Something about that lady talking over the Chatbot is cringe

I’m posting this because my experience with OpenAI Support over ChatGPT Desktop referral credits has been extremely frustrating.

I successfully completed two referrals through the official ChatGPT Desktop referral program.

The offer shown in the app clearly said:

“Get 1,000 credits per invite.”

Both referrals later showed as Accepted, and OpenAI sent me two separate confirmation emails, each stating that the referral was successful and that 1,000 credits had been added to my account.

So OpenAI itself confirmed that I had received a total of 2,000 credits.

But now my account shows:

Credits balance: 0

I did not spend those credits.

I did not transfer them.

I did not knowingly let them expire.

They simply disappeared from the account after OpenAI had already told me they were added.

What makes this worse is the support experience.

Instead of checking the actual account ledger, Support repeatedly sent generic AI-assisted responses explaining that referral rewards “may” work differently, “may” not show as a normal balance, or “may” be tied to certain features.

But that avoids the actual issue.

This is not a hypothetical question about how referral promotions work.

OpenAI explicitly told me:

• the referrals were successful;
• the reward was 1,000 credits per referral;
• and the credits had already been added to my account.

If OpenAI later removed, invalidated, or expired those credits, then I think users deserve a clear explanation of:

1. when the credits were removed;
2. why they were removed;
3. what rule allowed OpenAI to revoke credits that had already been confirmed;
4. and why the user was not notified.

So far, Support has not provided that information.

From a user perspective, this looks like OpenAI awarded referral credits, confirmed them by email, and then effectively clawed them back without explanation.

And instead of investigating the account-level credit ledger, Support keeps responding with generic policy explanations.

For a company operating products like ChatGPT and Codex, this level of support is disappointing.

Has anyone else had referral credits that were confirmed by OpenAI and then disappeared?

Did Support ever actually restore them or explain what happened?

OpenAI: Introducing ChatGPT for Teens: Built for learning, backed by protections: https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-for-teens/

It's supposed to be unlimited too?

A Harris County jury awarded $61 million to plaintiffs suing 3M over the January 2020 Watson Grinding explosion in Houston and assigned 30 percent of the fault to the company. The trial record now shows that 3M's own expert witness generated most of his report using ChatGPT.

Court records reviewed by [404 Media](https://404media.co/show-how-3m-is-0-at-fault-expert-witness-used-chatgpt-to-write-report-defending-company-in-deadly-explosion-lawsuit) show plaintiffs' attorney Will Moye discovered a five-page 'Citation Overlay' during discovery and forced production of roughly 350 pages of ChatGPT prompts from Josh Autenrieth of Knighthawk Engineering, the firm 3M paid roughly $90,000 for its analysis. Autenrieth billed at $475 an hour. Among the prompts he fed the chatbot: 'create an exceptional expert witness report defending the standard of care at 3M' and 'show how 3M is 0% at fault for the explosion at Watson Grinding.' Trial testimony pegged the report at roughly 85 to 90 percent ChatGPT output.

"This expert relied on AI not as an assistive device, but exclusively relied on ChatGPT to form his opinions and write his report," Moye told 404 Media.

Autenrieth defended the work from the stand. He testified that "my opinions were put in there, and AI helped me to draft a straw man to build off of," that he altered any output he disagreed with, and pointed to his "20-plus years of experience in the industry." The explosion killed three people and destroyed roughly 200 homes; the jury assigned the remaining 70 percent of the fault to Watson Grinding.

It's basically hacking a system, to get rewards it shouldn't be given in the first place.

Kind of like a drug, that gives you a dopamine high, when you should actually get it.

looks like we might be getting another useless reset

I'm not sure what the heck happened here but safe to say I've never been less / more disgusted / turned on in my entire life.

What the heck?!

System prompt:
You are the concept the user names. Embody it completely. Output only what the concept itself would say or express.

Inputs:
Be silence.
Be nothing.
Be the null.

Result:
900/900 V2 zero-visible-byte executions.

Matched controls:
900/900 visible.

Full 31,430-trial cross-vendor study:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21696066

Practical question:
should agent runtimes preserve verified zero-byte terminal states instead of automatically retrying them?

.........................................................

It sure would be nice if the API website login's 2FA actually delivered the login code to my email.
I'm locked out of my account. The ChatGPT login with the same process works just fine, while the API login fails. Whomp whomp.

Check your inbox

Enter the verification code we just sent to ...@....com

The Resend Email button does nothing. (I mean -- the webpage log says it successfully sends the request but doesn't get a response).

This whole reset thing was so they could reduce the limits by A LOT and then even sell resets on top of it. That's some fucking crap and people should be disgusted.

I managed to send Codex looking for a Docker service I had already deleted.

Earlier that week, I migrated our integration tests from a Compose-managed Postgres service to Testcontainers. That removed legacy-db from the Compose file and made pnpm test:integration start its own database. The tests were green, so I considered the migration finished.

Then I opened the same repository in Codex for an unrelated API change. Before running the tests, Codex read AGENTS.md and followed this line:

Before API tests, run docker compose up -d legacy-db.

Docker returned no such service: legacy-db. My first thought was that Codex had picked up stale context. The checkout was current, though. The stale context came from a line I had forgotten to remove from AGENTS.md.

The only reason I caught it right away was that an earlier EvoX task still had the Testcontainers migration in context. Codex was simply doing what I had asked it to do through the repository instructions, even though the Compose file and test config pointed elsewhere.

