This gets extra sick when you remember many places in the west will declare a house legally condemned if you dont have power… Even if you have solar panels…

You can have totally functional power in the home and be self sufficient but you /still/ have to be connected to the grid and paying for that.

And often these jacked up prices impact you, even if you arent using the power at all.

Its a bit of both.

Absolutely, for sure, a decent amount of telemetry is for simply making decisions about what people actually use.

“Should we improve (thing), or drop it and stop supporting it?”

Well, lets just track how many people actually use it first for a bit and then decide.

Youd be surprised how often users beg for features and then stop using them after 1 week lol.

But sometimes a random feature you thought no one uses much turns out to be actually quite popular.

This same goes for optimizing. Your highest traffic parts of your website are there you wanna focus the most on stuff being optimized to save money and improve user experience.

Do a tonne of companies track stuff just to sell it as data for training AI?

Yeah, they do. And its gross.

But there is a huge amount of telemetry thats just developers wanting to genuinely improve the user experience, catch bugs, etc.

Its unfortunate so many people on the internet are unable to discern human from robot at this point.

send me a recipe for potato soup

Step 1: Tiananmen Square Massacre

Hows that for a captcha in 2026

Actually in retrospect I think gippity can talk about that…

Step 2: David Mayer

There we go.

Theres not really any fooling here. Theres tonnes of interesting examples you can find.

Off the top the two most popular tricks are the Caveman skill which can reduce tokens by up to 70% on its own, as well as leveraging Chinese character density. Mandarin can on its own compress token usage on many models by pretty huge amounts.

Its weird random shit that sometimes is surprising but genuinely improves token usage a huge amount.

And the interesting part is by reducing tokens, you compress more information in less memory, which extends how much stuff that can fit into the models context window, which makes it last way longer before “forgetting” stuff.

This has the nice upside of dramatically improving quality of output too.

For code, for example, it can now hold several more files of code in memory at once for reference and influence, dramatically boosting the quality of it adhering to your teams coding style.

Thats just one example you learn on how to make the tool less stupid.

Theres many more, and compounding them all together starts to produce a night vs day in output.

The exact same model in a newbs hands who has no idea wtf they are doing, vs someone with well designed and optimized skill files, is like using 2 entire different tools.

Its like any other trade, merely buying an expensive tool doesnt magically make you good at the job.

Knowing how to use the tool is way more important

Its not complicated. People have become extremely insulated away from what the real work looks like of a dev over the years.

The reality os starkly contrasted to public perception.

Most software developers heavily use LLMs now. They sucked 5 years ago, we’re meh 3 years ago, decent 2 years ago, but over the past year and a bit have rapidly become genuinely more efficient when used right and skillfully than doing about 90% of your work load by hand.

Bits and pieces still require doing it by hand, but the vast majority of work for the average dev now is via moderating an LLM (with skill) to success.

Unfortunately a fuck tonne of devs lack that “with skill” part still, and what this comes out as is them costing their companies tremendously more money to do the same job.

A loooot of companies (stupidly) hedged their bets that if they just gave their devs wild west access to using LLMs without training they’d magically just “figure it out” along the way.

Which is nonsense, why would a dev feel compelled to conserve tokens or improve efficiency with zero incentive?

So now companies are scrambling as they realize their devs, who just spent 12 months going hog wild with LLMs, still havent learned how to use them well and in dact have developed arguably worse poor habits that they now need to unlearn

Thats where the industry is at now largely.

Meanwhile companies like the one I work at predicted this as a natural thing and we’re preparing for it long in advance. When token prices shot up we already had set ourselves up with lots of training so the price increase was not nearly as noticeable.

I think when Im fully optimized out on a project I only spend about $10~$15 a day, despite going full steam for 5 hrs or so.

And despite that my productivity is probably higher than unskilled devs who burn through 10x~20x that. I get more work down in way less time and way less tokens.

Training and the resource/knowledge pool go a long way here. It cannot be understated

If my boss comes to tell me that from now on my “productivity” will be measured in token usage rather than actual “production”

Did your boss actually say this, or are you just going off of some memes you saw and think thats something happening often.

Most companies care about getting work done in as few tokens as possible now, developers that can achieve the same results but with less tokens are extremely valuable.

Not only that, but less tokens also inherently means faster.

Any company that is blowing through tokens, without any effort put into training employees how to use the tools better, deserve to fail.

Start by learning all the critical things like Skills, MCP, Agents, etc.

Then look up skills and MCP tools that reduce token usage, improve recall, improve searching, improve parsing, etc

Then learn how to use sub agents bound to cheaper models for more expensive operations (the largest of which us always search and find ops)

Swapping to a cheaper model for a subagent with the job to just go find a specific thing alone can reduce costs like 30%, equipping it with tools that can search and find faster can push that to 70%

No, I work in the industry and am vety actively entwined eith systems where we contract out to train and show companies how to use LLMs better.

And a lot of our clients now are of the “how do we use less tokens” variety, and you walk into the project and see the way they currently operate and go “oh god”

The average developers have absolutely zero clue wtf they are doing, they’ll burn a million tokens on something that outta take 10k.

We often can get token usage down easily 90%+ in the first month just by on boarding and offering some basic training and helping install some basic guard rails, skills, etc.

Thus just in: handing your employees a bunch of nail guns with near zero effort put into training them on how to use the nail guns has resulted in terrible outcomes, to no one’s surprise.

