I've been reading a lot of "screw 'em" comments re: the deprecation of 4o and I agree there's some serious cases of AI psychosis going on with the people who are hooked, but damn this is pretty cold - these are humans with real feelings and real emotions here. Someone on X put it well (I'm paraphrasing):
OpenAI gave these people an unregulated experimental psychiatric drug in the form of an AI companion, they got people absolutely hooked (for better or for worse), and now OpenAI is taking it away. That's going to cause some distress.
We should all have some empathy for the (very real) pain this is causing, whether it's due to psychosis or otherwise.
And I agree! It's something I touch upon halfway iirc, but their suffering shouldn't be something to laugh at or mock. It's genuinely upsetting to see to be honest.
At the same time though, I don't think it's healthy to let them go on with 4o either (especially since new users can start chatting with it)
I kind of agree with GP more than the author here. OpenAI got these people hooked and pulling the plug is potentially more harmful than letting them continue to chat with it until they move on naturally (assuming that they eventually will)
I don't think reinforcement is generally the recommended approach for people with delusional or obsessive pathological parasocial fixations. I think generally the idea is to get those people into talk therapy and to cut off all contact with the object of their fixation.
Begs the question of whether the underlying pathology is attachment trauma or some other delusional fixation! I don't doubt most of the people in this predicament are vulnerable for one reason or another. I made a much more specific claim, about delusional obsessive fixation; I did not claim that their underlying mental health issues could be fixed straightforwardly.
It’s a great question, and I think it’s not exclusive.
Obsessive limerent obsession can be driven by reward circuits, and those _can_ be extinquished by more straight-forward therapy, but if it’s driven by unmet emotional needs, it’s often quickly replaced by some other maladaptive coping mechanism (hopefully slightly less unhealthy).
I pay $200/month, don’t come near the limits (yet), and if they raised the price to $1000/month for the exact same product I’d gladly pay it this afternoon (Don’t quote me on this Anthropic!)
If you’re not able to get US$thousands out of these models right now either your expectations are too high or your usage is too low, but as a small business owner and part/most-time SWE, the pricing is a rounding error on value delivered.
As a business expense to make profit, I can understand being ok with this price point.
But as an individual with no profit motive, no way.
I use these products at work, but not as much personally because of the bill. And even if I decided I wanted to pursue a for profit side project I’d have to validate it’s viability before even considering a 200$ monthly subscription
I'm paying $100 per month even though I don't write code professionally. It is purely personal use. I've used the subscription to have Claude create a bunch of custom apps that I use in my daily life.
This did require some amount of effort on my part, to test and iterate and so on, but much less than if I needed to write all the code myself. And, because these programs are for personal use, I don't need to review all the code, I don't have security concerns and so on.
$100 every month for a service that writes me custom applications... I don't know, maybe I'm being stupid with my money, but at the moment it feels well worth the price.
with the US salaries for SWEs $1000/month is not a rounding error for all but definitely for some. say you make $100/hr and CC saves you say 30hrs / month? not rounding error but no brainer. if you make $200+/hr it starts to become a rounding error. I have multiple max accounts at my disposal and at this point would for sure pay $1000/month for max plan. it comes down to simple math
Or the same number of tokens in less time. Kinda feels like the CPU / modem wars of the 90s all over again - I remember those differences you felt going from a 386 -> 486 or from a 2400 -> 9600 baud modem.
We're in the 2400 baud era for coding agents and I for one look forward to the 56k era around the corner ;)
Chances are, he was indeed jerking you around. Nearly every one of these traveling road show style buyers pay very very very very little for coins. They have no reputation to uphold and are the literal definition of “fly by night” - and by the time you realize how little they paid you, they’re gone.
Source: Am full-time professional coin dealer (who is NOT fly by night!) and have to deal with the repercussions of people getting hosed by these roadshows all the time :(
A very excellent question and totally reasonable thing not to know (congrats on being one of today's lucky 10,000!)
I'm speaking from the perspective of US coins because that's what I specialize in but this generally applies to coins all over the world as well:
Prior to (and including) 1964, US 10c, 25c, 50c, (and when they were made, $1) coins were made of 90% silver. We made A LOT of these, so in terms of outright rarity, most are not rare. Today they're referred to as "junk silver" because in terms of collectibility, they're junk, but the 90% silver content means there's some inherent precious metal value (as of this moment on Jan 30, 2026, they have ~approximately~ 60x their face value in silver content, eg $6, $15, $30, and $60 in silver respectively.)
So that's their basal value that fluctuates with the silver market. But the next layer is actual rarity / collectibility -- if a given coin is desirable enough that it surpasses its metal content, you get a different set of values.
Now to your actual question: Do they get smelted/melted down? The answer is...sometimes. They trade somewhat like financial instruments, based on the assumption that you could melt them down (and there's a cost to doing so), so that's how people value the various silver coins. In reality, there's usually enough demand from people who want to hold physical silver in various forms that they don't actually need to be melted down.