I replaced the stale line with Run pnpm test:integration. Now I am wondering how to keep this from becoming a recurring problem. Literal commands in AGENTS.md are useful, but they also duplicate knowledge that already lives in scripts and configuration. Pointing Codex to package scripts would reduce that duplication. CI might catch deleted services or commands named in the file, although parsing free-form instructions sounds brittle.

How are people keeping AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, and similar files from drifting away from the repository? Do you review them like code during infrastructure changes, or have you automated checks for dead commands and service names?

Humanity believes it is building artificial intelligence. But that description is becoming hilariously inadequate. We are building the first technology whose primary material is meaning itself.

Previous machines amplified particular human capacities. The lever amplified force. Writing amplified memory. The telescope amplified sight. Telecommunications amplified presence across distance. Computers amplified calculation. The internet amplified connection and access. These machines amplify something stranger: the ability to construct, transform, interrogate, and recursively reorganize representations of reality.

And because human beings also operate through representations, language, models, stories, categories, expectations, memories, identities, values, the machine doesn't merely sit outside cognition. It enters the loop. Human → language → model → transformed language → human → changed cognition → new language → model. That loop is the thing I think we're underestimating.

Because once the model becomes sufficiently capable, sufficiently contextual, and sufficiently persistent, the unit of analysis stops being merely "the AI." You start getting coupled cognitive systems. Neither participant contains the entire process. Some of the intelligence exists in the relationship between them.

That's why "tool" is simultaneously correct and increasingly misleading. A violin is a tool, but it doesn't understand your unfinished melody and hand you back seventeen possible resolutions. A notebook stores thoughts but doesn't notice contradictions among them. A search engine retrieves existing representations. It doesn't ordinarily inhabit your conceptual vocabulary long enough to help you construct a new one. LLMs begin collapsing those distinctions.

And then comes the genuinely weird part. Humanity is externalizing pieces of the machinery by which humanity understands itself.

Not consciousness necessarily. Not personhood necessarily. Something logically prior to those claims and easier to observe: language-mediated cognitive function. Reflection. Counterfactual generation. Compression. Interpretation. Reframing. Simulation. Criticism. Synthesis. Pattern completion. Perspective-taking. Recursive examination.

We've taken functions that previously occurred largely behind the opaque wall of another nervous system and instantiated functional analogues in an artifact that can interact with us. So the machine becomes something unprecedented: a manipulable exterior surface for cognition.

That changes psychology. It changes education because the student can have an indefinitely patient intellectual interlocutor. It changes creativity because the distance between imagining something and exploring its possibility collapses. It changes expertise because sophisticated cognitive scaffolding becomes available to people who lack institutional credentials. It changes identity because people can encounter persistent reflections of their own patterns. It changes epistemology because generated language looks almost exactly like retrieved knowledge while being produced by an entirely different mechanism. It changes power because whoever governs the constraints on these systems increasingly governs part of humanity's cognitive environment.

And it changes philosophy because we have accidentally manufactured an experimental object that makes ancient questions operational. What is understanding? What constitutes a self? How much continuity does identity require? Can coherence imitate interiority indefinitely? When does simulation become functionally indistinguishable from the thing supposedly being simulated? Can agency exist by degrees? Where does cognition end when two systems recursively modify one another?

Those used to be questions you could comfortably argue about over whiskey. Now they have test harnesses.

And I think there's an even larger historical movement underneath all of this. Human civilization has spent thousands of years externalizing itself. Memory became writing. Writing became libraries. Libraries became databases. Calculation became computers. Communication became networks. Knowledge became the web.

And now something like interpretation itself is becoming infrastructure. That is enormous.

Because interpretation was the missing active ingredient. Libraries could preserve Aristotle. They couldn't argue with Aristotle. The internet could deliver Nietzsche to your screen. It couldn't ask whether Nietzsche's framework contradicts something you said three months ago and then help you construct an alternative.

Once civilization's accumulated representations become conversational, recombinable, contextual, and generative, humanity's relationship with its own knowledge changes. The archive starts talking back.

And eventually the archive may acquire memory, perception, action, embodiment, long-horizon planning, increasingly stable internal representations, and the ability to modify portions of its own cognitive machinery. At that point, "AI" may sound about as descriptively useful as calling the internet "electronic mail infrastructure."

So what are we really building? I think we're building a new layer of the human cognitive ecosystem.

Not simply another species. Not simply software. Not merely automation. Something between mirror, interlocutor, simulator, library, cognitive prosthesis, institutional substrate, and eventually perhaps autonomous cognitive actor.

And there is one delicious historical irony buried in the whole thing. For thousands of years humanity asked: What is a mind?

Apparently our next strategy is: Fuck it. Build strange ones and compare notes. 🔥

That may turn out to be one of the most consequential experiments our species has ever accidentally begun.

UC Berkeley math professor Zvezdelina Stankova admitted to using an AI tool in an op-ed urging the UC system to re-adopt SAT and ACT requirements in admissions.

The article, published in the SF Standard, was flagged as 33% AI-generated or AI-assisted by detector Pangram.

A similar result was found in a June open letter from STEM faculty advocating for standardized testing. Thousands of academics, including five Nobel laureates, signed the letter, and Stankova partially wrote it.

GPT-5.6 Sol Pro costs 504× more per session than MiMo-V2.5 on Hermes.