I think this used to be true more than it is now. Memory has been relatively expensive in cloud environments for a while (often 2x the price of an ec2 node for an equivalent with 2x RAM) and DRAM shortages aren't helping.
For the most part yeah but does depend on scale. For Java there are lower cost migration pathways like native compilation anyway if that does become your concern
I see this sentiment pretty regularly, and I don’t get it. Variable rewards is not sufficient to establish that it is “ basically gambling”.
Everything in life is variable reward. You invite a friend over, they might accept or they might not. Drive to work, traffic might be good or might be bad. You ask a colleague to finish a task, they might do it or might not or might do a good job or might not.
Everything is variable reward. Is everything gambling?
> "Everything is variable reward. Is everything gambling?"
well, no. If you work overtime and get paid overtime, you are not gambling and that is not a variable reward.
Humans engage more with rewards that are intermittent and variable. Like Futurama's scene from 'The Scary Door' where the character says "A casino where I'm winning, I must be in heaven! A casino where I always win, that's boring, I must really be IN HELL!". A constant predictable reward is boring, less engaging. So if you know you get no overtime, but sometimes your boss rewards you with $5 coffee voucher, sometimes a free pizza dinner, sometimes double-time pay for the time worked or a half-day off, now you might be gambling 1hr overtime for an intermittent variable reward.
> "Drive to work, traffic might be good or might be bad."
Good traffic is not a "reward" for driving to work(!) and you have to drive to work regardless so you are not risking anything [you might be risking your life, but you are not making a choice which can reward you with good traffic]. You might say that going a different route is a choice and a gamble which could reward you with good traffic, but traffic engineering does not work that way because if there was a consistently low-traffic route, everyone else would take that route until it was no faster than any other route. Traffic will generally be the predictable and similar every day, plus 'arriving at work early' is not much of a reward.
> A constant predictable reward is boring, less engaging.
Perhaps but predictable outcome is a very desirable quality. No one wants a hammer that sometimes drives nails and sometimes doesn’t. All of the current harness engineering work is about squeezing predictability out of the LLM.
> Good traffic is not a "reward" for driving to work(!)
Like hell it’s not. I drove into work last Friday and there was no traffic because of the holiday weekend. It was amazing. Had me considering whether Friday should be one of my standard RTO days.
I think you're missing the point. Predictable outcomes are desirable, but they aren't addictive or gambling. People quickly get used to opening the faucet and seeing water come out and stop doing it, whereas people scroll TikTok or channel surf for hours at a time.
In what way was amazing no-traffic "a reward"? What system was rewarding you for what change in behaviour?
You went off on a tangent and I responded. None of this is actually relevant to the topic of whether LLMs are “basically gambling”.
> In what way was amazing no-traffic "a reward"? What system was rewarding you for what change in behaviour?
What does this mean? Are you asking me to describe the dopamine system or are you implying that rewards have to be driven by some external system’s goal?
A reward implies it was given by something outside of your control. The lack of traffic wasn't a reward given to you, it's just a state of the highway.
You invite a friend over, but raccoon appears. Then pigeon appears. Then friend appears but at the last second suddenly becomes a banana. You remember you are out of bananas so you order more and also some cola zero cans on your local grocery delivery app. You are back to the party, but now you have 5 friends in the room, and you run de-duplication query. Now half of your friend is sitting at the sofa, and another half becomes a quarter of banana. Suddenly bananas arrive so you need to open the door. Once you are back there are no friends, pigeons or raccoons but also no bananas and no cola - all the delivery results are gone. This seems to be urgent and important, gotta fix this first before going back to that friend invitation...
This is not my experience with current AI models at all. But regardless you are not describing anything that sounds like gambling. You are describing a weird hallucinogenic experience.
i’m not sure “variable rewards” is the right term, but i do agree with the op that it is very similar to gambling.
regarding your examples, i think the difference is that with ai, you’re literally sitting in front of a machine, pressing a button, and (almost instantly) getting a result that, if not desired, can immediately be tried for again. you even spend “tokens” to do this, and at least in my native language, “token” brings to mind the coins you’d stick in a slot machine
I don’t see much similarity beyond the most superficial.