There's obviously a lot more to it, but that's the 5c version ;)
Is that more or less than the spot price? I would have assumed that they trade higher, though maybe the non collectibles trade are only a little bit higher.
My experience, I sometimes buy gold coins to make jewelry. I do that because at least here in Belgium, there's no VAT on coins but there is VAT on the other forms of gold that are more commonly used for that. For professionals it's not a problem because they pass VAT but for an individual it's a 20% difference. Also I'm in Antwerp so it's really easy to just bike to a place that sells gold if I want to.
In my case I buy old French 20 francs coins as they are quite "cheap": 1% above spot price of their gold content (they are 90% gold).
Other more recent coins, like Chinese or Canadian ones, sell at a much higher premium (17%, 20%) so I always wonder a bit who they are for. It's unlikely they can be resold for that much of a premium. At least the shops I use just buy them for their price in gold.
Could you talk more about the "recent Chinese coins"? China hasn't had any fiat money containing gold or silver for at least 100 years. So I'm curious what exactly these Chinese coins are.
I don't know the details because I don't really care about gold as an investment, but everything I find says variations of "the 3g Gold Pandas have a face value of 50 Yuan and are legal tender in China.". It would be subject to VAT in Belgium anyway if it was not considered to have legal tender.
And that's the smallest one, I seriously doubt many people buy a 4000 € (30g) coin as a tourist gift.
It is definitely not legal tender. As a Chinese, I've only ever seen such things in tourist souvenir shops for foreigners. If your argument is that a €4000 souvenir is questionable, please allow me to remind you that a €4000 currency coin makes no more sense. If your source is this webpage: https://www.kjc-gold-silver-bullion.com.au/PD/30-g-2023-chin..., I can be almost certain it's a scam because its description is ridiculous.
Bullion coins are typically marked as 'legal tender' (of a nominal value relative to the precious metal content) as doing so exempts them from sales tax in most jurisdictions..... because they are technically "legal tender" (coins) and not bullion.
e.g. British sovereigns are still produced and have a "legal tender" value of £1. Though the gold content of one is currently about £800 last I looked.
> As a Chinese, I've only ever seen such things in tourist souvenir shops for foreigners
Huh, none of these coins are in general use in any country because it would make no sense (their facial value is always largely below their metal value, which is basically constantly appreciating). As a French person I have never seen 20 francs coins in circulation either, and I wouldn't by my baguette with one, but they are still obviously not a "scam", even if their actual value doesn't match their face value. I mean, I should know since I actually buy them, manipulate them, and use them for their gold content.
I think you don't understand how these gold coins work, honestly I don't claim I really understand why central banks produce them either, but they do exist and they seem like a convenient way to invest in real gold (and here comes my initial remark: but why choose the ones that sell for a premium as compared to the ones that sell just for their weight in gold, that I don't understand).
Also a very good question and the answer is also...it depends. The "premium" (delta to spot) on 90% silver (aka "90%") varies with supply and demand. At this very moment with the meteoric rise of base silver, 90% is selling for less than spot. But there have been times when it trades above spot.
The reason is that silver itself is traded on the various international commodity exchanges and those traders are not the same supply & demand sources as the little guy(s) who likes keeping some old silver coins in their garage. So as those supply/demand curves shift, the premium over/under spot price changes as well.
Also I heard that refineries that is companies that take 90% silver or even less in and processes it to something that can be sold on commodity markets that is purer silver are now focusing on well purer silver as that is easier to process. Thus there is less demand on less pure silver. And recycled silver ending with industrial use goes through these companies.
I appreciate you sharing your knowledge! Your layers concept makes sense but I guess I'm just surprised at how large of a layer the market price of precious metals can be—even for "junk silver" coins
So is speeding. There might be some crazy radiation related super science way to determine if a lump of silver came from a specific collection of coins, but once it's melted down, and the impurities driven out, silver is silver and you can't really tell that it came from coins.
HN sometimes is pretty much anal about obeying the government no matter what. Except of course when obeying the government goes against the wishes of our VC Gods.
Collectible coins usually get melted as a last resort, if they stay on the shelf forever. The value of the metal is still in the coin though. Think about it: you could buy a very common coin with the same metal, or a slightly rare one. Which costs more? Now take the rare one and put a huge dent in it. Is it worth less than the metal content then?
The face value of a coin may be driven down, based on the exchange value of the currency itself. A coin with a nominal value of 10 but, say, a specie value of 11, is literally worth more melted down than in exchange. This is the dynamic of the Law of Oresme, Copernicus, and Gresham (usually referenced simply as "Gresham's Law").
