This article reads like a description of gambling-addiction behavior; the author appears to be addicted to using LLMs.

He's eagerly awaiting his next hit of dopamine from his favorite model. He's setting timers to be ready for when his next hit comes available. He's spinning up unnecessary queries just to start the timer ticking on new models.

You could basically write the same article about some guy who sits in a casino all day eagerly awaiting double-your-winnings bonuses or similar.

• minimaxir

  today at 7:55 PM

  Gambling addition implies dopamine hits from irregular and uncertain outcomes: as I note in the post, I don't get a dopamine hit from running agents. I know people say "LLMs are just gambling because they're next-token-maximizers that can't write real code" but with GPT 5.6 Sol (and a few new tricks I discovered) the outputs are much less irregular and uncertain. It's just typical engineering.

  "Not wanting to waste money" is the polar opposite of gambling.

  • dlenski

    today at 9:01 PM

    > Gambling addition implies dopamine hits from irregular and uncertain outcomes

    Your post literally describes your fascination with trying to figure out the pattern of a "random" reward that you get, and trying to maximize the value you get out of it.

    I put "random" in scare quotes because I strongly believe that—just as slot machine payouts are carefully structured to keep you playing—these LLM resets are structured to keep heavy users like you coming back to max out their usage, and to progressively upgrade it.

    Several other commenters have also stated this same suspicion about the pattern of resets you're describing.

    > "Not wanting to waste money" is the polar opposite of gambling.

    From everything I've read about gambling addiction, particularly Jay Caspian Kang, that seems wrong.

    The desire to "not waste money" and "get back to even" seems like a huge part of what motivates gamblers to keep gambling.

  • dehrmann

    today at 8:02 PM

    > dopamine hits from irregular and uncertain outcomes

    Like the LLM getting the solution right?

• serf

  today at 7:52 PM

  > This article reads like a description of gambling-addiction behavior; the author appears to be addicted to using LLMs.

  you're projecting, it's just insanely irritating to work with a tool that 1) limits its' own use 2) with a random interval.

  keeping in mind that plenty of people are making money on token use..

  this guy sets a timer to wake up for work; he appears to be addicted to work.

  • rob

    today at 8:30 PM

    I have a subscription. If I don't have anything to do at the moment I don't use it. I don't think I need to set a timer every five hours and come up with tasks to do just to use my subscription. Seems like odd behavior?

    I also have a Netflix subscription. I watch a couple of things on it and stop. I don't think to myself I need to maximize my subscription so let me watch movies all the time and wake up at 2 AM to make sure the next movie starts.

    • skeledrew

      today at 10:23 PM

      I encourage you others to keep on minimizing so us others can keep in maximizing. Balance!

  • dlenski

    today at 8:51 PM

    > it's just insanely irritating to work with a tool that 1) limits its' own use 2) with a random interval.

    Do you understand how the psychological response to the "random" disappearance of an annoyance is pretty much exactly the same as the psychological response to the "random" appearance of a reward?

    I put "random" in square quotes because neither are in fact totally random, but both are clearly quite carefully engineered to provoke the desired response.

    > you're projecting

    I am not projecting. My total lifetime gambling consists of maybe 10 or 15 cash poker games with high school friends, ten minutes at a casino in Montréal which I found a revolting experience, and receiving a few $1 scratch lottery tickets as party favors.

They're giving everyone their next hit.

What I read on social media about people and these resets gives off literal worst kind of addiction vibes. I've literally seen people talking about "Oh I had an existential crisis without Fable/GPT-5.6"

These people legitimately need help, or alternatively a social life.

Maybe its different on my end because I just use a sub outside of work for fun stuff. At work its not my money so I don't really care. I go to work, maybe use these subs at home every once in a while for a fun personal project and if I hit the limits (I rarely even do) I play video games or hang out with my wife/family.

People are borderline tying their identities to these models it seems, and yet most people aren't even building anything interesting.

• dlenski

  today at 10:06 PM

  > They're giving everyone their next hit.

  Yes, 100%. The author seems to be describing, quite lucidly, how he is getting sucked into a gambling-like addiction to these LLMs… although he seems unaware of the implications of that.

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48961596

  • today at 10:09 PM

My guess is they are getting folks used to the idea of:

1. The end of unlimited token subsidization and a new status quo of metered usage limits.

2. Adding to the above, self-initiated usage limit resets give you some control and again help lessen the sting of the end of subsidization.

Right now though, I think Anthropic and OpenAI are in open MAU war ahead of their respective IPOs and that might be a bigger factor.

Yeah I've been noticing for a while. Definitely didn't want to be one of the first to bring it up! Few weeks ago it was really unexpected resets the day before the actually reset. Now I'm noticing Claude keeps going for a while after the 7 day quota hits 100% (I setup my statusline to include quota as I got tired of checking the app), but also it could just be bad calibration and even at 100% I still actually have quota left.

If I had to guess uncharitably, I’d say they want you to feel like you keep getting something extra for “free” while you’re getting the same service you should have expected as normal 3 months ago.

That explains it! I was wondering about this just today as I saw it hd reset. Alas I don't need to wait another 7 days..

Competition. If Anthropic had followed through on their plan to put Fable under API pricing, users would have jumped ship en masse to GPT 5.6 (or perhaps to K3 if it turns out to be good enough.)

• noworriesnate

  today at 7:52 PM

  Theoretically it'll still happen tomorrow. But we'll see--I think they've extended it twice?

  • CamperBob2

    today at 8:14 PM

    My understanding is that they are no longer threatening to do it, it's part of the Max plan now (which I use.) The $20/month subscribers might still have to pay as they go, though.

    • noworriesnate

      today at 10:26 PM

      I hope so! In the model selector in claude code in the browser it still says "Available until July 19" next to Fable. Also on Friday I did get an error while using Fable that said something like "This model requires API credits to use" but that disappeared after about 20 minutes....

I like money.

It feels like Anthropic was affected by resource limitations upon launch or big adoption curves in the past, and now they're tyring to be mindful of having less of those, in several ways, one of which is trying to keep capacity to keep core services running and let the high demand not impact the rest of the system.

WHen it doesn't turn out that way, it opens up options.

At the same time if other model providers were anticipating Anthropic or someone else to have problems at launch, and were waiting in the wings with their own models to launch competitively, it sets off a capacity release competition.

One might lower prices, one might give it away, or just make it available, and then there are users on other platforms with limits, or free until a certain day, etc.