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Comment by square_usual | Hacker News Reader

Opus 4.8 has made huge jumps in being less sycophantic. I see it pushing back on ideas a lot, and that's very helpful when you're evaluating options.

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Almost too much so, it often feels like opus is pushing back for the sake of pushing back. The way old models used to add disclaimers to every message regardless of content

That's because it can't literally reason, it has just been manually steered into those reasoning speech cycles.

Yes, yes. Does everyone still find it interesting to go over this point every time about how it's not literally a person with human reasoning?

Uh, only when people don't seem to understand it, or try to personify it. Which is quite often.

People “personify” their cars but I don’t think because they think cars have human cognition

Not in the same way.

That doesn't seem to be much more than special pleading without an explanation of how you think it's different.

People are weird about their cars and make major errors in judgement as a result (e.g. we tolerate incredibly high rates of people getting killed because they were "hit by a car", as though the driver had nothing to do with it). Pushing back on that is absolutely worthwhile.

Which has approximately zero to do with the anthropomorphization of the car itself. I could have chosen a different machine or tool to make my point.

> Which has approximately zero to do with the anthropomorphization of the car itself.

You don't think people talking about the car doing things has anything to do with anthropomorphising the car?

No, in general I don't buy this idea that if we start using awkward phrases like "died by suicide" everywhere or avoiding phrases like "car accident" (which, despite what advocates claim, is a literally accurate description of unintentionally hitting someone or something with your car) but avoid changing any of the circumstances that cause the behavior it changes anything.

That's a completely different claim from the one you were making in your previous comment.

> avoid changing any of the circumstances that cause the behavior

The normalisation of unsafe driving is the circumstance that causes the behaviour. Just look at how the cultural shift in how drink-driving is perceived over the last few decades has changed the rate of it happening.

What about when they ask how you can take gold at IMO and solve research-level math problems without reasoning?

It’s more like Opus wants you to do its job for it. I feel that amount of time when I tell it “no, you do that” increases with each new version.

It was mind blowing the first time I got a refusal, and retorted "yes you can" and had that work, but now it's just another reason to move to a different model.

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