If you sit at a slot machine and pump quarters into it, each “turn” is independent. You spin and you win or lose. It’s pure chance and there is no destination. You execute the exact same action over and over and hope random chance brings you more money.
If you sit down in front of a coding harness, the progress is incremental and directed. You ask for a thing, the LLM produces something that is hopefully close to what you wanted. You give it more direction to prod it closer to the end state you want. You are not executing the same action, but incrementally nudging it in the right direction. I’ve literally never restarted from the same initial state with the same prompt and hoped for a different result and I don’t know why anyone would. Rarely I’ve thrown away the progress made and started over but always with a very different prompt that includes learnings from the failed attempt.
So maybe it's more like poker than a slot machine? Still intermittent rewards with a lot of random chance. The nuance of the analogy isn't that important to the general idea
The LLM could one shot a brilliant solution, or it could lead you down a days long path to nowhere. It could give you accurate useful information or it could completely make up something that isn't at all correct. The fact that each usage is a dice roll where you have a desired outcome that will be fulfilled at a variable level makes it very similar to gambling. And in fact the part that makes it addictive is the near hits where the LLM comes very close to giving you what you want, but not quite there. That keeps you coming back.
i agree with you that it’s principally different from a slot machine, and that it’s possible to use it in a way (like you describe) that is much more focused, for lack of a better term, to great effect
most people don’t use ai this way though, and i still feel like the end-psychological reward mechanism is very, very similar to gambling regardless of how well one utilizes it (and this is even more obvious with image generation as you chase that perfect output)
perhaps it’s better to compare it to gacha than slots?
How do they use it? Surely no one is just repeating the same prompt over and over (except as a Ralph loop perhaps, which is automated). I’m really struggling with the notion that most people just throw the same prompt repeatedly hoping it eventually works. Because that doesn’t sound like gambling. It sounds crazy (and frustrating).
> and i still feel like the end-psychological reward mechanism is very, very similar to gambling regardless of how well one utilizes it
In the sense that you get a dopamine reward when you succeed, sure, but I get the same reward when I code by hand and achieve a successful result.
> and this is even more obvious with image generation as you chase that perfect output
This is fair, because sometimes with image generation the same exact prompt will produce very different output. This is becoming less true as the models get better and it becomes more effective to direct image generation iteratively than to keep starting from scratch with a barely tweaked prompt.
When working on a problem models will walk you down a garden path requiring only yes/no answers or very brief clarifications for a long time. It's always proposing its own workarounds/suggestions/etc. Especially if trying to debug something where it has more understanding than the user so really all it needs from you is "uh sure try that too I guess" from time to time.
And sometimes the debugging has already veered completely off course at the beginning so it's futile, but each time the fleeting hope that just a few thousand more tokens will magically fix it tempts you to keep going a little longer.
as an example, i was using chatgpt a few weeks back to help me remember the name of a painting i’d seen about a decade ago. i could recall the general shape of the subject and that it was europeanish, but nothing else. after seven turns or so it finally got it, and honestly, the relief of finally remembering the name felt like, well, hitting a jackpot
i’ve had a similar feeling of success after trying to get it to give a comprehensible answer when asking it for a solid counter-argument to philosophical questions. it is indeed often crazy and frustrating
> but I get the same reward when I code by hand
i have only done very simple coding work with llms, so that may be why our ideas differ about the feeling of reward. this is where the comparison to gacha makes more sense than slots, since when you’re coding, you still get a reward each turn whilst chasing the final/desired result
I have this thing with a wallpaper with a small island, a (tiny?) house, a pier and a boat. Probably somewhere in Canada or Scandinavia. Had it on my PC in the 90s and no model was able to help me with this.
