cmrdporcupine

They will go through the usual transition of "can't release a model" to "won't load in a harness normal people can use for 3-4 weeks" to "it's smart as hell but completely inept at tool use and coding" to "now it's behind everyone else" ... like every Gemini release.

"For antitrust reasons, it’s helpful for the US government to mediate or at least enable these discussions — they don’t need to participate, but do need to issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations. " - Dario a couple weeks ago.

Yes, he was talking about safety, but IMHO they're likely already IMHO pushing the boundaries of cartel type behaviour. And they will use safety as the cover to make it happen.

I suspect we'll see serious price fixing and the DOJ do nothing about it because of the inroads these people have with the Trump regime.

Whether that survives contact with Chinese open weight models is hard to say.

Sorry, I'm GenX. Growing up they showed us "Old Yeller" in the school gym every year like that was some kind of treat.

Taking GPT-6 "Sol" outside behind the shed and giving it a merciful end is about the best outcome possible.

Huge misstep releasing it.

6 Sol was worse than 5.6 Sol from my own experiences. Far worse.

Will see if this remedies things.

Aka "we made an oopsie last week and released what should have been called GPT 6 Terra with the name GPT 6 Sol"

Imagine if you will two product proposals coming across Dario's desk.

One is:

1) Complex IDE integration where our AI model is called to assist users in making decisions, assisting them to do the things they already intended to do. It appears more as a function of the IDE rather than something separate. It shows off the intelligence of the model but doesn't show off any autonomy.

2) A separate tool that can be branded Anthropic. It takes over completely. It advances the narrative that we've already been spreading that AI is going to make some human jobs obsolete. It looks to employers (the actual people who spend money) like it replaces an expensive developer even if at first it requires one. It has minimal to no integration point.

Which do you think they'll approve. I think it has less to do with the user motivation and more with the producer's.

I am simultaneously deep down in the agentic treadmill and also supremely frustrated by this.

And I don't think it was ever necessary to go to the point where people just gave up authorship. These were choices made by adopting the "I'll do everything for you" agentic "harness" model that shipped with Claude Code but it was never inevitable.

e.g. we completely dropped fill-in-the-middle completion OG CoPilot auto completion model. That combined AI authorship with a human always in the mix and I actually really enjoyed it. It's just that the models involved were pretty stupid. We totally could have had IDE / shell / tooling integration that kept people in the driver's seat while automating parts of the drudgery away. Instead what we got was a simple chat loop with "oh, whatever, you go do it" being the ultimate result. Cuz, you'll totally review everything after and understand it, right?

The things should end by quizzing you on what was just made and if you don't pass, just throw it away. That'd be funny to watch.

68020 and onwards could also get substantially more work done in a cycle than a 68000. So Amiga 1200 or Atari Falcon not only had substantially higher bus speeds they were just ... better... at the CPU level in terms of how much work could be done.

Even if they "solved" that, the problem is it's the LLM that "knows" it, not the team.

Which is really the same problem with coding.

The agentic model of it just taking over and doing everything is poisonous to effective long term team work.

We're well past the point where it's about the quality of the work they produce. It's the way they integrate (or rather, don't) into human practices.

> I don't know if the dominance of the PC was a foregone conclusion by 1985

It absolutely was. Simply on account of the name on the grey box.

If it hadn't been IBM, maybe somebody like DEC may have gotten their shit together to take the market instead of farting around with overly high margin products and eating themselves from the inside.

But the way "business" culture was in the 80s the "respectable" productivity machine could not have come from the games/"home" market. Apple maybe but they opted instead to go close off the Apple II line (which in fact had a strong productivity sector thing going on, especially in schools) and push the Macintosh which was a good product but started off weak in terms of capability and costly on price.

In the early to mid-80s it was either going to be a CP/M machine or a CP/M-like machine (like the PC). These are Visicalc/Lotus-123/WordPerfect machines to their customers, and they cared not at all about graphics capabilities until later. Just needed 80 columns, floppies, and reasonable amounts of memory.

