3 ms·

This is actually what keeps people using AI: variable reward schedule. It's basically gambling.

by captainbland 17d ago

stavros 17d ago
People say this, but I've never seen it. AI has been very consistent in its rewards for me.
- wuisce 17d ago
  You're absolutely right. And it matters.
mysterydip 17d ago
Which also explains why response speed is so important.
gbraad 17d ago
This is why I also suspect them to waste tokens on purpose.
- BikiniPrince 17d ago
  Listen Pal, this is load bearing. If you know what is good for you then you will stop asking questions. —Claude
  - gbraad 13d ago
    "Public opinion has been affected. we need a reset. Let me announce it on X."
- Grimblewald 16d ago
  I really do think its tge case. Ever notice how juuust when you run out of usage its allllmost correct? then the handy helpful "buy more credits!" link pops up. Meanwhile local models are finishing the task without fucking around and without alterting shit it wasnt supposed to touch. How is it a environmental catastrophe level, datacentre requiring, bullshit model is so much worse than something that runs on my workstation and doesn't cost us a ha itable planet? Either they're fucking with us serving 8b models at scale or china really has the AI race in the bag so much so that they can openly release what the USA jealously guards. They moan and complain about china copying from them (while doing the same), but if that's the case in full, then why are the chinese models better? you dont copy bad work and come out ahead.
  - gbraad 13d ago
    Out of curiosity; what do you run, and how? And yes, I noticed DeepSeek stayed on track way more than Claude.
varispeed 17d ago
Something regulators should look at. They don't deliver consistent compute, yet charge consistent money. In my opinion that's fraud.
- autoexec 17d ago
  Maybe they should be regulated like lootboxes and be required to post odds.
dpark 17d ago
I see this sentiment pretty regularly, and I don’t get it. Variable rewards is not sufficient to establish that it is “ basically gambling”. Everything in life is variable reward. You invite a friend over, they might accept or they might not. Drive to work, traffic might be good or might be bad. You ask a colleague to finish a task, they might do it or might not or might do a good job or might not. Everything is variable reward. Is everything gambling?
- howunfortunate 17d ago
  Same vibe as people saying "addicted to sugar" or "sugar hijacks your reward system" Sugar is the original point of the reward system!
  - Barbing 17d ago
    & you can cheat the reward system. Do hard work (takes time), get dopamine for successful completion. Find berries, taste sweet (hopefully safe), eat all, get calories. Doordash Krispy Kreme instead = few too many calories. (I’m no Luddite in the sense popularly thought of them pre-‘22 [1], though we have to watch skill atrophy) [1] regressionist? Decelerationist, too loaded perhaps. Someone remembers or knows the word…
- utopiah 17d ago
  No, if I use a ruler or a pocket calculator they will reliabley give me the correct result. There is no gambling.
- smugglerFlynn 17d ago
  You invite a friend over, but raccoon appears. Then pigeon appears. Then friend appears but at the last second suddenly becomes a banana. You remember you are out of bananas so you order more and also some cola zero cans on your local grocery delivery app. You are back to the party, but now you have 5 friends in the room, and you run de-duplication query. Now half of your friend is sitting at the sofa, and another half becomes a quarter of banana. Suddenly bananas arrive so you need to open the door. Once you are back there are no friends, pigeons or raccoons but also no bananas and no cola - all the delivery results are gone. This seems to be urgent and important, gotta fix this first before going back to that friend invitation...
smugglerFlynn 17d ago
Modern LLM services are engineer's pipe dream that was heavily shaped by the shadiest product management dark patterns you can find: applying gambling-style engagement tactics, exploiting cognitive biases, exploiting users' lack of technical understanding to inflate product expectations, using fear mongering in external and investor communications. And that's not even a complete list.
deleted 17d ago
[deleted]
tiborsaas 17d ago
Is it gambling if I'm beating the house?
raincole 17d ago
Gambling but with positive expected value, yes.
jimmaswell 17d ago
Programming before AI was always variable reward. It was a gamble against your own time and patience. Maybe I'd waste hours down the wrong rabbit holes trying to find a library that worked for my use case. Maybe I'd waste a day trying to get an API to do something it turned out it couldn't do. Maybe I'd have to redo my entire approach because of some factor I hadn't considered. Something I wrote could have worked on the first try or I could have had to spend the day chasing logic errors (or multiple days chasing memory errors if it was C or C++). Maybe I would just get bored of the project, especially if I realized there were 20 layers of yaks I needed to shave first, and Visual Studio got stuck updating again, and before I could even start actually coding I had to spend the entire evening on an exhausting merge conflict. My entire weekend could be gone with nothing to actually show for it. I got so sick of all this at some point that I slowly stopped doing anything that wasn't my job. But then AI got better and better and I realized it was the ultimate unblocker. When that dreaded malaise started creeping in signaling it was a project's end because I didn't want to waste any more of my life dealing with bullshit orthogonal to what I was trying to do, I'd give it to the AI. It felt like a miracle the first time this worked, and it still does. If we were previously equipped with shovels to dig through bullshit, we now have a fully automated Bagger 288. The reward schedule now isn't variable anymore; the chance that I finish something in a good state is 100%. I can focus on the parts I actually enjoy - architecting the broader system, making the parts mesh together in a sensible way that's easy to work with and has some mathematical elegance to it, hand coding the bits I want to be really specific about (but now without the endless frustration of bugfixing or import errors and edgecases being immediately discovered, thanks to the AI).
- supern0va 17d ago
  >Maybe I'd waste a day trying to get an API to do something it turned out it couldn't do. I was working on a side project recently. I had spent months designing the data model in my spare time, thinking through how to make it as elegant and durable to change as possible in the long term, since (if I launched it) the repercussions for getting it wrong would be significant. Once I had a working design, it probably would have been several more months to build a working prototype and start testing it. Instead, Claude knocked out the prototype for me in an afternoon. And it immediately became clear that it didn't work: not because the data model didn't solve all the problems I wanted it to solve, but because it didn't fit the shape of how I quickly learned a normal person would need/want to interact with the product. I was so focused on the long term, that I never thought about what the first five minutes of a user with hands on the thing would need. And the changes needed would be significant. Maybe there's some variable reward mechanism. But I sure was glad to be able to pull that particular slot machine handle and learn that than waste even more of my time on what was a dead end.
thepasswordis 17d ago
Literally putting tokens into a machine and hoping profit comes out. Amazing.
- seki285 17d ago
  Bingo
ricksunny 16d ago
1000%. My social community if reference is nomads of varying skills. The lower-skilled among them (the ones who were on the digital marketing, crypto,, now into building sales CRM tool) are manifestly demonstrating addictive tendencies around vibecoding) - the chain-smoking ADD guy pulling all-nighters still sticks in my mind. I myself (also low sw-skilled, just not the digital marketing / crypto hustling type) am exhibiting these tendencies in the form of all-nighters that in practice produce very little leverageable value-add. To remedy I try to be conservative in my goals - like only produce a comprehensive english-language PRD instead of any code till the tools get better and stroke the gambling instinct a bit less. (By the way this is not to say that all nomads are low-skilled or even low-sw-skill, not by a long shot. I’ve met plenty of CS-degreed nomads who I treat as the wizened experts that they are, from whom deferentially elicit their pearls of hard-won software project wisdom. It was one of these even who, non-derisively, recognized the ‘pulling the slot machine lever’ reflex among vibecoders after I posed the apparent addictive tendency. On later describing this to a longtime friend deeply conversant in social science, he immediately responded with a nod and the phrase ‘variable reward response’.)