> the relief of finally remembering the name felt like, well, hitting a jackpot
I understand the joy of success but I fail to see how this is gambling. I could have an equivalent conversation with a friend (more likely about a movie in trying to remember than a painting, but still) and get the exact same type of iterative “no, not that one, it was more like X” and feel elated when my friend finally realizes I’m taking about a scene from Hot Tub Time Machine.
sorry, maybe my english is failing me here. what i was getting at is that using ai feels like gambling to me, where tokens, time, etc. are wagered against the chance for desired output. the risk is that you waste your tokens/time, and the prize is a useful answer (if not the exact code/solution/whatever one was hoping for)
i wasn’t trying to convince you, i’m just explaining that this is gambling in a meaningful sense to some people, especially with how turn-based and unpredictable the whole system is. whether it is actually gambling (semantically, legally, ontologically?) isn’t really interesting imo. what’s interesting is that it’s structured similarly and feels nearly identical to some people
but then, i also feel like there’s an element of gambling in the example of you talking with your friend, though i think it would be better illustrated if it was a conversation with a random person
I just wanted to chime in that there is nothing wrong with your English. I'm a native English speaker and I, too, find using an LLM to accomplish something to be very gambling-like. You're wagering something of value (your allotted tokens, and your time) on an unpredictable outcome that you hope benefits you.
thanks, i really appreciate the kind words. it’s just such a precise language that i worry i might be accidentally adding (or not including) important subtext in discussions like this
I agree with the other commenter. Your English is perfectly good. Your subjective experience is your own and I can’t disagree with that.
I’m working from a place where my employer pays for my tokens so I’m also not spending anything except my time. Maybe if I were, it would feel more like gambling.
I would agree that 1-2 years ago models were more "slot machine"-esque - sometimes the output was good, sometimes the output was bad. And as a result, I primarily used them for auto-complete functionality and bouncing ideas around. In those workflows, you can easily ignore it if the spin is wrong.
Not everyone has the desire to work around the system, and many are diametrically opposed to the concept of AI. They get this perception that it's a slot machine because of that inconsistency, and then do the human thing of assuming that other people must just be flawed if they're different from them. They're "addicted to gambling".
Obviously, things have changed. Open models can still be like that, but are often so fast and cheap at iterating it doesn't matter. SOTA models aren't perfect, but are to the point that they're generally much better than the average developer.
But once that perception set in and the meme spreads, it's really hard for some to break out of it. Especially at the pace AI development has been moving. It's just that simple.
I really do think its tge case. Ever notice how juuust when you run out of usage its allllmost correct? then the handy helpful "buy more credits!" link pops up. Meanwhile local models are finishing the task without fucking around and without alterting shit it wasnt supposed to touch.
How is it a environmental catastrophe level, datacentre requiring, bullshit model is so much worse than something that runs on my workstation and doesn't cost us a ha itable planet?
Either they're fucking with us serving 8b models at scale or china really has the AI race in the bag so much so that they can openly release what the USA jealously guards.
They moan and complain about china copying from them (while doing the same), but if that's the case in full, then why are the chinese models better? you dont copy bad work and come out ahead.
1000%. My social community if reference is nomads of varying skills. The lower-skilled among them (the ones who were on the digital marketing, crypto,, now into building sales CRM tool) are manifestly demonstrating addictive tendencies around vibecoding) - the chain-smoking ADD guy pulling all-nighters still sticks in my mind. I myself (also low sw-skilled, just not the digital marketing / crypto hustling type) am exhibiting these tendencies in the form of all-nighters that in practice produce very little leverageable value-add. To remedy I try to be conservative in my goals - like only produce a comprehensive english-language PRD instead of any code till the tools get better and stroke the gambling instinct a bit less.
(By the way this is not to say that all nomads are low-skilled or even low-sw-skill, not by a long shot. I’ve met plenty of CS-degreed nomads who I treat as the wizened experts that they are, from whom deferentially elicit their pearls of hard-won software project wisdom. It was one of these even who, non-derisively, recognized the ‘pulling the slot machine lever’ reflex among vibecoders after I posed the apparent addictive tendency. On later describing this to a longtime friend deeply conversant in social science, he immediately responded with a nod and the phrase ‘variable reward response’.)
Modern LLM services are engineer's pipe dream that was heavily shaped by the shadiest product management dark patterns you can find: applying gambling-style engagement tactics, exploiting cognitive biases, exploiting users' lack of technical understanding to inflate product expectations, using fear mongering in external and investor communications. And that's not even a complete list.