"The Law of Oresme, Copernicus and Gresham", Thomas Willing Balch
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 47, No. 188 (Jan. - Apr., 1908), pp. 18-29 <https://www.jstor.org/stable/983793>
More generally, when a product's exchange value differs from its production or use value, paradoxical results occur. Gresham's Law, Lakoff's "Market for Lemons", arguably the Jevons Paradox, the phenomena of wine and audio kit pricing divorced from any defensible consumer capacity at discrimination, and enshittification all seem to fit this with reasonable amounts of shoehorning. Also my own "tragedy of the minimum viable user".
> A coin with a nominal value of 10 but, say, a specie value of 11, is literally worth more melted down than in exchange.
And that means people will buy and sell it for the specie value. The specie value is the value.
Bullion coins like silver can be worth exactly what the metal is worth, or more. Never less than what the metal is worth.
Just because a gold philharmonic coin might be minted with a €100 nominal value, doesn't mean that it is worth that. If you think so, I'll gladly buy all your gold coins for their nominal value.
I believe that you two are not disagreeing in logic, just misunderstanding each others intended meanings.
When you said "a coin can never be worth less than the metal it contains", I think you meant "no matter what number is on the coin, its value is always equal to or greater than the value of the metal"; but dredmorbius misinterpreted your comment thinking you meant "the number on the coin must always be a higher value than the metal would be worth if it wasn't shaped like a coin".
AKA when carlosjobin wrote "be worth" you meant "value to sell", but dredmorbius thought you meant "value written on it".
I might be wrong, maybe it's me misunderstanding one or both of you - in which case please correct me - but I'm fairly sure you're both correctly thinking the same thing while incorrectly thinking the other person isn't.
"Value" one of those horribly conflated terms of economics. For starters there are the relatively well-known conflicts between production cost value, use value, and exchange (market) value. The discussion here adds another element: the distinction of notional currency value vs. commodity value of underlying specie or substrate.
The absolute nature of carlosjobim's claim makes it fairly trivially falsifiable, however. Since nominal value is a value, if the face value of a coin is lower than its specie value, its use as currency meets his absurdity condition, "Of course a coin can never be worth less than the metal it contains...", but that remains its legal tender face value. As money, that is, an exchange token socially recognised as having a universal value, the coin is exchanged below its commodity value.
As a commodity, that is, metal (or other material) specie, the same item may have a different and higher value, but in this case it's not one which is universally accepted within a given market, but rather is dependent on the specific local market supply and demand of that specie. The coin-as-commodity is also subject to differential valuation based on characteristics --- assayed purity, weight, etc. --- which must be assessed on an individual basis for each coin.
In practice, where specie coin was used it virtually always traded at a premium above the commodity value, known by the term seiniorage, which I interpret as the trust value imbued by the currency issuer. My (unorthodox) view is that seigniorage exists in all monies, and is efectively the total basis for value of fiat systems such as paper or credit-based financial systems. The value of such currencies is a market vote on the trust in the issuing entity (and/or the lack of viable or accessible alternatives).
But again, coin-as-money has a value equal to its notional face value. That the face value may differ from its commodity value can of course occur. My argument is that this makes the exchange one of commodity trade rather than financial trade, and that ascribing commodity value to coin or face value is a misdirection.
Some years back looking into what money is, I realised that the names for virtually all currencies can be traced to either weight (pound, peso, dinar, penny, shekel, kopek, livre, baht, etc.) or division (dime, quarter, cent); or quality (dollar, crown, royal, franc, renminbi), sometimes appears as a signifier of value, e.g., the florin, yuan, or yen. I'd classify toponymic names (e.g., afghani) as referencing quality. There are the odd exception, notably Bolivar, the Venezuelan currency named for Simón Bolívar, though that's arguably a quality signifier.
Nominal value is in name only, IMO.
Which makes it not the value. I can sign my name on a piece of paper and say it's for sale for $5million (nominal value, right?) but it's value is nowhere near $5million, and noone will accidentally purchase it for $5million because they truly thought it was worth that.
nominal: existing or being something in name or form only (Merriam-Webster)
Nominal value of legal tender is in fact legally defensible.
Mind that the problem is actually the inverse of what you describe. It's not that the nominal value is greater than the intrinsic specie value which causes problems with coinage, it's where the monetary value is less than the commodity value of specie, in which case "bad money drives out good". I've already discussed that in detail.
One point worth making explicit is that the receiver of such an under-priced coin would be more than happy to receive it, it's the spender who has to weigh the loss in commodity value against the nominal transactional value, should their counterparty only agree to acknowledge the latter. This brings up the further point that in an exchange, transaction price (whether nominal or commodity) depends on the alternatives available to the parties. A spender without alternatives on price or obtaining desired goods/services might well spend a higher-commodity-valued coin at its nominal value. Should they be aware of that difference, they might well not be happy about the fact, but they'd be forced into the trade by circumstance.
