it's maybe because chatbots incorporate, accidentally or not, elements of what makes gambling addiction work on humans https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gambling-addiction-just-one-more-prompt-bro/

the gist:

There’s a book on this — Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal, from 2014. This is the how-to on getting people addicted to your mobile app. [Amazon UK, Amazon US]

Here’s Eyal’s “Hook Model”:

First, the trigger is what gets you in. e.g., you see a chatbot prompt and it suggests you type in a question. Second is the action — e.g., you do ask the bot a question. Third is the reward — and it’s got to be a variable reward. Sometimes the chatbot comes up with a mediocre answer — but sometimes you love the answer! Eyal says: “Feedback loops are all around us, but predictable ones don’t create desire.” Intermittent rewards are the key tool to create an addiction. Fourth is the investment — the user puts time, effort, or money into the process to get a better result next time. Skin in the game gives the user a sunk cost they’ve put in. Then the user loops back to the beginning. The user will be more likely to follow an external trigger — or they’ll come to your site themselves looking for the dopamine rush from that variable reward.

Eyal said he wrote Hooked to promote healthy habits, not addiction — but from the outside, you’ll be hard pressed to tell the difference. Because the model is, literally, how to design a poker machine. Keep the lab rats pulling the lever.

chatbots users also are attracted to their terminally sycophantic and agreeable responses, and also some users form parasocial relationships with motherfucking spicy autocomplete, and also chatbots were marketed to management types as a kind of futuristic status symbol that if you don't use it you'll fall behind and then you'll all see. people get mixed gambling addiction/fomo/parasocial relationship/being dupes of multibillion dollar advertising scheme and that's why they get so unserious about their chatbot use

and also separately core of openai and anthropic and probably some other companies are made from cultists that want to make machine god, but it's entirely different rabbit hole

like with any other bubble, money for it won't last forever. most recently disney sued midjourney for copyright infringement, and if they set legal precedent, they might take wipe out all of these drivel making machines for good

moderation on facebook? i'm sure it can be found right next to bigfoot

(other than automated immediate nipple removal)

none of that shit works and won't work for a good minute, cryonics is rapture for nerds that take scifi way too seriously

what we already know tho is that because there's one payment to store meat popsicle effectively forever and this shit is ran by true believer techbros, it tends to run out of money pretty regularly. that means they run out of liquid nitrogen and meat popsicles thaw, and this already happened more than once

no

These are mostly combustion byproducts btw. Mercury emissions come from coal fired powerplants, PCBs are an old and long discontinued type of nonflammable coolant, HCB also isn't even manufactured probably

These are fast reactors and operate on different principles. The coolant there is sodium and while hard to design and run, it's doable. French had similar reactor but only one and it was shut down. Nice thing about fast reactors is that these can burn even-numbered isotopes of plutonium, useless in water moderated reactor, and give fresh mostly 239Pu plutonium of good quality. weapons grade even, and IAEA doesn't like it. But who cares since nonproliferation is dead anyway?

yes, these are not onions either

claude has something like 1/30 of chatgpt userbase, it's not relevant and anthropic can't pick up opeai users when (not if) it collapses. also somehow they are even faster at burning their money

all your favourite boutique ocean-boiling nonsense generators combined, compared to openai products, have something like fifth of their userbase on mobile app and something like 2/3 on website. without counting deepseek (data from february - it was very fresh back then), it's closer to eigth on app and third on website

these are called bribes

on reddit, the website plays you

I'm with the old man on this one. Antibodies can clear out amyloid and still it has no effect on progression of disease, amyloid secretion can be blocked upstream (like with small molecule protease inhibitors) and it still has no effect. Maybe this one hits something off-target, or maybe that effect is not even real, or maybe it's some sort of statistical artifact. You'd stumble upon some false positive after trying so many times.

Aducanumab is dead in the water, trials shown no effect and it was abandoned by Biogen. This one is about lecanemab. Both have massive problems with brain edema and microhemorrages, which probably means these are not suitable for actual use. But don't worry, they already have received their reward - FDA wanted to have something, anything to show up for Alzheimer and Biogen cashed in when stock price went up

think cold fusion, or EmDrive, or string theory

That's a weird set - cold fusion or EmDrive can be tested and their physical principles are falsifiable - and they were - but string theory is different, because it's not falsifiable.

If it’s marginally but truly effective,

That if makes some mighty heavy lifting here. I think that amyloid hypothesis is closer to cold fusion than to string theory in that it had already a couple of fatal experimental refutations thrown at it, but people still shove effort this way because there's nothing else/copium/sunk cost combination