Show HN: Burn, baby, burn (those tokens)

(github.com)

120 points | by dtnewman 1 day ago

18 comments

  • Sharlin 1 day ago
    Never would I ever have imagined a world where companies are going all in on the idea of measuring productivity by how much an employee is able to spend company money. Try to explain this to a time traveler from 2020. What a time to be alive.
    • gblargg 21 hours ago
      An update to the mouse jiggler.
  • dtnewman 1 day ago
    Creator here.

    Are you a startup looking to show investors your hefty AI budget? Are you an engineer trying to top the AI token leaderboard? Wanna show your friends how "AI Native" you are? Look no further, I created this for you.

    • ehxor 1 day ago
      Hey you invalidated my start-up idea! ;)

      https://robintoken.dev/

      • throwburn202605 20 hours ago
        If the aim is to burn tokens in a plausible manner why not go one step further, without getting users accounts banned, use those tokens as a distributed distillation effort.

        Publish all the generated content into a data source, think open crawl, so open sourced models (open training not just weights) could use it as input.

      • rtgfhyuj 21 hours ago
        is this satire?
  • throwatdem12311 1 day ago
    Absolutely incredible, gonna kee this on my back burner for when my boss inevitably gets the tokenmaxxing mind virus.
  • cube00 1 day ago
    Token measured productivity is the KLOC of the AI world

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25225814

  • usplusAI 13 hours ago
    I can do this with KiloCode and actually generate stuff. I burned 680 M tokens last weekend building over a 48 hr period on KiloCode with Grok Code First(free until 15th). Once I uploaded into replit, there was a lot of stubs lets just say and truncated code and things to clean. But it built something and did a hefty token burn in the process.
  • filmpalace 13 hours ago
    This is one of the funniest things I've seen on HN. This is actually becoming useful where I work haha :) I think your next natural move should be to make a who-burned-it-baby version for management to audit and figure out who's been burning tokens and ironically use a ton of tokens to do that :D
  • wolvoleo 6 hours ago
    Like I just said in another thread, all this reminds me so much of that scene in Mr. Robot where they make a CIO set millions of dollars on fire.

    Sometimes I feel like the leadership doesn't even know what they're at. They just want to show "We're an AI company", whatever we do with that AI is not relevant. It's frankly ridiculous.

  • photonair 1 day ago
    Token-maxxing is a silly idea that does not measure true productivity and quality. I can easily burn through tokens and not produce anything useful.
    • hughw 1 day ago
      Hear hear
    • dtnewman 1 day ago
      > Token-maxxing is a silly idea

      Well I guess you also thing that getting a job promotion is a silly idea? /s

  • localhoster 20 hours ago
    Ok so in all honesty I have it a try. I think you are burning "input tokens" rather than output ones, which fill your usage quicker.

    Suggestion to improve? :praying_hands:

  • krschn 1 day ago
    It’s a strange time ,some people are trying to save tokens to reduce costs, while in other places, employees are intentionally burning more tokens for performance evaluations.
  • random__duck 1 day ago
    Marketing material includes legendary promises such as:

    > Burning token like there's no context window.

  • hootz 1 day ago
    Finally we can beat the usage metrics goal!
    • dtnewman 1 day ago
      And you'll be such a productive engineer!
  • erelong 1 day ago
    labor theory of value: AI edition
  • wewewedxfgdf 1 day ago
    Should be making pelicans in hats riding unicorns.
  • boundless88 1 day ago
    This idea is really innovative and interesting.
  • kevinh456 1 day ago
    Burn baby burn. Token inferno.
  • fcpguru 1 day ago
    you laugh but this is so real. executives love metrics. I do feel like I need to keep the prompts going.
  • lbrito 1 day ago
    Beautiful