Having a monthly summary or estimate of how your spending is going would be really useful, too.
Even if we have a negotiated yearly contract for $X spend per year, maybe we’ll hit that spend in 6 months instead of 12. Having some kind of automated telemetry saying how we’re trending would be so useful.
I’ve gotten vague warnings from customer success people saying vaguely that, but without any warning of what’s truly happening. The more we abstract away from money (tokens, credits, etc), the more we need a way to translate right back to money, to see how close we’re getting to any limits over time.
I don’t want to find out in month 5 that the contract which was expected to cover a year is now going to run out in 14 days.
I'm not seeing the word "money" show up in that article or in these comments nearly enough.
Hosting someone involves some money for the food and drinks to be consumed, sure.
But hosting also requires the hosts to feel up to the task of hosting by feeling that their home is adequate for hosting.
Having a home that's adequate for hosting involves money. And these days, lots of it.
In 2025 in the USA, the average age of a first-time home buyer is 40 years old. [0]
The average 27 year old who might have bought a home in the 1970s [1] and hosted people there is now probably renting until they're 40 years old.
Not that you can't host when you're renting, but there's more potential issues that aren't there when you own a place, including:
* a higher chance of having roommates, which increases the logistics of planning, and also potentially intruding on someone else's hope to have a quiet night in
* probably less space to host
So I think it seems reasonable to include the housing affordability crisis as a contributor to this, too.
Ya it's a real thing. At 35 y.o, I've hosted people in the 600 sqft basement my partner and I rent, but realistically all of our space fits about 3 extra people and all of that is in the same space as the kitchen. Some of my friends have older places with more space and better layouts for such a thing, but they're also spending quite a lot more and still need decent dual incomes usually to pull it off. They also tend to position themselves as "hosting" type people. With such volatile careers, it doesn't make sense to extend ourselves unnecessarily and don't plan on having kids or getting married. This place was a reluctant upgrade after getting kicked out of our studio, so at this point we consider it a luxury to have any separate rooms at all. We don't have any upward mobility to look forward to in the next 5 years, and although I'm generally satisfied in life, typing those words feels a bit depressing.
To be fair, if owning a place or renting with more space was the most important thing to us, we could hypothetically move to a lower CoL area, but we ultimately find that a rather poor tradeoff that would only save a marginal amount on net anyway. We're thankful to have those close friends that have the space and enjoy hosting.
I mean, there is a sliding scale what "hosting someone" means. Most of this thread seems to assume classic dinner parties where you prepare all the food for the people, and they may include aquintances.
We often host a group of good friends, and it's more like a potluck. Brunch is especially easy, as everyone can bring some random dish and there is little coordination necessary. It's also pretty cheap, we don't really spend much more money than we would on regular breakfast. Dinner may be a bit more expensive as we usually do the main (meat) dish.
As they're all good friends we don't have to prepare the place either, they don't care when it's a bit messy. We're lucky to have a big place, but every now and then also go to other friends where people have to sit on the floor due to lack of chairs when there's more than 8 invited. It's fine (and I'm in my 40s, it's not a bunch of college kids).
How many friends might not physically have the room in their home though?
> people have to sit on the floor due to lack of chairs when there's more than 8 invited
It's fine for you and the hosts and your friends (and for me, for that matter!), but how many people think that's unacceptable and will just not have people over if that's the solution?
For sure. If you write with a casual conversational tone people don't get triggered. But if you are eloquent and use an extended vocabulary thanks to large amounts of reading then that seems to make people think you're using AI.
As someone who loves to read (well, on and off) I wonder what the median vocabulary is and how I and other readers compare. I guess language has always been functional for most people.
Yeah its getting annoying how people discuss endlessly how some text is AI or not... like some extra imaginative points are awarded to those who spot the most. People seem to keep getting triggered by little insignificant things in the text.
LLMs average human writing thats out there, its not making up new expressions or language constructs so just move on if you (anybody) can and put that little obsessive pedantic part of you behind you.
I couldn't care less, why be a prick and not just enjoy & discuss the content, not this ultra focus on the form. If content is crap then thats another story altogether. I wish there would be some plugin/feature to just block those rather empty subthreads.
Not really, and also they do not vary their writing like humans would. Human writers do not repeat the same pattern over and over as much as LLMs do. They'd get bored of their own writing.
People as a whole are always going to be sick of whichever affectation current popular LLMs have, since they'd be reading a fair bit of that. As a writer you should steer clear of things that would elicit groans in a contemporary audience and "LLM prose" is just the latest addition.