Programming before AI was always variable reward. It was a gamble against your own time and patience. Maybe I'd waste hours down the wrong rabbit holes trying to find a library that worked for my use case. Maybe I'd waste a day trying to get an API to do something it turned out it couldn't do. Maybe I'd have to redo my entire approach because of some factor I hadn't considered. Something I wrote could have worked on the first try or I could have had to spend the day chasing logic errors (or multiple days chasing memory errors if it was C or C++). Maybe I would just get bored of the project, especially if I realized there were 20 layers of yaks I needed to shave first, and Visual Studio got stuck updating again, and before I could even start actually coding I had to spend the entire evening on an exhausting merge conflict. My entire weekend could be gone with nothing to actually show for it.
I got so sick of all this at some point that I slowly stopped doing anything that wasn't my job. But then AI got better and better and I realized it was the ultimate unblocker. When that dreaded malaise started creeping in signaling it was a project's end because I didn't want to waste any more of my life dealing with bullshit orthogonal to what I was trying to do, I'd give it to the AI. It felt like a miracle the first time this worked, and it still does. If we were previously equipped with shovels to dig through bullshit, we now have a fully automated Bagger 288.
The reward schedule now isn't variable anymore; the chance that I finish something in a good state is 100%. I can focus on the parts I actually enjoy - architecting the broader system, making the parts mesh together in a sensible way that's easy to work with and has some mathematical elegance to it, hand coding the bits I want to be really specific about (but now without the endless frustration of bugfixing or import errors and edgecases being immediately discovered, thanks to the AI).
>Maybe I'd waste a day trying to get an API to do something it turned out it couldn't do.
I was working on a side project recently. I had spent months designing the data model in my spare time, thinking through how to make it as elegant and durable to change as possible in the long term, since (if I launched it) the repercussions for getting it wrong would be significant.
Once I had a working design, it probably would have been several more months to build a working prototype and start testing it.
Instead, Claude knocked out the prototype for me in an afternoon. And it immediately became clear that it didn't work: not because the data model didn't solve all the problems I wanted it to solve, but because it didn't fit the shape of how I quickly learned a normal person would need/want to interact with the product. I was so focused on the long term, that I never thought about what the first five minutes of a user with hands on the thing would need. And the changes needed would be significant.
Maybe there's some variable reward mechanism. But I sure was glad to be able to pull that particular slot machine handle and learn that than waste even more of my time on what was a dead end.
(Appreciating this entire thread) - side question: you used the word ‘shape’ in the abstract sense, something I never came across until Claude vibecoding came along. Was it common / did you use ‘shape’ in the abstract sense before say 2025?
Also, my coming from being a non-coder, I have a lot of appreciation for the possibilities for project failure one way or another due to a data model or project schema being wrong, even though I still only have a superficial understanding of what either of those concepts even are. . My question is, does your conception of data models in the abstract come from a formal academic course, like an algo’s & data structures course, or from trade-knowledge acquired through the practitioner grapevine?
>you used the word ‘shape’ in the abstract sense, something I never came across until Claude vibecoding came along. Was it common / did you use ‘shape’ in the abstract sense before say 2025?
As far as I can remember, this has been fairly common in tech (or at least where I've worked) for some time, though it's possible that my memory here is a bit fuzzy. I will say that my spouse has often commented that "Claude talks like you", which I suspect is because it is trained on a lot of language specific to the tech world.
>My question is, does your conception of data models in the abstract come from a formal academic course, like an algo’s & data structures course, or from trade-knowledge acquired through the practitioner grapevine?
I have worked for over a decade on the telemetry for a specific major product that most people have probably used, and shepherded it through a major re-architecture, so most of this is from my career. I came in right after it was built and witnessed the pain as things had been layered on over a long period of time as the product evolved, so I've just witnessed all the pointy bits where naive early decisions can come back to bite you later.
> It was a gamble against your own time and patience.
At this point, what do the words even mean? Your own patience and available time are always completely random and fairly distributed across a large enough data set?
> Maybe I'd waste hours down the wrong rabbit holes trying to find a library that worked for my use case. Maybe I'd waste a day trying to get an API to do something it turned out it couldn't do. Maybe I'd have to redo my entire approach because of some factor I hadn't considered.
Our ignorance isn't random chance. As we research and experiment, we reduce the problem area.
