Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnsmith1840 | Hacker News Reader

I'm a heavy user and fable is great the #1 reason I stopped using it was the horrible safegaurd filter. I found sol close enough in capability and have only been blocked when my request was an obvious offensive cyber work. Fable blocked me on almost everything.

Optimizing a OS build? -> block

Securing a container -> block

60% is nowhere near enough for that safegaurd system. This just means I am going to be blocked half as much? Any long running task will likely get blocked.

Say you give a single big prompt and fable goes off for 6hrs of work. At hr 5 it gets blocked you now have the option of a much dumber model taking over and wrecking it or losing the entire 5hrs of work. That risk is beyond terrible and deffinetly not worth a 5-10% percieved improvement on my end. I previously would just bring sol in when that happened and realized sol is stupidly close in capability.

View on HN

I never hit Anthropic's safety filter when I'm doing something illegal, only when I'm not.

I hit the safety feature when I ask something I saw that blocked other biologists: "why did the chicken cross the road?"

Due to my standard cancer research work I'm blocked from Fable.

That said, with how execrable all the 5 models have been, I can't imagine I'm missing much. It's impossible to get an intelligible explanation in text out of the 5 models, and the mistakes are just comically bad on anything that's not code.

Cancelled my subscription, and can't imagine going back since OpenRouter gives me a consistent model that I can trust won't change underneath me.

Why would cancer work be safeguarded? Are they afraid some cartel is going to, like, invent a stronger cancer?

The safeguard filter is comically unintelligent. One of my side projects is a strategy game, and in that strategy game one player has a set of jokes, one of them referring to "biological minds". Whenever Fable reads this asset it immediately stops - because of the use of word 'biological', there is nothing else biological about that codebase.

And there is a bug to this bug, if the downgrade happens at close to full context window, there is no taking over this session with Opus -- happened to me twice: it throws some context window exceeded error, suggesting what fits in Fable context, may not fit in Opus's around the maximum. And then and there, an entire session is lost. In fact, there are two bugs, as /resuming such broken session attempts to resume with Fable, burning through tokens.

Oh well, I learned to be careful with the jokes around Fable.

My theory is that they’re pretending it’s about biological weapons but really they want to charge pharmaceutical companies $$$ to help with research. (Essentially a Mythos type segmentation for biology)

Theory? Given they have now moved into "science" I'd say it's a given

Okay, finally a plausible explanation for why Anthropic has stubbornly appeared to be self-sabotaging their model with the overly broad yet somehow also overly specific biology filter.

The fear of Trump Admin retaliation excuse made superficial sense except for the fact that it missed all sorts of non-bio stuff a punitive state actor might find objectionable to use against them.

Fable zaps anything that seems even vaguely biological.

It refused to answer anything about pickling for me. Always kicked me down to Opus which is comical.

> Due to my standard cancer research work I'm blocked from Fable.

Honest question, is this account wide or do you get unblocked in not research related queries when disabling memory?

I didn’t think to disable memory before I cancelled my plan, but I was getting blocked similarly for having a lot of biology chats (nothing close to “biosafety related”; all stuff that would be in standard textbooks or publications on biophysics). The classifier would activate even on a new conversation on a pure math problem or even travel suggestions…

But at the end of the day, if I can’t use it to help with anything biology related in the slightest then it is a completely worthless product to me, so I switched to OpenAI.

They have some allowance flags, you should email them.

How often do you have to ask for a service to be delivered after you pay? Never. In fact, if you have to do that once, you stop transacting with that party.

Have you ever hired someone and then had to also ask them to work? Never. That’s immediate termination.

Stop normalizing this “we charged your credit card, but we will decide what tasks to complete” nonsense.

Mere mention of "reverse engineering" gets me kicked back to Opus.

Where I reside, reverse engineering for interoperability is generally legal, and interoperability (e.g. getting a USB HID and USB MIDI devices or DOS programs to work in Linux/Android) is essentially what I'm interested in.

This makes me wonder how often you are doing illegal things!

Honestly, unless what you are doing is frankly illegal, it usually is possible for you to get around most safeguards for coding things if you also know how to write code. Most problems have a separable completely innocuous core that Fable would gladly do. Then you can implement the problematic parts yourself. Particularly things like copyright issues, web scraping etc.

> Then you can implement the problematic parts yourself.

Or with another LLM, but yeah. The only issue is when it's a monorepo and fable does ls/grep. I've got a file named `system_prompt` in a completely innocent project and as soon as fable accidentally stumbled upon it - cyber.

Hacked together something with omp and sandbox-exec so that only whitelisted models can see some parts of the project. Works pretty well.

If it doesnt have a context (what you are using it for) then it's happy to do it. If you have X amount of code you can ask it to generate (X/5)5 and there is no problem. Like you said, you have to know what you are doing. You have to know what it needs to write so that you can tell it to write the parts.

It dramatically improved about a week ago - most of my blocked projects are now completely functional.

Ironically, having never been flagged - I've just restarted Claude Desktop and it's flagged a conversation that has already been completed.

In a long session pulling data from all over the place it created a pretty PDF.

"create this as a google doc that can be commented on"

Done — the full v0.5 content is now a Google Doc in your Drive...

"Ah, the formatting has gone. Do it in google slides please"

The brand studio has a native Google Slides path for exactly this — building the deck now.

Google Slides created.

Then today:

Chat paused Edit and retry with Fable 5 Fable 5's safeguards flagged this message. This sometimes happens with safe, normal conversations. Continue with Opus 4.8, send feedback, or learn more.

Details: [reasoning_extraction]

  Flagging the formatting prompt

The last time i ran into that issue it suggested to make sure that a Fable AGENT took over the long-horizon task because, for some reason, agents in a session don't get blocked for security reasons. This may not always be possible, but it worked for me.

Don't fall for this. Agents silently downgrade unless you explicitly block the behavior. I built a little harness for Chatgpt, grok and Claude to do design review feedback rounds where one holds the pen and the other 2 send feedback, then rotate if no convergence. I built a thing into it to track if model swaps happen. Happens to Claude all the time. The other two, never.

Do you find the variety helps? I've migrated away from such complexity, and I simply have multiple agents of the same model run the same prompt (usually Sol 5.6 high or max), and generally this gives plenty of adversarial input. I'd be curious to know how much difference it makes to run multiple models.

I frequently find blind spots / edges where one model notices something non-trivial none of the others did. I think the one that surprises me the most often is probably grok, but I wouldn't want grok to be my daily driver. I feel I get benefits but I could also see the argument that it's just a complex token burning furnace lol.

That's a good idea but it works from the change in context no? So you lose context from your big model. It's a good suggestion though.

No idea if subagents are not blocked, but you can set the starting method for subagents to "fork", then they inherit the main agents context

I only use OpenAI models, and Sol is the only one to refuse me yet, and ofc it was completely bogus and I was unable to convince I was just working a regular bug for a well-known product for a well-known company using my official github account.

Aaargh.

You generally don't even have to convince it, or at least I don't. I just paste the error into the prompt window, and say "you got blocked, try again", and it'll just say, "Oh, that's because ...", then do it.

Do you have the prompt for these? I ask because I have recently asked Fable's help with hardening a docker container (custom dev container CC sandbox) and it didn't get triggered on it at all.

The blocks that fustrate me more are tool permisissions. I ask to do something then flip to another screen and come back to see it never started

Auto permission is what ya need.

> Optimizing a OS build? -> block

Why would fable block optimizing an OS build

The safety filter is simply no longer an issue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com