Comment by Nzen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nzen | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

tl;dr Peter Steinberger shared a product demo for CodexBar [0] with a graph of OpenAI token usage. This graph shows one million spent, prefers gpt-5.5 and spent twenty thousand today.

[0] https://github.com/steipete/CodexBar

However, I do not see a strong reason to believe that this is his actual, personal usage. It could be all openclaw usage or some subset of openai usage, given that he is inside them. I suspect it is far more likely to be fake data [1] that exercises the graph library in a visually satisfying way. Notice that it has no usage for a 'week' after April 15 (a Wednesday), but picks up a bunch later. As marketing copy it needn't have any basis in reality [2]. I should hope openai would put a procedure in front of their entrepreneur acquisition that prevents accidentally exposing trade secrets [3].

[1] https://github.com/faker-js/faker

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/proceduralgeneration/comments/lf2n4...

[3] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PostingWhatYouSh...

I view this type of post (his, not yours) as meta deception. I only became aware of this type of deception and its power from a bit of reading in to magicians and stage craft in the last few months. There’s a video on YouTube as well that does a great job of breaking down a Derren Brown stunt that uses it to great effect manipulating the TV viewing audience.

I’d actually seen the original DB episode years before when it first aired and it definitely had an affect on me through this form of manipulation - it altered my internal understanding of marketing/advertising, which was the actual underlying purpose of the episode.

It’s altered how I internally accept and process information from any 2nd or 3rd hand source. BTW, people aren’t necessarily always aware they’re doing it. We all suffer from our own internal biases and deceptions, and sometimes we spread them unknowingly!

Could you link to the video?

Of course, it's at the start of this 5hr video (it's only 20 min segment or so I think) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnwcU-XDyJ4 (I've not watched all of this). It took me a while to find again, probably due to the title. I came across these guys discussing the same thing as well (link jumps to the correct place), which is more of a TLDR but also feeds into how it was used around Brexit, etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHTCNG6pPgQ&t=468s

Thank you! I'll take a look

This reply implies it was his own usage (in fast mode):

https://x.com/steipete/status/2055428360789016964

Reply on news.ycombinator.com