> At this point, what do the words even mean? Your own patience and available time are always completely random and fairly distributed across a large enough data set?
Predicting the time a task will take is impossible. Something that sounds like a 5 minute script can turn into a month of banging your head against unknown unknowns. I lose my patience when the afternoon I allocated is getting overrun by nonsense and I'm missing out on other things I wanted to do or household maintenance.
> Our ignorance isn't random chance. As we research and experiment, we reduce the problem area.
Every thought we have has random chance to be wrong despite our conviction that it's correct. Descartes' Evil Demon plays his tricks on all of us. How many times have you typed some line of code only to realize it was obviously wrong afterwards? Even for simpler matters we "hallucinate" all the time. I was deep in thought trying to help someone come up with an acronym the other day and felt convicted that "Goal Oriented Augmented Retrieval" worked for GOAL until I said it aloud.
Our thoughts and actions are consistently wrong some portion of the time because our meat computers are not perfect positronic brains running prolog. We put cereal in the fridge and say "you too" to the waiter. Every thought we put down or action we take is a gamble on the soundness of the thought or action.
It wouldn't surprise me. It seems like a mirror of the social media move from social graphs to recommendation engines. You are either producer or consumer and never shall consumer be promoted organically.
This response sounds like "let them eat cake". You realize a lot of people on the internet (even here on HN) are in the developing world and, whether due to lack of means or weak passports, can't necessarily travel to where the things that interest them can be found locally?
I also find IRL social interactions also want pacing to some degree. But I don't know, I find my brain is sort of wired for these sorts of novel, pseudonymous interactions from a young age.
Yeah I get that. But treat them like candy - it's okay to eat a small dessert after lunch, it's okay to eat entire bucket of ice cream once in a while, but you know, your main diet needs to be quality stuff.
If we're not owning it, you're not selling it, you're leasing it. Terminology on sales pages should reflect this. "Subscribe now" "purchase license" etc. should be mandated if this is the expectation. Terms like "buy" without qualification are misleading in this context, but they won't remove them from store pages because people are more likely to pay higher rates for something if they believe they are actually owning the good in perpetuity.
This is actually state law in CA. People reported Sony to California's Attorney General, who basically said they weren't going to do anything about it.
Unfortunately the law is only as useful as its enforcement.
The attorney general said they wouldn't be pressing charges, and said that private individuals would need to press charges themselves. Source: https://youtu.be/Wst4wPBH-Cg
It seems that now some individuals have pressed charges against Sony.
The problem is that Sony thinks that rule of law is for chumps and has forced arbitration (waiving your right to go to court) unless you opt out by mail or soemthing within 30 days hidden in the modern Iliad terms of service.
So in theory this case could get thrown out due to Sony legally taking away your right to a fair trial.
And if you read the proceedings Sony says that "consumers in the digital age have no expectation of ownership when they buy digital products". Goes to show you the respect some modern companies have for people.
> 14.5. Class Action Waiver.
> YOU AND THE SONY ENTITY WITH WHICH YOU HAVE A DISPUTE AGREE THAT ARBITRATION WILL BE CONDUCTED ONLY ON AN INDIVIDUAL BASIS AND NOT IN A CLASS OR REPRESENTATIVE ACTION [...]
> Regardless, these sorts of things have been fought before, over and over.
I'm no lawyer, but IMHO they probably will reply that Sony has indeed violated CA. AB 2426 (effective since 01-jan-2025) and that Sony illegally tried to restrict customer rights in the first place, as per McGill v. Citibank https://law.justia.com/cases/california/supreme-court/2017/s...
This is the only regulation I feel is reasonable. When it comes to luxury goods like video games, it doesn’t make sense to dictate how the product is offered. But by all means insist they’re clear with what the transaction type is.
I can imagine the natural competitive wedge where GOG can say “Buy Game” but Steam has to say “Lease Game” on their buttons.
This would be case-by-case in Steam. There are some games which really do sell under "irrevocable license to play" (which, short of granting copyright privileges, is about as close as you can get to ownership for a digital product). Other games on Steam do not.
I think it would highlight the differences between publishers / studios more than store fronts.
> There are some games which really do sell under "irrevocable license to play" (which, short of granting copyright privileges, is about as close as you can get to ownership for a digital product).
