I think this release is really going to give them a hard time selling Fable:
> On our benchmarks, Claude Opus 5.5 leads in agentic coding, computer use, and knowledge work. That said, at these levels of capability we’ve found that benchmark margins have become a less reliable guide to real-world differences. In our own use, the gap between Opus 5.5 and Claude Fable 5.1 is narrower than these scores suggest.
In general, "benchmark margins have become a less reliable guide to real-world differences" sounds like a big problem. It was certainly the biggest problem with the previous generation of Claude models for a different reason, because the non-code output was nonsensical, and that is not being benchmarked at the moment. But I'm not sure what to make of this admission.
The biggest jump was Opus 4.6. Since then they have gradually gotten better at finding issues in your reasoning, not hallucinating, and being rigorous with the code, but much much worse at explaining things and generally just talking in a way that a human can understand. All the models I've tried seem to be suffering from the same fate so it must be something going on with the training meta right now.
That would actually be a reasonable thing to do with a model that is good at writing though. I'm sure if you used that method on Opus 4.6 you'd get a pretty decent result, because Claude models used to be quite good at that sort of technical synthesis. Asking a model that is bad at technical writing (e.g. Opus/Fable 5) to write your docs is a bad idea.
I believe AI technical prose peaked with Opus 4.6. I still use it (mostly for that purpose) and I think it's legitimately great. I'm hoping they are able to reverse the trends that benchmaxxing and RLAIF have wrought on Claude's non-code output with the future models.
I assure you it won't be as bad as this (answer to FAQ: "Will OpenLogi support Logitech Flow?")
> It's on the roadmap, at the far end: a cross-computer pointer and clipboard bridge is a very large feature. The half that lives in the protocol already ships. OpenLogi drives Easy-Switch host switching over HID++ (0x1814/0x1815), and paired mice follow the keyboard when it switches hosts. If the rest lands, it will be opt-in and local-network only.
A great example of why Claude's writing is terrible is the sentence "The half that lives in the protocol already ships". I cannot imagine any human writing this.
The entire ecosystem of CC is designed to facilitate burning tokens. You have to ask the LLM to write a script for the app to tell you which folder you're working in and which branch you're on. There are commands that just diagnose your Claude Code setup and try to "optimize" it. Adding skills or plugins bloats the context window. Developing plans means that you work through questions before you get to it in the code, but that matters way more for human programmers than LLMs, so it's probably just a waste of tokens.
What output style have you found to actually fix Opus 5's grating prose then? I find it leans hard into its preferred grammatical structures and rote sayings no matter what I include in the output style.
> because it's really hard to learn anything by skimming code that's being pooped out by Claude.
I think this is pretty dubious. It's true that you have to do more proactive learning with an agentic workflow, but it doesn't mean you can't learn stuff. Software engineers forged in the age of AI are not learning the same things their predecessors did or thinking about code in the same way, but the more curious people will still be better at the job, which is I think how it's always been. It seems a little unclear how much "AI brain rot" will be a force unto itself that neuters even the smartest of the juniors, but I think it's still an open question.
I agree, very odd they did not comment on any theories for the degradation here. Dip and then rebound at max effort is pretty interesting too. Overthinking is bad, but you can overthink so much it starts to be better again?
> So I would rather share a match with the occasional cheater than run un-auditable ring-0 software on the same machine I use for anything private.
The article makes an argument that anti-cheat is not worth the trade-off, yet the author admits they are a non-gamer. Then they go on to present one example of anti-cheat that tells us all we need to know about actual gamers' preferences—FACEIT. For those who don't know, FACEIT is a third-party matchmaking service, primarily for CS2. People choose to go through the hoops of using third-party service that installs kernel-level anti-cheat on their computer because it helps to keep cheaters out of their games. This seems like pretty strong evidence that the author's argument is not a good representation of gamers' thoughts on this. I don't know what the actual solution is. I suspect if Valve made their own kernel-level anti-cheat people might trust it more, but it's still the same problem.
I'm basically restating what you said, but it's amazing to me that the vast majority of people you will meet, even educated people, are casual dualists and free-will libertarians. If they happen to acknowledge materialism in some way (i.e. the acceptance of the idea that the brain's processes are just the interaction of physical matter), there is still zero chance they draw determinist conclusions from that acknowledgement. But I guess that tracks, given that most professional philosophers are apparently compatibilists for some reason I have never understood (the arguments get really confusing).
Because, as the OP said, working hours are powered by norms. There are salaried positions and companies and teams that certainly will make you work 6 days a week, or make you feel like a bad worker if you don't do anything on a Saturday. But the vast majority of companies (and employees within those companies) would consider the expectation of working a 6th day to be completely unacceptable.
The real question is: Why are people designing benchmarks that, if a model is trained on them, it won't improve the performance of the model at any real-world tasks? Why would anyone care about such benchmarks?
