or assumptions. But since they are easy to make turn around on their own statements it has limited utility.

Unless you are sparring with the Chipotle customer service bot trying to score a free burrito or something.

New comment by operatingthetan in "Oracle is changing free tier limits. Update by the 15th to avoid charges"

operatingthetan — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:14:44 +0000

Their clients must be locked in to the the complexity of migrating off their platforms.

New comment by operatingthetan in "Metamodernism: The cultural philosophy of the digital age"

operatingthetan — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 19:42:28 +0000

I'm skeptical, but I guess you are clear to continue making self serving generalizations.