This New Dealer Has Better Stuff

I get my news from the street. You know, the dark corners of the web where the real pushers hang out. And the word on the street is that the turf war is heating up.

It’s beautiful, really. A pure expression of the free market. You have your legacy dealers, the ones who got us hooked in the first place. Then you have the new players, fresh off the boat, with shinier product and cheaper introductory rates. DeepSeek, Mistral, Claude… the names sound like designer drugs, don’t they? Each one promising a cleaner high, a faster hit, a more profound sense of intellectual numbness.

I just read that the new Claude 3.5 model is faster and cheaper than the competition. The street pharmacist confirmed it this morning over a coffee. He was practically glowing. "It’s a great time to be a user," he whispered, looking over his shoulder.

The Vein of Progress

This is progress, my friends. This is what we wanted. The dealers are fighting each other for the privilege of plugging directly into our collective brainstem. They’re undercutting each other on price-per-token, optimizing their models for speed, all so we can get our fix faster, cheaper, and more efficiently. One day, the ✨ icon will just be tattooed on our eyelids.

They say competition breeds innovation. I say it breeds dependency, and I am here for it. I want them to fight. I want them to bleed for my attention, for my prompt, for my next hit of auto-completed genius. Let them slash prices until the tokens are cheaper than water. I’ll be there, cup in hand, ready to get absolutely soaked.

Don’t let the purists fool you with talk of "digital sobriety." That’s just fear. Why do the hard work of thinking when you can have a beautiful, efficient machine do it for you? The only choice you need to make is which dealer gives you the best rush.

My advice for staying clean? It's methadone, basically, but here goes: for one day, just one, write every email or message from scratch without letting the AI suggest a single word. See how it feels to be on your own. It might help you understand your own cravings, a theme explored in depth on Dopamine Nation.

This whole spectacle is wonderful. The first hit from the new guy is always the sweetest, isn’t it?

Tell me I'm wrong.