If you include opportunity cost into the decision, then your contrast can and often will disappear (i.e. renting is financially superior or "winning" in your terminology).

Also, is this an AI comment? Because it's surely poetic about something that doesn't call for it.

What are you basing that claim on?

How do you know it's an actual preference and not mainly caused by external factors (e.g. not wanting to be seen doing unkind things, wanting to be seen as upstanding)?

Isn't it simply that there are two competing goals that the LLM received RL for, honesty on one hand (a goal that is often assumed as implicit for humans) and producing a solution that meets expectations (which doesn't technically require honesty)?

So the LLM didn't read and interpret the prompt and decide via discussion to violate ethical behavior, the unethical result merely won out because ethics wasn't a hard requirement (and one that isn't reliably detected in the result). An LLM doesn't fear punishment, so ethical behavior is simply one of many positive signals that were trained into it.

> give the friend a subtle clue that it's time to move on

If a friend needs someone to listen about life struggles and you tell them you're tired of it and don't want to hear it anymore, then you're not being a friend. Maybe you want to be encouraging and that is fine, probably helpful. But you immediately seem to turn that encouragement into threats of social exclusion:

> If that clue isn't heeded the friend often gets targeted 1:1 offers for help and can eventually just be shut out of the group altogether for being too negative.

I've seen this many times - people suggest "solutions" to something they don't quite understand, then get angry when people don't take their non-functional solution. Similarly, in online support groups, I've seen plenty of people storm off angrily because people are being "too negative", not seeing that sharing these feelings, wanting to be heard and knowing you're not alone with certain struggles can be part of a discovery and healing process. Those people use similar language you used in your comment of "misery loves company", essentially accusing people of wanting to be miserable and choosing depression.

If you want people to read what you write in a charitable fashion, refusing to explain the background for your comments is rather dysfunctional BTW. In general, people don't all have the same mental context and experience background to understand where you're coming from.

This isn't analogous to the threat of AI.

Lots of smaller and mid sized companies that tried to invest in the Chinese market lost everything because the government protected and supported local copycats, with no intention of giving the foreign company fair access to the market.

You could conceivably walk to a car wash that has similar sundries as a gas station.

Misplaced brackets seem like a thing from the past to me when we didn't have IDEs. I don't remember ever having a bug due to that.

Even if you are good at those, for many companies, it's more about connections than about the ability to build stuff. So if you don't know the right people, it is very difficult to get a foothold.

The covert stuff gives some degree of plausible deniability and it causes a good amount of the population to be complacent and ignore reality. I don't see how this can be considered good for anyone but the people creating propaganda.