This is actually what keeps people using AI: variable reward schedule. It's basically gambling.

stavros 17d ago

People say this, but I've never seen it. AI has been very consistent in its rewards for me.

wuisce 17d ago
You're absolutely right. And it matters.

mysterydip 17d ago

Which also explains why response speed is so important.

gbraad 17d ago

This is why I also suspect them to waste tokens on purpose.

BikiniPrince 17d ago
Listen Pal, this is load bearing. If you know what is good for you then you will stop asking questions. —Claude
- gbraad 13d ago
  "Public opinion has been affected. we need a reset. Let me announce it on X."
Grimblewald 16d ago
I really do think its tge case. Ever notice how juuust when you run out of usage its allllmost correct? then the handy helpful "buy more credits!" link pops up. Meanwhile local models are finishing the task without fucking around and without alterting shit it wasnt supposed to touch. How is it a environmental catastrophe level, datacentre requiring, bullshit model is so much worse than something that runs on my workstation and doesn't cost us a ha itable planet? Either they're fucking with us serving 8b models at scale or china really has the AI race in the bag so much so that they can openly release what the USA jealously guards. They moan and complain about china copying from them (while doing the same), but if that's the case in full, then why are the chinese models better? you dont copy bad work and come out ahead.
- gbraad 13d ago
  Out of curiosity; what do you run, and how? And yes, I noticed DeepSeek stayed on track way more than Claude.

varispeed 17d ago

Something regulators should look at. They don't deliver consistent compute, yet charge consistent money. In my opinion that's fraud.

autoexec 17d ago
Maybe they should be regulated like lootboxes and be required to post odds.

dpark 17d ago

I see this sentiment pretty regularly, and I don’t get it. Variable rewards is not sufficient to establish that it is “ basically gambling”. Everything in life is variable reward. You invite a friend over, they might accept or they might not. Drive to work, traffic might be good or might be bad. You ask a colleague to finish a task, they might do it or might not or might do a good job or might not. Everything is variable reward. Is everything gambling?