So, as the person you're replying to said, you'll have to get used to this being a new angle from which writing is critiqued. You'll live happier if you don't let your cortisol spike over it. If it is any comfort, writers will eventually adjust and you'll encounter less of it.
Interesting. I agree that it seems that LLMs are wont to fall into recognisable patterns much more readily than humans however I asked a model to evaluate your comment history and it found loads of patterns such as:
“I’m not sure…” / “I don’t…” hedges before disagreement
Negation followed by correction/reframing is a recurring structure: essentially “It’s not X, it’s Y”.
And dozens of other examples. I wonder if LLMs really are more liable for it or if it simply seems that way purely because when you use a model it's almost as if you're speaking to the same "person". I think that human language is naturally formed by common agreed meanings of words first, and then phrases.
> I asked a model to evaluate your comment history and it found loads of patterns such as
> “I’m not sure…” / “I don’t…” hedges before disagreement Negation followed by correction/reframing is a recurring structure: essentially “It’s not X, it’s Y”.
I did a manual human dig through GP's profile and I don't see any evidence supporting this. The literal strings "I'm not sure" and "I don't" do appear a lot (also in replies, which I'm hoping your LLM was intelligent enough to exclude?), and they are used to hedge before making a statement, but not a single one of them even approaches the "It's not X, it's Y" thing your LLM has claimed they do.
Your LLM did not find dozens of examples, it told you it did and you didn't even bother to check.
Any given person will have phrases or ways of organizing things that they tend towards. But that isn't the same thing. Those patterns are the exception with lots of variance all around them. LLMs lack the same general variance while also going beyond merely favoring a few patterns to the point where you could describe it more as a production line stamping them out. They're also remarkably inefficient with their prose. I think I'm pretty bad on a first pass (see this comment I'm typing right now) but they put me to shame by a huge margin.
And in your estimation, is the LLM correct in qualifying that as a pattern, or is it full of shit?
I could ask an LLM to generate something arguing against whatever yours put out, but I won't. I come here to talk to other people, not their electronic sycophants.
What you wrote becomes completely incorrect if non-native speaker picks up the pen (like half of folks here, including me). Then you can easily start seeing this stuff and having these... non-smart reactions to manually written comments.
> As a writer you should steer clear of things that would elicit groans in a contemporary audience and "LLM prose" is just the latest addition.
Nope, thats you and your own self-pressures to adhere and conform to imaginary critical crowd, don't push it nor expect it form others. Its not a really happy way to live like that, is it. Maybe a warm fuzzy feeling when being in similar crowd, just pointing out that crowd may be more vocal but its actually pretty small.
Its really just some form of OCD/anxiety, unhealthy competitiveness, with a pinch of pettiness (as you write you completely reject any form of more moderate or tolerant approach or understanding how wrong in your assumptions you may be). You do you, just don't expect much respect for the n-th same comment on x-th article.
You could have read at least read some of my comments on here to quickly figure out I care about pleasing approximately nobody. Your sibling comment at least had their LLM go over them.
If you wish to continue the psychoanalyst LARP, feel free. Rather than be offended, myself and mine are bound to be further entertained.
One can still suspect that something might not have been uttered through some AI assistance. There might even be still some living humans outside, who knows.
I've had that happen to me. I actually recently wrote a draft blog and looked over it, and it felt AI generated. My writing style has definitely changed.
Hah absolutely, after of a very intense project I’ve undertaken with Claude agent teams for a few months now, I have caught myself using opus expressions, since they come to mind now naturally because that’s most of the text I’ve read since then … I’m catching myself so far, but in a year or two maybe I will not, fable doesn’t do as much “mannerisms” and speaks plainly, so maybe by then we will all be running fable level models on hour local machines and just not notice it anymore?
Or maybe the frontier labs could run several "personality" variants of each model and route you to them at random. Sessions are already sticky because of cache so it seems like any given cluster could be assigned one out of several fine tunes.
I recently started noticing myself using the term "candidly" instead of "honestly" a lot more. The only term I doubt I will ever use is "churn". I still don't understand why Claude likes to plug that term into random sentences every now and then.
I can't name one but I can tell you these models keep getting stupider as they keep existing and their system prompts get inflated with what not to do. I have experienced this happen with Qwen 3.8 Max Preview where for the early days it was blasting through Rust code fine and then before the release it silently got replaced and started to suck hard. Claude still has the "blue button" problem so it is probable that a casual chat with it could have this exact outcome of forgetting what to do. I saw some models also have this thing where when you tell them a text restriction they first ignore it in thinking, creating the full text and then apply them in their thinking rewriting it fully causing your output tokens to be inflated.
