I don't think that difference matters to the comparison.
It's not an inherent feature to slot machines, it's something we enforce because people got angry about the outcomes (i.e. fraud) when they didn't operate that way.
It doesn't matter because a dodgy slot-machine is still a slot machine, and the person using it would still be a gambler.
I'd emphasize that prompting LLMs to generate code isn't just metaphorical gambling in the sense of "taking a risk", the scary part is the more-literal gambling involving addictive behaviors and how those affect the way the user interacts with the machine and the world.
Heck, this technology also offers a parasocial relationship at the same time! Plopping tokens into a slot-machine which also projects a holographic "best friend" that gives you "encouragement" would fit fine in any cyberpunk dystopia.
If it were me and some coworker that made all that text in an afternoon, it would represent a lot of real labor and thought and billable-hours, so it must be valuable.
I believe that's the strongest pattern in LLM gambling. Was listening the Syntax and they described that "Even though theLLM did it wrong 4 times, that 5th time could be right, so why not just go!"; paraphrased of course.
It also explains the meta-LLM business, where all these CEO types put in some question and because the LLM just knows all these words, they believe it's valuable because it's "almost" correct, even when that last correction might be forever elusive because these machines arn't thinking, they're patterning a highly regularized language beneath the more loose descriptions.
There'll definitely be a winner in the AI bubble, but it'll be seen after it pops.
Having used agents some I think 'addictive behavior' is really the closest thing to the feeling it gives me as well. I don't find it engaging my critical thinking brain, and in fact it often subverts that in favor of 'get the next dopamine hit faster' behavior (ie just rerun it, leading to the metaphor the OP is using). It takes a conscious effort for me to get back out of that cycle and start thinking of the fine details of what the code really does, or why I wanted it to do that in the first place. I have called it 'smoking vibes' and 'chasing rAInbows' in my sillier moments. It really does feel good... too good :P
TLDR: Parent-poster is a MAGA blogger flogging "The Peace President: Trump" hats, and this piece is whining that every other nation is to blame for a lack of "cooperation" with comparatively-flawless Trump policies.
> Trump’s approach has consistently demonstrated a willingness to act despite political consequences, prioritizing outcomes over optics.
Utter piddle. We've had months--years--to watch the exact opposite occur over and over and over. The only consistent outcome Trump prioritizes is the optics of winning and making other lose... with the exception of putting money into his pockets.
> A lot of times these hypothetical fears are disconnected from reality.
Conversely, a lot of times people don't fear real dangers of reality until it bites them. "Hackers wouldn't care about me, and the single password I use on every website is super good and complicated."
> but people generally don't engage in destruction for destruction's sake
Generally true, but they do engage in destruction when there's profit to be made or when it becomes in their geopolitical interests, and sometimes that destruction is quite notable: Remember when it was safe to assume that passengers could passively wait out airplane hijackings?
Your average script-kiddie might not seriously consider cutting everyone's brakes simultaneously, Al Queda would have been giddy.
Sometimes being involved in the construction process allows you to discover all the (many, overlapping) ways it's the "wrong thing" sooner.
In the long term, some of the most expensive wrong-things are the ones where the prototype gets a "looks good to me" from users, and it turns out what they were asking for was not what they needed or what could work, for reasons that aren't visually apparent.
In other words, it's important to have many people look at it from many perspectives, and optimizing for the end-user/tester perspective at the expense of the inner-working/developer perspective might backfire. Especially when the first group knows something is wrong, but the second group doesn't have a clue why it's happening or how to fix it. Worse still if every day feels like learning a new external codebase (re-)written by (LLM) strangers.
I'm reminded of all the man-hours spent building layers that prohibited someone's "about me" field from containing words like "update" or "delete" or "truncate".
Sure, technically it reduced the the odds of the system getting hacked, but it rankles against some engineering ideal of "not a proper fix." Yet it still happens, because a "proper fix" involves some change to the underlying layer (RDBMS or LLM).
Reminds me of the Terri Schiavo controversy [0], and now what congress did feels like a rather quaint little scandal compared to the last couple years.
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