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Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

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?

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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