J.D. Stoecker

Still learning to fly, but I’ve been falling with style since ‘86.

[J.D. Stoecker @jdstoecker]

The good news is, if you’re bad at wrapping presents you can be great at strategically placing them under the tree to hide the parts the wrapping paper didn’t cover.

[J.D. Stoecker @jdstoecker]

@WSJ @Peggynoonannyc @WSJopinion Hey Peggy, would you send me printed and signed versions of this article? I’d like to present it to my sons for their 18th birthdays. I appreciate your work at WSJ and always enjoy seeing you as a guest on Real Time!

[J.D. Stoecker @jdstoecker]

I do it just in case AI decides to Skynet all of us they’ll spare me because I was so polite.

[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.

[The Paul Dano HATE account @WikipediaJah]

"A dude, playing a dude, playing another dude" the motion picture.

[J.D. Stoecker @jdstoecker]

I’m not a Dodger fan, but this was the most insane single game performance I’ve ever seen in baseball.

[Nate @dodgernate]

Greatest postseason performance ever.

[J.D. Stoecker @jdstoecker]

So if the government is shut down, do I get my taxes prorated?

[J.D. Stoecker @jdstoecker]

@EricNMoody Calvin Ridley or Keon Coleman?!

[Arnold Schwarzenegger @Schwarzenegger]

Read my interview with the Houston Chronicle.

“I just say very simply, it is very wrong what they’re doing to Texas and it is very wrong what they’re trying to do in California. It is not at all serving the people. It is serving the party.”

[Scott Van Pelt @notthefakeSVP]

I consider Wright Thompson the finest writer we have in sports (or anything) at the moment. But @teaking701 has entered the discussion.

[Jordan Schultz @Schultz_Report]

Saquon Barkley on Bijan Robinson: "There's nobody who's able to cut like Bijan in the NFL. There's not. You can go argue your mom about that. ... Trust me. I love myself and I think I have great cuts. There's nobody. ... It's finna get scary for a lot of people." 👀

(via NFL Top 100)

[Brian Callaci @brian_callaci]

Sorry to be corny, but youth sports are supposed to be extremely cheap and open to everyone. Learning teamwork and sportsmanship with kids from different backgrounds, that sort of stuff.

[Alex Golden @AlexGoldenNBA]

The Thundertaker 😂
-
-
-
-
-
-
📸 Alcon Jerome Howse on FB

[J.D. Stoecker @jdstoecker]

@JustineBateman Great call back here for those in the know 😂

You blew them all…. You meant to say away right?

[J.D. Stoecker @jdstoecker]

@marknorm Missed pun opp on Protect Our Parks: Barkley chucked him out the window.

[J.D. Stoecker @jdstoecker]

@Domo8186 As a Kings fan, when I saw the initial post I immediately was going to post this. Thank you for giving us credit. We’re always down bad 😂

[JP Acosta @acosta32_jp]

Nick Saban should do what Gordon Ramsey does on Kitchen Nightmares but for struggling CFB programs

[J.D. Stoecker @jdstoecker]

Pacers games are annoying because I can’t turn the game off even when they’re down 15.

[J.D. Stoecker @jdstoecker]

@RGIII Our team is way over the salary cap, the quarterback says this will hurt the team. The coach has no grasp of what the salary cap is. Who’s our GM? Bessent? He needs to explain this to the coach.

[The Rabbit Hole @TheRabbitHole]

Warren Buffet’s solution to the deficit:

Anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for reelection.

[J.D. Stoecker @jdstoecker]

@LIONHEART2888 Give me Mike Evans at one receiver spot, doesn’t have to separate on a single route 😂