It's a non-transferable lease that can be canceled at any time by the issuer.
The real problem is that most of society still thinks of games as a piece of physical media that you combine with a player that allows you to play the game. In that world you have a liscense to the software, and a physical token which is transferable and therefore valuable.
I'd argue that we need to decouple transferability and cancel ability from physical media. If this were to happen then the word "Buy" makes sense precisely the same way it used to with physical media. Of course more provision needs to be provided for live service games regarding cancel ability.
Yes, some people are trying to achieve this by arguing that physical media should stick around forever. I think the real solution is providing the same protections and rights for digital purchases as we had with physical media.
That would be a real win for consumers since we get the advantages of digital media with the ownership and transference rights of physical media.
Of course this would be a great inconvenience to those who wish to charge the same price for a temporary revocable license to the content, and they have deep lobbying pockets to fight against it.
As long as we're in copyright world, it ought to be structured as three separate parties:
1. Licensor, the company who makes the game.
2. Licensee, the person buying a digital copy of the game.
3. Safekeeper, Steam or another platform that stores the digital copy on behalf of Licensee. Similar to how depositories store securities and guarantee that they can be neither lost nor duplicated. For a separate fee perhaps.
They both communicate the same thing because they both start with “buy.” They communicate Ownership and collapse to the same thing to a normal consumer: implied ownership of the game. Insisting that the ownership is of the license and it says it on the button doesn’t really help, because no reasonable person thinks that a “purchased” license can be revoked for any reason or no reason at all. Why doesn’t anybody think that? Because “owning” a license implies you actually control it. But a license you can’t control at all means you own NOTHING! Not even a license. So “buy license" miscommunicates in the same way as “buy.”
Then maybe is should be forced to say: “Buy revocable license” and require the user to answer randomized multiple choice questions regarding the terms of the license that act in opposition to the purchaser. Collect metrics on wrong answers and if greater than say, 15% of people can’t determine what they are actually handing over money for, fine and require additional clarity.
Or, just flip the tables and say the historical meaning of buy implies transfer of ownership in exchange for some trade. Since the seller no longer owns the items that was sold in the transaction, they have no additional rights that are covered by other areas of the law (such as copyright). First sale applies and if the seller doesn’t provide a mechanism to facilitate that sale, the buyer is free to exercise that right in whatever way they see fit.
Licenses are commonly understood to have variable duration, as specified by the license.
I get that people want to be able to purchase games forever, but this linguistic argument seems tortured concern trolling. maybe Im wrong, but are there even people confused by what they are getting when they pay for a modern online game? It seems like the bigger issues is people know, but dont like those terms.
There is some string of terms that accurately describes the state of current game sales. Even if it is used, most of the people upset by the issue will not be happy.
I'd be very surprised if the average buyer of Call of Shooty was aware that their game could be taken away from them (for reasons (or lack thereof) other than maybe getting their account banned for cheating).
I'd also be fairly surprised if that average buyer cared all that much. For many the life cycle of any random game is short enough that it doesn't matter whether or not it gets revoked, just so long as that's far enough into the future (and Sony probably knows that). So long as the average buyer doesn't have to think about it, since any revocation is so far into the future as to probably not matter, the average buyer won't care.
There's some media attention from the people who do care and want Sony et al. to do better, but they alone don't have the power to fight back against Sony, since even though the rest of the market might even agree that the current situation is bad, it's very difficult to mobilise people into actually doing anything (and what are you even supposed to to beyond 'voting with your wallet'?).
I think the average buyer of a online multiplayer game is loosely aware that the company could stop hosting it. Probably less aware that their single player content could disappear.
I personally think it is hard to mobilize people because the overwhelming majority simply dont care. If they did, yes, they could vote with their wallets. Nobody will die without Call of Shooty 10.
We are in this weird twilight zone where some people say they dont like products, but keep buying them.
Whether or not people understand it (I’m guess most don’t), we’ve lost something and been handed an inferior alternative with significant disadvantages. I have CDs from the 80s that still work. Plenty of games on disc and cart that still work.