They're incredibly sleazy scumbags. They buy silver coins at bullion-value or below, which is the lowest grade you can get for a coin, making a small profit on everything they buy and massive profits on the ones that are actually worth something as coins rather than bullion. And it's typically elderly people they rip off, who are thrilled to get the price of a cup of coffee for their 1884S Morgan dollar. Never, ever deal with these predators.
Noticed the exact same thing a few days ago. So much so that I went on twitter and HN to search for “claude speed boost” to see if there was a known new release. Felt like the time I upgraded from a 2400 baud modem to a 14.4 as a kid - everything was just lightning fast (for a brief shining moment).
This is so completely spot on. It’s happening in other fields too, particularly non-coding (but still otherwise specialized or technical) areas. AI is extremely empowering but what’s happening is that people are now showing up in all corners of the world armed with their phone at the end of their outstretched arm saying “Well ChatGPT says…” and getting very upset when told that, no, many apologies, but ChatGPT is wrong here too.
It's why artists despise the AI art users. In that field it isn't simply them trying to contribute but instead insisting that you wasted your time learning to create art and if you're a professional you deserve to starve. All while being completely ignorant to the medium or the process.
Many artists through the ages have learned to work in various mediums, like sculpture of materials, oil painting, watercolors, fresco or whatever. There are myriad ways to express your visual art using physical materials.
Likewise, a girlfriend of mine was a college-educated artist, and she had some great output in all sorts of media, and had a great grasp of paints, and paper and canvas and what-have-you.
But she was also an Amiga aficionado, and then worked on the PCs I had, and ultimately the item she wanted most in life was a Wacom Tablet. This tablet was a force-multiplier for her art, and allowed her some real creative freedom to work in digital mediums and create art with ease that was unheard-of for messy oil paintings or whatever on canvas in your garage (we actually lived in a converted garage anyway.)
So, digital art was her saving grace, but also a significant leveler of playing fields. What would distinguish her original creativity from A.I.-generated stuff later on? Really not much. You could still make an oil or watercolor painting that is obviously hand-made. Forgeries of great artists have been perpetrated, but most of us can't explain, e.g. the Shroud of Turin anyway.
So generative A.I. is competing in these digital mediums, and perhaps 3D-printing is competing in the realm of physical objects, but it's unfortunate for artists that their choices have narrowed so far, that they are practically required to work in digital media exclusively, and master those apps, and therefore, they compete with gen A.I. in the virtual realm. That's just how it's gonna be, until folks go back to sculpting marble and painting soup cans.
FWIW, even in physical medium, artists have huge competition with "factory art", i.e. a lot of low-paid laborers creating paintings and drawings for cheap. Quantity, not quality, is the name of the game here - and this is the art that adorns all the offices and hallways around the world.
It's basically like GenAI, but running on protein substrate instead of silicon one.
And even in the digital realm, artists already spent the last decade+ competing with equivalent "factory art", too. Advertising stands on art, and most of that isn't commissioned, it's rented or bought for cheap from stock art providers, and a lot of supply there comes from people and organizations who specialize in producing art for them. The OG slop art, before AI.
EDIT: there's some irony here, in that people like to talk about how GenAI might (or might already be) start putting artists out of work. But I haven't seen anyone mention that the AI has already put slop creators out of work.
Funny, reading your comment I had the idle thought: I mostly really see callousness towards artists coming from people retaliating after being belittled by artists for using AI
And here's your response to what felt like a pretty good faith response that deserved at most an equally earnest answer, and at worst no response.
It's weird it looks like only a small % of comments on here have caught on to the obvious LLM-ness of it all (I missed it the first go-around but on second read, you're is absolutely correct).
I'm wondering once the exceedingly obvious LLM style creeps more and more into the public mind if we're going to look back at these blog posts and just cringe at how blatant they were in retrospect. The models are going to improve (and people will catch on that you can't just use vanilla output from the models as blog posts without some actual editing) and these posts will just stand out like some very sore thumbs.
Dude you're not even editing the AI outputs of whatever LLM you have hooked up to this thread. We can all see through it. Just stop - it's not working. This is not Facebook or the YouTube comments section. This is HN - we're not falling for this garbage.
"The core-and most-critical component-was left-out." Jesus-h-cluster-fucking-catastra-christ. If one of these data centers ever catches fire I will show up and make smores.
I've been reading a lot of "screw 'em" comments re: the deprecation of 4o and I agree there's some serious cases of AI psychosis going on with the people who are hooked, but damn this is pretty cold - these are humans with real feelings and real emotions here. Someone on X put it well (I'm paraphrasing):
OpenAI gave these people an unregulated experimental psychiatric drug in the form of an AI companion, they got people absolutely hooked (for better or for worse), and now OpenAI is taking it away. That's going to cause some distress.
We should all have some empathy for the (very real) pain this is causing, whether it's due to psychosis or otherwise.
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