Hell there was terror in the microcomputer market when IBM made moves to go "downmarket" into it with the PCjr (which was a flop). The hype leading up to it, and the noises about how it would be a Commodore and Atari killer was insane.

I mean, that's just pedantic. Of course the display frame rate was fixed. The point is what the effective game loop responsiveness was. which was often a fraction of the actual display's capability. If you go back and play some of the classic games of that era, there's often low responsiveness to joystick movements etc.

Graphic fidelity on the 16-bit machines was great. Latency was sometimes bad, depending on how much they were trying to do in the game loop.

Despite its obviously far lower MIPS rating the 6502 could just get more "video game" type work done in a clock cycle than a 68000. 68000 interrupt responsiveness was also pretty terrible.

Looking back 68000 had little business in video game type machines. I like the 68000 from a programming POV but it's faster for doing a pile of fast integer calculations than it is at moving memory around and responding to interrupts.

But Atari and Commodore were also imagining their machines to be targeting productivity more than games, so.

ChatGPT also seems down for me.

Frame rates on games on the ST were terrible, which just came down to there not being enough cycles in a single frame to really move stuff around. Sprites or tiles would be great but are a bit specific. Blitter hardware subsumes all of that under a more general utility. The STe's blitter when it finally came along was great. But by then it was too late, nobody was going to make games for it because the market was too small.

Once clockspeeds got up to what the Falcon could do, it was unnecessary. But again, too late.

This is a great post, thanks. I've been following prototype systems since I first logged into lambdamoo in 91, and Self is an old intellectual muse of mine but this is the first time I'd seen Korz.

You might be interested in my lang/environment "mica" which attacks this same dimension of problems from a relational/datalog angle and then makes object/prototype identity hopefully emergent out of that: https://github.com/timbran-project/mica -- relational dispatch feels like a broadening of multiple dispatch.

I feel like I may have ended up at a similar place as Korz without realizing it. I will need to dig into this paper.

Speaking also of multiple dispatch and prototypes, there's also this paper from an old acquaintance: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aldrich/courses/819/salzman-pmd.pdf which I used to find interesting (and built my first version of "mica" back then around the idea).

yeah, substantially agree. But I also think if only Atari and Commodore teams could have just been one company... it would have been glorious. Somehow. The market couldn't afford to be split like that, the pie wasn't big enough.

Also I was an Atari ST user back then, and loved it. But the Tramiel's didn't "get" software in the early days. They failed to make the right investments to keep TOS/GEM actively developed (e.g. as a Mac alternative) until it was too late (they hired Eric Smith to work on MiNT and then MultiTOS in the early 90s but they were already done as a company by then).

And then three fundamental hardware mistakes with the ST were:

1. not shipping it with the Blitter from the start so it couldn't compete on games, obviously with the Amiga but even with 8-bits of the time

2. forcing the ROM size down to 192kB so they had to size optimize the crap out of GEM before shipping (waste of precious development time), especially including tossing away all of GDOS (which had support for proportional fonts and printer drivers etc). A 256kB or 512kB ROM would have solved a lot of problems with what I'd think wouldn't have been an insane BOM cost bump.

3. Minor but long term annoying -- tying the cartridge port to only have 128kB of address lines. If they had given it 256kB or 512kB address ability their later expansion issues (OS upgrades etc) would have been much improved.

As for the Amiga, great machine but a) it cost too much at the start so failed to catch immediate fire (the 500 rectified this to some degree) b) interlace.

The alternative to "open weights" at this point is "American controlled."

And Dario and Sam have already made it clear that it's America First.

The rest of the world isn't going to accept a regulatory regime which imposes American hegemony. Maybe when Silicon Valley was playing all utopian like they used to. Not now.