But there is a way for even an aligned federal government to fight back against the slide into authoritarianism, even with an authoritarian president expanding the powers of the executive, and that is for the other branches to strongly advocate for their own power. The problem as I see it is that Congress literally does not care that they are ceding more power than ever before to the executive. Mostly I think this is due to the cult of personality aspect of Trumpism and the idea that you're basically either with him and in the party or against him and out of the party, so it's impossible to drum up support within the party to fight back against the wresting of power. But also it's because the Republican party has no interest in actually passing legislation because most non-budgetary directions they can go will result in incredible cross-pressure (healthcare reform, federal abortion bans, etc). They believe they are better off not doing policy and letting Trump do whatever.
> “In my trips to Wall Street,” Dyer told the panel, “one of my analyst friends took me to lunch one day and said, ‘Joe, you have to get iRobot out of the defense business. It’s killing your stock price.’ And I countered by saying ‘Well, what about the importance of DARPA and leading-edge technology? What about the stability that sometimes comes from the defense industry? What about patriotism?’ And his response was, ‘Joe, what is it about capitalism you don’t understand?’”
I find this article a pretty compelling critique of the extractive incentives of Wall Street and a good argument for government stepping in from time to time to adjust those incentives. Where is the societal good in the engine of capitalism prioritizing short-term extraction over long-term value creation?
Sure, but the author is arguing that the outcome you're describing is tightly coupled to the perverse incentives that he describes in the article. Investors pushed the company towards extraction over innovation and the end product suffered as a result.
I'm not so sure I buy the premise that engineers are really dismissing AI because it's still not good enough. At the very least, this framing does not get to the heart of why certain engineers dislike AI.
Many of the people I've encountered who are most staunchly anti-AI are hobbyists. They enjoy programming in their spare time and they got into software as a career because of that. If AI can now adequately perform the enjoyable part of the job in 90% of cases, then what's left for them?
Low mileage used cars don't come with a warranty, or probably have a more limited warranty if they're CPO.
Leases can be better, but again they are usually better choices in high depreciation scenarios (like luxury vehicles or EVs, as you point out), not low depreciation scenarios.
Have you seen the prices of pre-owned Honda/Toyota sedans that are less than 5 years old? There are absolutely cars out there where trading in your new car after 3-4 years can make sense depending on the cost of the car, the depreciation curve, and whether you want to always be driving a relatively new car. Of course it's almost always going to be a better value proposition to drive the car for 10 years if you can, but that can still depend on depreciation.
Those things also require more willpower than taking a medication. Willpower is generally determined by your particular psychology which is determined by genetics and environmental factors. People don't have a choice in the matter as much as your comment seems to imply. Getting GLP-1s to everyone who could benefit from them is extremely important for overall health.
"Real industry" also has quite a hard time getting things done these days. If you look around at the software landscape, you'll notice that "getting things done" is much easier for companies whose software interfaces less with the real world. Banking, government, defense, healthcare etc. are all places where real-life regulation has a trickle-down effect on the actual speed of producing software. The rise of big tech companies as the dominant economic powerhouses of our time is only further evidence that it's easier to just do a lot of things over the internet and even preferred, because the market rewards it. We would do well to figure out how to get stuff done in the real world again.
I think the problem is false positives, not false negatives. The people you interact with during the interview process have all sorts of reasons to embellish the experience of working at their company.
You hit the nail on the head. There is no place on the internet more broadly susceptible to the same kinds of "founder brain" malaise that has afflicted so many in Silicon Valley--i.e. "I am good at software development so therefore I am confident I have a good understanding of (and opinion on) all sorts of intellectual topics".
Maybe it that's an apt analogy in more ways than one, given the recent research out of MIT on AI's impact on the brain, and previous findings about GPS use deteriorating navigation skills:
> The narrative synthesis presented negative associations between GPS use and performance in environmental knowledge and self-reported sense of direction measures and a positive association with wayfinding. When considering quantitative data, results revealed a negative effect of GPS use on environmental knowledge (r = −.18 [95% CI: −.28, −.08]) and sense of direction (r = −.25 [95% CI: −.39, −.12]) and a positive yet not significant effect on wayfinding (r = .07 [95% CI: −.28, .41]).
I think it's a bit fallacious to imply that the only way we could be in an AI investment bubble is if people are reasoning incorrectly about the thing. Or at least, it's a bit reductive. There are risks associated with AI investment. The important people at FAANG/AI companies are the ones who stand to gain from investments in AI. Therefore it is their job to downplay and minimize the apparent risks in order to maximize potential investment.
Of course at a basic level, if AI is indeed a "bubble", then the investors did not reason correctly. But this situation is more like poker than chess, and you cannot expect that decisions that appear rational are in fact completely accurate.