Well yes, there are only so many attention heads (well whatever magical variant frontier models are using these days) that can attend to the context and so as the context grows attention becomes spread thin.
But with reasoning enabled I find that even with a large context that induces mistakes most of the time a decent model realises and corrects itself before output.
And it's always been known that prompting what it should do is far better than what it shouldn't, since just introducing "DON'T do X" into the prompt means that the tokens for X are present and can be paid attention to in the wrong way.
But even then I've used plenty of "Do X, not Y" recently, especially for tools "Use this for x, don't use this for Y" and models perform like 90% of the time.
I would be interesting to experiment to see performance curves given a restriction on reasoning tokens allowed to n% of context tokens and see if there's some magic number of "reasoning should be at least n tokens for a context of length p" even ignoring the complexity of instructions in the prompt itself.
I have the opposite, I can pick up AIsms much more now and they stick out like a sore thumb. A couple of years ago I had no such intuition, it just sounded like normal writing to me, but now if I try to use AI to write any prose it just sounds absolutely terrible.
> the "IDunno" of archeology - "It most likely served ritual and cultural purposes"
If all you know about archeology is from daytime television and clickbait articles, all you know about history is what you vaguely remember from school, you never met anybody working in those fields and actually don't even have a passing interest to engage with the subject, then yes, you might be inclined to believe that's how it works.
EDIT: of course this comment accumulates nothing but drive-by down votes from arrogant computer touchers, presumably before heading off to other comment sections to discuss law, macroeconomics, quantum physics and whatever else they are experts at, having watched YouTube videos. You see, only CS requires years of study and is divided into dozens of intricate sub fields, everything else is simple, straight forward and can be "disrupted".
Remember, when it was "dig" even if it is destructive. Now its scan, map- return when the scanners get better, read scrolls of ash via scanner. We are 10 years away from a "Do not disturb ground" sign on every suspected digsite.
Given that models have been trained on tons of academic papers as well as internal corporate documentation, it's no surprise their output sounds a lot like an unholy fusion of both styles.
Worst thing is that because the smell is bad and you called it out, too comments are all about the smell vs the substance. I contribute, sadly. Maybe we should all be more judicious with when we say there's a smell, save that for when it's really rank? Like a polite thing. Yeah it stinks but maybe it's worth something beyond that. Not sure if this is the one, just thinking out loud.
Ran it through several testes, only one flagged a few sentences as AI, including the one you mention. Fair enough, it's unlikely that English is the (turkish in this case?) author's first language and a little AI help can't hurt here.
I learned a great lesson for a gamedev youtuber this summer: Use AI to give you a summary what you have to implement, what functions you'll need, what edge case you missed and then write it yourself. Putting this into practice helps me to refine the ticket I'm working on. With the last ticket I had to persuade the AI (Atlassian's Rovo in my case) that a new data model wasn't necessary and we can do it more elegantly with less code.
Many of us still have to figure out how AI fits into our workflow, letting it do all the work isn't it but asking AI to point you towards the goal and let it review/refine your work sounds a lot more acceptable to me.
Bad writing makes the reader stop thinking about what you wanted to convey. As unintuitive as it is for most people in this forum, AI writing smell is as bad as bad grammar. Doesn't matter how you get rid of it. Maybe even more AI can clean those up, but those unintuitive phrases that pop up in AI writing are going to be a hindrance for many people who would love for the focus to be on what they're presenting, not the sloppy way they've written it up
It sounds to me like you want to censor perfectly fine phrasing just because AI rolled the dice to use it. Let's not forget that AI learned to "speak" from people in the first place.
Not to mention that as people shift their phrasing to avoid being accused of using AI, the AI will keep evolving, training on the new phrasing and then adopting it, too.
I understand the language evolves, but evolving language just to sound different from AI feels like wasting effort better spent elsewhere. On actual substance of the message for example.
You can believe what you want. I don't censor bad grammar, but it's not good writing, and it will have negative effects on someone's writing and who will read it. You can have your fingers in your ears or you can adapt.
We're not talking about bad grammar, but sentences that are correct and sensible, and if you wrote them before AI, nobody would bat an eye. But because they are used by AI, these days they make people dismiss the whole piece.
It's not really different from dismissing people because they happened to use the same phrasing as Stephen King. You can't even tell if it's because they read Stephen King that much, Stephen King wrote it for them, and they are now trying to pass it as their own, or just coincidentally arrived at the same literary construction.
Whenever I see those threads, they usually don't discuss the merits of the writing. They claim that AI must have been used, so it's not even worth reading.
