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Comment by comfysocks | Hacker News Reader

Sure, indiscriminate tokenmaxxing is a gamble that can pay off sometimes. However, I think that the decision to take any gamble should be made by someone who will bear responsibility for the downside as well as the upside. I would prefer to search for new usages in a more strategic way. I agree that experimentation is a great way to learn if done intelligently and with limits. Full “Monte Carlo” makes sense when ops are cheap enough. It seems some orgs don’t think tokens are cheap enough yet.

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    >  I would prefer to search for new usages in a more strategic way

I think this is very, very hard for orgs to do.

Looking back at the Internet, who would have thought that it would eventually create a Netflix, Amazon, Shopify, Spotify, Google Maps, etc. Just wild the things that ended up coming out of pushing bits over a wire with few simple protocols.

In an ideal world, you make strategic bets, but I can also see the case for the opposite this early in the lifecycle of a technology. You just don't know until you try.

Mid/late 2023, it wasn't at all obvious that it would take over coding that fast.

People talked about streaming years before Netflix. Online maps apps date back to the 1990s. E-commerce as well.

I definitely get the impression that many people thought it would eventually create shopping, streaming, and mapping sites.

I think people were less likely to have predicted things like social media or YouTube, though those weren't ideas sprung from a vacuum either.

If it were that simple and obvious, Blockbuster would have beat everyone to streaming. Sears would have digitized their catalog and used their vast brick-and-mortar stores as fulfillment centers for same-day shipping.

None of these shifts were obviously the right bet and many organizations lost because they missed the opportunity. Now orgs are on the same horizon and I can see why they don't want to miss this window.

Blockbuster actually did try to beat everyone to streaming. Notably, Blockbuster and Enron [1] entered into a 20-year partnership for online video delivery.

Sears was a different story, in that they were a real estate company with a store front and retail real estate took a nosedive due to ecommerce. But that's a different discussion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal

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