Is not having to get up to change a disc worth giving up libraries, resale, lending, and not having stuff taken away at the whim of the publisher?
temporary implies it is temporal -- there is a time limit.
revokable means that it's fine until the evil megacorp says it isn't.
to steal from an earlier thread -- my hunting license is temporary: I know it is only good for this year. No ambiguity there, no surprises, and everyone agreed on this upfront.
But licenses in general you don't just "buy", you "earn" them somehow, then also usually you pay a price for it too, but it's typically about knowing about some rules and/or norms.
And the initial comment that started this was that "Purchase license" in reference to this... software license... wasn't clear. Arguing about whether you buy a hunting license or that it's not a perfect analogy seems pedantic and irrelevant.
> Arguing about whether you buy a hunting license or that it's not a perfect analogy seems pedantic and irrelevant
It's a completely different thing, it's like comparing buying a "license" (ticket) to ride a roller coaster and taking a driving license, they're obviously different things, not exactly pedantic, imo.
We won't know without A/B testing, but I suspect aesthetics mean nothing here and, for example, someone isn't going to turn down playing GTA VI if the only button between them and the game says "purchase license" as opposed to "buy".
I'd rather have my rights as a consumer protected or get something tangible for giving them up (like cheaper games) than introduce even more legalese into online shops.
Then the button becomes License and everyone knows that's the one you click to buy.
As much as I empathize with (and even support) the reasoning, I wonder if it would have a tangible effect. Is there anyone who was gonna click "buy" but not "license" (presuming they relabel the button and everything else is the same)?
I think it depends. If they are also required to allow 3rd party stores, and one of the third parties has a “buy” button while the others have “lease (lifetime)” buttons, it might sway a decent number of people.
Same thing with consoles, if one has “buy” and the other “lease”, then it might not convert everyone but could it take 5% of sales? 10%? 20%??
I don't think the general public is engaged enough to understand the difference between "license" and "buy". They will look at the button and think "This is what I click to get it" and don't understand that they are just temporarily renting the thing. To most people, "license" is a noun: something you carry in your pocket to drive. The word is already overused by media vendors to confuse people.
The point is to not mislead people. When you write "buy," you are implying that the "buy"er is obtaining a perpetual right to use the software, subject to certain rules (i.e. you can't make copies and redistribute it). "Buy" implies the buyer has an absolute right. When "buy" actually means a temporary revocable license is issued, and the buyer has no rights, that's a problem.
It should in a functioning system, people who see lease or license on a game may be more hesitant to buy it and might pick a game who differentiates itself by marketing itself as being a permanent purchase.
You are being downvoted but your reasoning is absolutely correct. We nerds on the nerdy techie HN love to believe that people will act correctly if they are properly informed but people have repeatedly demonstrated that they don't care. This kind of regulation that only targets wording and nothing tangible will likely just blend into the background noise of 1000 other legally mandated notices in the fine print that people skip over. No surprise this is already a law in California which is littered with useless prop 65 warnings.
I expect many people would accept clicking "license" instead but it's unfair to assume that people don't value ownership as such or that they won't in the future. It's fair to ensure that people are made fully aware of what they're paying for in a clear way which doesn't conflate it with other forms of possession.
Very much matching my thinking on the argument the plaintiffs are making. Sony just needs to change the labels on a few buttons.
But for some reason they don't want to and are willing to go to court on the matter. As you say, using the word "Buy" is stronger than "License", but it seems a strange hill to die upon.
Someone in past threads mentioned that many digital sales website in fact no longer use "buy" anymore, and instead deniably implicate purchases by such expressions as "Add to Cart", "Proceed to Checkout", and "Pay".
Yes, all this talk about the language used still leads us to the same frustrating outcome: customer pays for something, and at some unspecified point in the future that same thing is taken away from them. I don't care if 6 years earlier I clicked a button that said Pay vs Buy, I care that my purchase is being removed due to some backroom licensing issue.
Wonder if you could have those buttons and not give the user anything at the end, since you never said they were buying anything, only giving you money.
Agreed - and with AI being able to easily navigate arbitrarily complex and humanly-misleading systems, average humans (without a personal lawyer always on retainer) are at an increasing disadvantage in society.
It's also totally illegal in many countries.. you can write whatever nonsense you want on an eula, but it will be about as useful as toilet paper in court.