The disconcerting effect is enhanced by hearing the Dutch voice and reading the Dutch subtitles which don't quite match up with what he is saying in English! - until it all goes off into musical absurdity. Thanks for sharing.
Biologists take ethics much more seriously than any computer engineer or computer scientist that I've seen.
I saw a very notable scientist talk about topics like this and how they wrestle with them. Things like a "gene drive" [0] are being experimented with in the world [1], and biologists think very hard before doing certain things with the powers they wield. And I have not heard a life scientist laugh off ethical or spreading concerns when a thoughtful question was asked... but maybe the interview you're thinking of was a more lighthearted one?
My point isn't so much about the work ethics of one or another but rather than systems, even interconnected ones, are rarely as genuinely interdependent as science fiction drama lead us to believe.
Yes there can be terrible catastrophes e.g Fukushima, but what actually happened, within which extremely rare conditions, versus what we freely imagined is quite different.
We might need more reminders of those risks to properly insure such systems don't lead to the collapse of one to another (sadly) but still we manage to learn from it.
6% is the cost of sales tax in some places. That is not considered any kind of correction to bad behavior - it's literally the cost of buying goods in a variety of places.
I'd strongly argue that 6% will not correct bad behavior.
What corrects bad behavior? The threat of serious consequences to a business.
For Roblox their 6% of global turnover ($5b) is $300m which while it seems trivial, is 30% of their profit ($1b).
For a company like Google this fine would be in the vicinity of $24 billion, which would be a bit over 20% of their annual profit.
So for companies that have to answer to shareholders this is already a pretty big deterrent, but just in case if they reject compliance it becomes a periodic penalty!
Of one year. How many years does it take complete the investigation and let courts handle appeals? I assume they do not need to change behavior nor can the fine increase during the appeals.
I don't know, there's certainly mixed results so far for the DMA which has harsher penalties and none specifically for how this would play out with the DSA.
We've seen Zuckerburg pivot from openly pledging to defy the EU [1] and then presenting compliant plans six months later to avoid the the periodic fine [2].
But we've also seen Apple in a bid to avoid the periodic fine imposing a ~20% commission [3] on third party payments after their 27% fee was ruled illegal and they were told it must be free [4]. The investigation into that has taken a year now despite being immediately perceived as noncompliant by many developers and ressembling what Google was recently fined €430 million for [5] and Apple seems to feel no pressure to change it.
I guess what happens next to Apple will decide if companies fear this regulation, the periodic fine they were due if they didn't drop the 27% fee was touted to be up to $50m/day retroactively for the entire noncompliance period, which is now at least 400 days so lots of opportunity to send a message.
That 6% could be more than your profit margin, depending on what business you operate. There's nothing saying that fines can't keep coming if your behavior isn't corrected, it's not just one fine then they leave you alone.
> it's literally the cost of buying goods in a variety of places.
Not an accurate analogy. This is a fine on sales, not expenditures. It would be like fining you 6% of your pre-tax income, not doubling sales tax on things you buy.
> I'd strongly argue that 6% will not correct bad behavior.
If the government threatened to take 6% of your pre-tax income if you violated a set of laws, would you laugh it off and refuse to change your behavior? Or would you make an effort to not incur those fines?
These laws are not covering things that increase sales by 50%
If that was true, sales would fall to 67% of the pre-law sales. That doesn’t happen. It’s a silly claim.
It would be like the government taking 6% of your total compensation for breaking the speed limit. You could try to speed everywhere to save time but if you get caught it’s going to hurt.
It’s not a “increase sales 50%” scenario. You’re arguing against something that doesn’t exist.
> 6% is the cost of sales tax in some places. That is not considered any kind of correction to bad behavior - it's literally the cost of buying goods in a variety of places.
6% of annual, global sales, as an extra cost from one jurisdiction, which can impose this multiple times if there are multiple breaches, and where they're not the only jurisdiction with such rules, and the DSA isn't the only ruleset where fines are based on global revenue even in the EU (famously, GDPR).
Or, to put it another way: 16 such fines in one year and you've lost 100% of your revenue. You don't get to make up for this by raising prices, because that just means "100% of your revenue" is now a bigger number.
Even if we have a negotiated yearly contract for $X spend per year, maybe we’ll hit that spend in 6 months instead of 12. Having some kind of automated telemetry saying how we’re trending would be so useful.
I’ve gotten vague warnings from customer success people saying vaguely that, but without any warning of what’s truly happening. The more we abstract away from money (tokens, credits, etc), the more we need a way to translate right back to money, to see how close we’re getting to any limits over time.
I don’t want to find out in month 5 that the contract which was expected to cover a year is now going to run out in 14 days.