Nicho

guy from the 1900s, pragmatic, optimistic, occasional 2nd-punch thrower, quitting this any day.

[Nicho @Nichoiofo8]

@ByEddieFerns @clairlemon Meanwhile…the “working” class.

[Nicho @Nichoiofo8]

@cremieuxrecueil How hard is it to get meaningful status? I don't fly enough, so I have to CC spend on Citi to get AA Exec Plat. Looking for n/c on exit or premium seating, occasional 1st bumps...

[Shafeeq @Y2SHAF]

i can’t believe people prefer going to Dubai than places like this 😭

[Nicho @Nichoiofo8]

@physicsgeek Do suburbanites endlessly try to convince people their position is “right?” Other than in defense? I suppose that could happen, but my feed is only the authoritarian left doing this.

[Nicho @Nichoiofo8]

@VisualCap Relative to population… (nano banana revision)

[Interesting things @awkwardgoogle]

Imagine losing an entire Family in gambling 😩

[Nicho @Nichoiofo8]

@BigBrother_Popy @grok - this seems like a very expensive, unnecessary project. Give a concise summary of how it came about, costs, and which politicians and lobbying forces made it happen.

[Nicho @Nichoiofo8]

@TechOperator Congratulations!

Going to work for yourself?

[Nicho @Nichoiofo8]

@emzanotti Not the best, but no way I wasn't having AI bring this to life.

[Nicho @Nichoiofo8]

@Bob_Janke In case anyone wondered: "Aviation records confirm the incident occurred on July 11, 1978, when a Hiller UH-12E helicopter (N81959) accidentally crashed in a San Diego tomato field, destroying the $60,000 aircraft with no injuries reported."

[Nicho @Nichoiofo8]

@feelsdesperate I have a couple nonprofit clients. Those particular CEOs make $350-$400k. Sure, good money, but these are incredibly sharp leaders that can make more than that elsewhere.

[The Associated Press @AP]

Jürgen Habermas, whose work on communication, rationality and sociology made him one of the world’s most influential philosophers and a key intellectual figure in his native Germany, has died. He was 96. https://t.co/FFI5TO0oGT

[eric ゑリｯ久 @shinobu_books]

Biggest story in Japan right now is this mobile roasted sweet potato truck catching on fire, blasting full speed through red lights and driving right up to the fire station.
These sometimes drive thru my hood, albeit in less gaudy trucks.

[Nicho @Nichoiofo8]

@CBSNews And the left gets four more pawns in their “white men commit more terror!” charade.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Sam Altman said people saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT costs OpenAI tens of millions of dollars a year in compute. 67% of Americans do it anyway.

Run the math on why.

A 2024 Waseda University study tested LLM responses across politeness levels in English, Chinese, and Japanese. Impolite prompts produced measurably worse outputs: more bias, more errors, more refusals. Moderate politeness consistently beat both extremes.

The mechanism makes sense once you see it. Polite prompts pattern-match to higher-quality training data. When you write “Could you help me structure this analysis?”, the model pulls from professional, well-reasoned text. When you write “give me the answer,” it pulls from Reddit.

Google DeepMind’s Murray Shanahan explained it simply: the model is role-playing a smart intern. Treat the intern like a colleague, you get colleague-quality work. Bark orders, you get minimum-viable compliance.

Now look at the cost side. OpenAI handles over a billion queries daily. Each GPT-4 query uses roughly 2.9 watt-hours, ten times a Google search. But OpenAI just raised $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation. Tens of millions in politeness tokens is a rounding error on a rounding error.

67% of users do it anyway, and 55% of them say it’s because it’s “the right thing to do.” They’re maintaining a behavioral habit that governs every other interaction in their life. The parent who teaches their kid to say please to Alexa isn’t doing it for Alexa. They’re doing it because the alternative is raising someone who learns that being rude gets faster results.

Telling 900 million people to stop saying thank you so OpenAI can save 0.01% of operating costs is the most engineer-brained optimization take on the internet. You’re training yourself to treat every interaction as a transaction. And that habit doesn’t stay in the chat window.

[Nicho @Nichoiofo8]

@thatreiguy “Don’t waste time” - guy who endlessly tweets with ZERO likes except on this one.

[Nicho @Nichoiofo8]

@CoreyWriting Not that I expected her to be brilliant, but…
“My daughter has been a dancer her whole life — my daughter teaches dance and has a dance academy — so his comments are silly”

[Nicho @Nichoiofo8]

@dabignalga13 Ok, but that's the lamest picture of California ever used to make this point.

[Nicho @Nichoiofo8]

@neoavatara What would it take to NOT have chickened out?
A nuke dropped on Tehran or must he suit up personally and enter combat?

[Nicho @Nichoiofo8]

@tarafaul503 Fantastic. Though I love your work, I'd prefer your subject matter cease to exist. Just don't start taking picture of flowers if that happens.