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> loading a few thousand tokens of raw JSON into a context window, asking a language model to reformat data it did not need to reason about...

> That trap catches almost everyone right now.

Has everyone really become so stupid now? I wouldn't even have thought of doing such a horrible thing as using AI to format JSON...

Needless to say I stopped reading there.


> Has everyone really become so stupid now?

I wouldn't mistake stupidity for ignorance. A lot of "tech-sensitive", yet non-technical people are using agents/vibe coding these days. Their level of understanding is very basic ("JSON is structured data", "I need to reformat this to fit my need"), but they wouldn't get that the best way of doing things does not necessitate burning tokens.


> Has everyone really become so stupid now?

Not everyone. But unfortunately, yes, very many people have.


Yeah we can do really weird things with op amps, negative resistance and capacitance comes to mind.

That's less productivity for same pay. We can have less work without impacting productivity much.


Unfortunately that's not how it works. Productivity gains have already increased tenfold in the past, yet still all work full time.

It used to be that 80+% of the population worked in agriculture. In developed countries that number is now around 1-2%. Some of the freed labour was funneled into improving living standards, some of it was funneled into new jobs created by the increasingly complex society (the "intermediate economy").

With AI, the same is true: labour is freed by the productivity gains (which I doubt are 10x sustainably but whatever), more labour is needed for power generation, mineral extraction, maintaining this new extra layer of complexity in the intermediate economy, etc. In the end we might see, say, a net 3% increase in global productivity per year over the next 10 years, which will be funneled into increasing living standards and increasing economic inequalities, but not in reducing working hours.

If you accept living below average standards, you could easily work a single day of the week for the rest of your life. But why would an employer hire 5 people working one day a week, instead of one working 5 days a week? They won't, hence we don't see a reduction in working hours.

The alternative is to work full time but retire earlier, much earlier, than you would otherwise, which in the end is the equivalent of having worked one day a week for your whole life.

I highly recommend reading Lean Logic by David Fleming, it explores several of these concepts in a very interesting way.


These satire articles on cybersecurity are really entertaining.

The other one a few days ago was also good: https://nesbitt.io/2026/02/03/incident-report-cve-2024-yikes...


I enabled it and I had to read carefully to check if it was really active... turns out I never read the words that caveman omits, so to me it makes zero difference.


Yeah, makes sense. The appeal is is more to cut output tokens for cost, than downstream reading experience. But the benchmark suggests it doesn't offer as much benefit as "be brief.".


At what point does milk become oil?


The law of supply and demand works in a perfect competition market.

There are two RAM suppliers...


> The report estimates that carbon emissions from models with the least efficient inference are over 10 times as high as those with the most efficient inference. DeepSeek’s V3 models were estimated to consume around 23 watts when responding to a “medium-length” prompt, while Claude 4 Opus was estimated to consume about 5 watts.

This makes absolutely no sense. I suppose they meant watt hours, and that's a weird way to explain carbon emissions...


And vegan of course


Ew. Vibecoded slop is vegan: no biological life was involved during its creation.


Could you explain what you think veganism is or means?


Go ahead, I know you're itching to. (It was just a silly joke, no need to get offended)


Not offended and I find it funny, though you nailed my itching:

> "Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals."

https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism


Just curious,

would that include lab grown animal products?


My personal take is yes, assuming there's no animal exploitation or cruelty involved.

That said AFAIK there is no consensus: some abstain from all animal inputs while others focus on avoiding harm, which itself can be interpreted in different ways. It's more a philosophy than a rulebook, lab-grown meat kind of sits in a gray area. I'd be curious to try it :-)


And just like that, history has been erased.


Nice philosophical point. To iron-on more irony, zooming out a little, one could also argue much real historical experience was first erased when it was written down with the presumption of authority.

So is now the best time to write history by hand?


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