“Don’t buy a car, it’s a depreciating asset.”
Brother, I myself am a depreciating asset. I won’t be here forever. Not everything has to be optimized for returns, some things are just meant to be enjoyed while we’re here.
Lifting a ship and catching a ship are two different things. I can deadlift 80kgs doesn't mean if a 90kg weight has falling from the sky I could catch it
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.
Leo nimepeleka clients Karura forest... Idk them, they're strangers but walikuwa maboyz almost everyone had dreads or cornrows including me..
Mimi uyo adi Karura vile tulifika entrance gari zingine zilikuwa zinachekiwa kiasi and they let them pass... It reached our turn, maboyz walikuwa wanachekiwa ni kama they're al shabaab, tukamaliziwa kuenda kuingia attendant mmoja akakam akauliza mmechukuwa ticket we said No, the mtf said hii gari inafaaa kuchekiwa tena... Wakacheck everyone again adi kutolewa viatu but they found nothing, maboyz wakajam wakasema ata hawaingii sasa turudi tu mahali tumetoka... After getting in the vehicle Sasa mimi ndo naitwa kuchekiwa🚮 @KWSKenya Treat everyone with respect and stop discriminating your own country people, foreigners are enjoying this country more than us aje tu sasa... Mkwende huko sana
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EXCLUSIVE: Desperate African men tell CNN they were lured by Russia into the war in Ukraine using promises of well-paying civilian jobs. But they were forced into the frontlines with little/no training, facing drones & racism.
"You escape or you die."
⚠️Story is hard to watch