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Comment by jamwil | Hacker News Reader

I’m vague on a specific reason for this feeling because there are a few to choose from and no one overpowers the other, but the emotion that comes to mind when I read this is disgust. As a society I feel we will look back on the subsidized opulence of this moment with total and utter contempt.

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There's no opulence in spending tokens for entertainment. Vibecoding your own game is the new viral game.

I know exactly the feeling you mean. I get a much stronger feeling of that when I talk with friends who frequently take a plane for a 250 mile trip which has a world-class comfortable high-speed train connection with very frequent trains, each taking less than 3 hours. I'm sure you have friends who would do this in this situation - do you feel the same disgust when you hear them talking about such choices?

I still haven't seen a single person who actually cares about the environment and has willingly made significant sacrifices for it, who clamors about the environmental cost of AI. Every time I see someone do it it's someone who never cared about this before, and still doesn't really. Who buys plenty of new clothes and furniture, loves a good burger, has the latest iPhone, flies 4 times per year.

Maybe you're the unicorn in which case fair enough, you've earned the right to feel disgusted.

Or nostalgia for simpler times

That as well. But everyone reading GP’s posts knows in their bones that it’s unsustainable. It’s economically unsustainable and environmentally unsustainable, and in that context it strikes me as pure hoarding behaviour. Taking as much as they can for themselves before the house of cards crashes down.

I have no sympathy for OpenAI or Anthropic as corporations, but if these are the new tools of the trade, then platform abuse like GP is bragging about serves only to destroy the livelihoods of the rest of us who are content to use our fair share.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and the bill always comes at the end.

I mostly hate it because the token crunch is now coming for us regular users because of people like this. A few people always ruin it for the rest of us.

Yea. It’s greed, pure and simple. And also a major misstep on the part of the inference providers to offer these subsidized plans and not anticipate these slop mills.

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