howunfortunate 17d ago
Same vibe as people saying "addicted to sugar" or "sugar hijacks your reward system" Sugar is the original point of the reward system!
- Barbing 17d ago
  & you can cheat the reward system. Do hard work (takes time), get dopamine for successful completion. Find berries, taste sweet (hopefully safe), eat all, get calories. Doordash Krispy Kreme instead = few too many calories. (I’m no Luddite in the sense popularly thought of them pre-‘22 [1], though we have to watch skill atrophy) [1] regressionist? Decelerationist, too loaded perhaps. Someone remembers or knows the word…
utopiah 17d ago
No, if I use a ruler or a pocket calculator they will reliabley give me the correct result. There is no gambling.
smugglerFlynn 17d ago
You invite a friend over, but raccoon appears. Then pigeon appears. Then friend appears but at the last second suddenly becomes a banana. You remember you are out of bananas so you order more and also some cola zero cans on your local grocery delivery app. You are back to the party, but now you have 5 friends in the room, and you run de-duplication query. Now half of your friend is sitting at the sofa, and another half becomes a quarter of banana. Suddenly bananas arrive so you need to open the door. Once you are back there are no friends, pigeons or raccoons but also no bananas and no cola - all the delivery results are gone. This seems to be urgent and important, gotta fix this first before going back to that friend invitation...

smugglerFlynn 17d ago

Modern LLM services are engineer's pipe dream that was heavily shaped by the shadiest product management dark patterns you can find: applying gambling-style engagement tactics, exploiting cognitive biases, exploiting users' lack of technical understanding to inflate product expectations, using fear mongering in external and investor communications. And that's not even a complete list.

deleted 17d ago

[deleted]

tiborsaas 17d ago

Is it gambling if I'm beating the house?

raincole 17d ago

Gambling but with positive expected value, yes.

jimmaswell 17d ago

Programming before AI was always variable reward. It was a gamble against your own time and patience. Maybe I'd waste hours down the wrong rabbit holes trying to find a library that worked for my use case. Maybe I'd waste a day trying to get an API to do something it turned out it couldn't do. Maybe I'd have to redo my entire approach because of some factor I hadn't considered. Something I wrote could have worked on the first try or I could have had to spend the day chasing logic errors (or multiple days chasing memory errors if it was C or C++). Maybe I would just get bored of the project, especially if I realized there were 20 layers of yaks I needed to shave first, and Visual Studio got stuck updating again, and before I could even start actually coding I had to spend the entire evening on an exhausting merge conflict. My entire weekend could be gone with nothing to actually show for it. I got so sick of all this at some point that I slowly stopped doing anything that wasn't my job. But then AI got better and better and I realized it was the ultimate unblocker. When that dreaded malaise started creeping in signaling it was a project's end because I didn't want to waste any more of my life dealing with bullshit orthogonal to what I was trying to do, I'd give it to the AI. It felt like a miracle the first time this worked, and it still does. If we were previously equipped with shovels to dig through bullshit, we now have a fully automated Bagger 288. The reward schedule now isn't variable anymore; the chance that I finish something in a good state is 100%. I can focus on the parts I actually enjoy - architecting the broader system, making the parts mesh together in a sensible way that's easy to work with and has some mathematical elegance to it, hand coding the bits I want to be really specific about (but now without the endless frustration of bugfixing or import errors and edgecases being immediately discovered, thanks to the AI).

supern0va 17d ago
>Maybe I'd waste a day trying to get an API to do something it turned out it couldn't do. I was working on a side project recently. I had spent months designing the data model in my spare time, thinking through how to make it as elegant and durable to change as possible in the long term, since (if I launched it) the repercussions for getting it wrong would be significant. Once I had a working design, it probably would have been several more months to build a working prototype and start testing it. Instead, Claude knocked out the prototype for me in an afternoon. And it immediately became clear that it didn't work: not because the data model didn't solve all the problems I wanted it to solve, but because it didn't fit the shape of how I quickly learned a normal person would need/want to interact with the product. I was so focused on the long term, that I never thought about what the first five minutes of a user with hands on the thing would need. And the changes needed would be significant. Maybe there's some variable reward mechanism. But I sure was glad to be able to pull that particular slot machine handle and learn that than waste even more of my time on what was a dead end.

thepasswordis 17d ago

Literally putting tokens into a machine and hoping profit comes out. Amazing.

seki285 17d ago
Bingo

ricksunny 16d ago

1000%. My social community if reference is nomads of varying skills. The lower-skilled among them (the ones who were on the digital marketing, crypto,, now into building sales CRM tool) are manifestly demonstrating addictive tendencies around vibecoding) - the chain-smoking ADD guy pulling all-nighters still sticks in my mind. I myself (also low sw-skilled, just not the digital marketing / crypto hustling type) am exhibiting these tendencies in the form of all-nighters that in practice produce very little leverageable value-add. To remedy I try to be conservative in my goals - like only produce a comprehensive english-language PRD instead of any code till the tools get better and stroke the gambling instinct a bit less. (By the way this is not to say that all nomads are low-skilled or even low-sw-skill, not by a long shot. I’ve met plenty of CS-degreed nomads who I treat as the wizened experts that they are, from whom deferentially elicit their pearls of hard-won software project wisdom. It was one of these even who, non-derisively, recognized the ‘pulling the slot machine lever’ reflex among vibecoders after I posed the apparent addictive tendency. On later describing this to a longtime friend deeply conversant in social science, he immediately responded with a nod and the phrase ‘variable reward response’.)