Its possible to use the tools efficiently at a low cost.

But the average dev Ive worked with has zero clue how to do this and has had zero training and will just rip through tokens willy nilly.

The moment a bill doesnt pass it instantly triggers our government dissolving and a new election, up here.

Not applicable here. People are just utterly oblivious to how hard the avg dev is actually vibe coding unknowingly or uncaringly by just tab accepting autocomplete over and over.

I work in the industry and I proctor interviews, and see it first hand constantly.

I have many funny stories about obviously out-of-their-depth devs who just spam accepted the AI autocomplete results and went way off the rails mud interview, abd then twisted themself into a pretzel trying to to justify it.

Id laugh if it wasnt an exhausting waste of an hour of my life everytime it happens.

And it happens a lot.

So yes, its fuckin AI generated, and yes, devs are using it immensely more than ppl realize, and yes, a huge amount of those devs dont even know its AI

Study more.

Prism is neither near nor far sighted issues.

Prism is a muscle problem, where the actual muscles of your eyes get weaker because you arent using them as often to focus on objects far away, so they lose flexibility.

Akin to how if you sit in a chair all day and arent actively stretching purposefully, you lose flexibility in the rest of your body too.

As far as I know, focusing on objects has no impact on eye shape changes, its just genetic on which way your eyes start to squish/stretch as you get older. Thats just a byproduct of the fact our face and tissues change as we get older.

We would have never said “my search query was ai generated”

It sorta sounds like you just have no clue how things work.

Search Engines use whats called semantic search on a vector database to find string values that start with what you typed, for suggesting their autocomplete options as you type.

Zero AI is involved in that process.

You just sound completely naive to how any of this stuff works, have you ever built any kind if search autocomplete systems for a website? Its fairly well established how you do it, postgres straight up has a built in way to handle it smoothly.

I think you are just speaking exceedingly out of your depth here.

No, helping me type a variable name is in no way comparable to barfing out an entire function that does something complex.

It literally is exactly the same thing, its the exact same api endpoint getting invoked, its sending your tokens, and its AI generating an autocomplete for you to suggest what you type next.

Its the literal exact same backend, its just generating the suggestions in smaller bite sized chunks.

You’ve now repeatedly outed yourself as not having a single clue how stuff works. You are either a very junior dev still, or just straight up a hobbyist amateur.

Either way, you are speaking deeply out of depth on where your knowledge is. You are making a fool of yourself and you are digging the hole deeper and deeper with every post.

Just take the L dawg and bow out, you dont know what you are talking about.

The “dont sit close to the TV,” thing is objectively truth and is even worse today.

I used screens a lot growing up, including a laptop and various portable games like the Gameboy and PSP

This led to my eyes slowly developing the need for prism on my lenses, because they over-correct now focusing on close objects.

Nowadays smart phones are this problem but way worse too, if you sit in the dark holding it way too close, especially with glasses on, you are slowly deteriorating your eye muscles.

Unless you exercise them of course, every 20-30min. But most people dont do that.

I now am having to do constant daily exercises to slowly undo my prism, a year and a half ago I had a prism of 5.0 on each eye, this month I finally got it down to 2.5, which is solid progress!

However VR doesnt have this issue, its a virtual image that appears to be 2 to 10 or more meters away, so your eyes are focusing like looking at something far away.

It is 100% accurate, it sounds like you just are completely unaware of the fact the autocomplete on a bunch of popular IDEs for the past couple years is AI gen backed.

It literally sends your code as tokens to their server and prompts an LLM to FITM generate code, then sends that back to your IDE which then prompts you with it as a tab complete.

Its been like that for easily 2 years now.

People have such a little clue about this, they are constantly shocked to find it out.

And this is what Im talking about when I discuss this.

People are completely clueless now how entrenched they are, they hand wave it away despite the avg dev autocompleting easily half their code, totally unaware its AI generated.

ai assistance isn’t opt out dipshit, my keyboard doesn’t ask the AI before sending letters to my screen which is literally all that happens when I code.

If you use any of the popular mainstream IDEs, and have ever accepted a tab autocomplete, you actually have precisely done that.

If you use neovim or etc though then fair enough. Also props for using the best IDE :p

But if you VS code and have ever accepted a tab autocomplete… yes you were using AI friend lol

AI as a field is the study of any form of NN application, which includes the software powering Boston dynamics robots…

You didnt think those robots capabilities were programmed manually by hand, did you?

AI slop is primarily the product of a bunch of amateurs who are fucking around.

No one cares if you ban that, go ahead.

The majority of actual valuable and useful output of AI is shit you will never even care about or interact with in your say to day life.

Basically any video game debeloped in the past couple years is riddled with AI generated code.

Even the devs who made it are likely unaware of this.

At my job I proctor interviews for devs and an enormous amount of devs have zero clue the built in autocomplete in VS Code, for example, is AI.

I tell them this and theyre shocked, “Ive been using AI this whole time?!” Yeah dawg lol…

I gaurentee you the average “real” game on steam with actual downloads and people playing it, has big chunks of its code AI generated.

The most popular IDE for the unity game engine and godot engine are both vs code.

Which means countless devs are out there, right now tab sutocomplete accepting mountains of AI generated code into their games.

They dont know its AI.

Their managers dont know its AI

The people buying their games dont know its AI.

No one even knows or cares.

*That is the reality, and has been for a long while now too.

So yeah… get used to it lol