Open weights is the most reasonable counter-power we have.

guess i'm old cuz i still feel like it's weird and antisocial

I mean, those of us with Marxian biases define it that way -- not right wingers -- and see "social democrats" in the 21st century as being the people who successively turned the term to mean instead anything-where-government-does-stuff. That's effectively what it came to mean in the US.

Notably, the definition given by Marx and other 19th century socialists (worker controlled production) is doesn't even have to involve government or the state at all. It just came to mean that once proximity to power came into play. The "soviet" word merely meant local worker councils, not a state form, for example. But once the Bolsheviks took state power, the power of the actual soviets was successively demolished in favour of a centralized one party state.

So, notably: Self-called "Marxist-Leninists" in the USSR, and Social Democrats (or "democratic socialists" in the US), and Right-wingers all far prefer the term to mean "government controls things." The latter because they can then point fingers and call things authoritarian (but somehow exempt corporate power from critique).

But it is not at all clear that 19th century socialists .. from Proudhon through Marx etc -- who coined the term -- meant this at all.

Also this hard line between "communism" and "socialism" is fictitious and very schematic. All communists call themselves socialists, and almost none of them agree on what that means.

Social democrats trying desperately to sound respectable clearly want a nice hard line there. But they also have no intention of bringing about socialism.

Update: It's markedly worse than 5.6 Sol. It costs far less money because it's far far stupider.

Update:

Sol 6 is a heaping pile of garbage. Just epic levels of slop. And r/codex etc is full of people noticing the same.

I've switched back to 5.6 Sol. What they're selling as Sol 6 is really what would have been Terra before, and it's awful.

More seriously this has been my fear all along.

When people spend their days interacting with machines that pretend to be human, they may then start treating real humans like machines.

Astra 6 was a huge improvement over Sol 5.6 for UI work. I haven't tried Sol 6 yet for it (it's only been a few minutes).

The GPT / Codex models have always been "overengineer" personalities. I prefer that to "I left a pile of race conditions lying around and big gaps in testing" though, which is what I was getting from Opus at times.

But yes both Astra and Sol veer on the side of paranoid. And honestly that's better for team work. For solo work where you just want to yeet something, it can be tiring.

You learn to tame the GPT "personality" on this front by combing over once a week and asking it to find and exterminate pointless tests, clean abstractions etc.

Yeah.

Astra was/is superior for planning type tasks. It was capable of doing seemingly magic things with rather vague/lazy instructions ("I need to be able to test this on Windows, maybe a qemu VM or something? Shrug." ... 1 hour later "yeah i built you a whole qemu + eval windows image + harness of powershell scripts + shell scripts to retrieve & verify harness.").

And for UI work -- which is not something I do a lot of but do here and there -- it was clearly superior to 5.6 Sol.

But it also feels sloppier? Somehow. And too expensive to use.

We'll see how Sol 6 is.

It wasn't just Astra. Sol 5.6 was a hog, too. They futzed with the formula and it pissed people off royal.

Are you trying to imply that nothing OpenAI can release would justify that response and therefore the people must be bots?

Asking cuz I don't think I'm a bot [pats self], I legitimately prefer the GPT models to Anthropic's, don't like Anthropic's customer service/reliability story at all, and I welcome a massive price reduction. Seems like something I should be happy to get.

If you'd told me I'd be typing this a year ago I'd be skeptical though.

Well, they do rug pull constantly. This week and last leading up to this the cost to use Codex was overwhelmingly perceived as terrible. People running out of usage all over the place. Reddit full of people crying. I noticed it myself.

Then they do a new model launch, issue quota resets all around, and it's a party for 2-3 weeks before things return to normal.

Looking at their own charts it seems like it's only small incremental improvement over 5.6 Sol, but with a massive cost reduction. And the better writing/communication style that Astra had.

Which... fine, I'll take that.

GPT Sol 6 has also released today, but no official blog announcement yet

https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/comments/1wnggya/gpt_6_droppe...