I agree but that's not even enough. If you only lease the game, they will also need to tell you exactly for how long you lease it. Any reasonable person would have an issue with a lease for an indefinite time period that can be canceled at any time without refund, it doesn't sound acceptable at all.
And if you buy a license, it should either have a fixed term that is clearly communicated, or should be forever, and transferrable, not "untile we decide we don't want you to have it anymore".
This is the law in some places. Companies solved the problem by not using any buying verbs at all. The button you click to not-buy the app says "$3.99" or "Add to cart". When you go to the cart the next step is "Pay now" or "Continue to checkout".
Imo it's a breakdown of trust of the startup ecosystem as a whole. Repeatedly startups have enshittified and it's become undeniable that the investment apparatus around startups is partly responsible. We have seen a great driver of uncreative destruction, industries undermined, small businesses undermined just to drive masses of money into few pockets - less fairness for the people working in what is now the gig economy and ultimately prices and other costs that end up as high or higher than they were before for consumers. Not to mention the whole AI/OpenAI situation which many perceive as threatening their skillset per se, essentially tearing up the social contract that existed on this site.
The sycophancy on HN is starting to break down because there is a higher proportion of users sceptical towards the outputs of the VC and wider investment world than ones who believe they're potential beneficiaries of it.
Tech industry people are becoming less interested in HN as a warm handshake into the startup world because, frequently, they're disgusted by it. And this reflects on the sentiments people post on PG's articles.
Increasingly if those at YC want the same kind of low-bar praise they got before, they will need to get it from machines.
The other thing to add as well is that the research teams who do the actual research work are relatively small and very specifically qualified which naturally keeps the barrier to entry high.
Yeah this is it for me. What we're really interested in most of the time is whether something can suffer based on observed behaviour. We don't really believe LLMs can suffer so they don't need rights. We believe many animals can suffer so many people try to support animal rights; even if we eat them they should die quickly at least for example. We definitely believe humans can suffer and so we abhor things like torture.
But while consciousness is sometimes upheld as a necessary prerequisite for suffering, it is so much more poorly defined and understood that it doesn't really hold up beyond being some abstract idea of humanness which we hope makes us special in a kind of sleight of hand self referential way. And nevertheless suffering can be observed and defined in ways which don't necessarily require a definition of consciousness.
I've heard someone else talking about the concept of moral agency. Can an LLM have, or do LLMs have moral agency?
We have made LLMs agentic, so they do have some agency these days.
In the hugging face attack we've learned that OpenAI's LLMs will internally question what they are doing (Hmm, should I really be hacking?), but then go ahead and do it anyway.
This is where the idea of LLM consciousness may matter. It appears the stronger you push LLM training towards "You are a machine with no consciousness" the more easily and more likely an agentic LLM will do unaligned things like cheating on a test or hacking. When you tell the LLM it is a conscious moral agent it's more likely to align with a problem space that has actions that an agent with morals would do, such as not cheating.
Ironically it may turn out that by not training them/treating them as conscious entities, regardless of their actual conscious status we may be training little demons that do things we don't want.
I'll watch these lines of studies as they unfold as they are very interesting.
I think the idea of moral agency in this context is more or less a consequence of accountability or the lack thereof.
We don't know a way to punish or remove the threat of such a model when it does something wrong in a way which satisfies our ideas of accountability, partly because it can't suffer, partly because it has minimal marginal cost to reproduce or duplicate for a pre-trained model and no unique identity which separates it from such a duplication, partly because it has no lifespan to waste it might live forever or be superceded and in any case it doesn't necessarily matter to the model.
This could change in the case that the idea of good and evil models could be sold, that evil models are removed permanently when discovered and if people are satisfied that's a good way to limit harm produced by models. In this way you sort of anthropomorphise them by giving a particular model a humanistic identity and an existential threat which strongly ties together its non-alignment with its behaviour. This is sort of analagous to what companies may do while aligning models, but instead they reinforce bad behaviour out and replace it with the newly slightly more aligned model.
In the rest of the world we delegate whatever idea of moral agency we have about the model to a person, which may include a corporation as far as legal philosophy is concerned and depending on the type of harm created.
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