There is little new under the big fusion reactor in the sky. I just read a chapter in James Glieck's "The Information" about tokenmaxxing in the telegraphy industry. There used to be a big market for code books to reduce the per-character charges for sending telegrams. Compression was cash in the pocket. The telegraph companies discouraged the practice but were forced to accept it. The telegraph code industry started with the initial commercialization of telegraphy and didn't end until the 1920s.

There was a cost to it though. Codes greatly reduced redundancy, and caused large miscommunications from very small errors. As Glieck explains it, this was the opposite of the African drumming practice of adding redundancy to strengthen the relationship between the rhythm and the language that the drums mimic.

▲

mejutoco an hour ago | parent [-]

That is interesting but tokenmaxxing is not maximizing token usage _efficiency_. It is maximizing its usage.

	▲	lumost 13 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This will probably lead to some balancing act like ye olden days of big data etc. Companies want AI native engineers who will use AI to do their work, but don't want AI quality outputs and don't want to drop 200k per year per employee. AI quality outputs are fine for backoffice work now, but they are awful to read and reason about. Hallucinated features are also difficult to work with.
	▲	delichon 26 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Thanks, that's so odd that I assumed it was about efficiency, which is how I treat tokens. It's hard to imagine a 19th century business man ordering his staff to send as many long winded telegrams as they can.