geuis

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Has Opus 5.5 gotten dumber for anyone else in the last few days?

5 geuis 6 days ago 5 comments

Comment · 18 days ago

I'm old enough to have been in the industry when Chrome launched. It was amazing. It was such a relief to move away from IE and all the arcane levels of details I had to remember back then to artisnaly get IE to behave like a moderately modern (for then) browser.

Chrome was fast, did the basic job of correctly rendering pages, and its js runtime was groundbreaking. Node.js was direct outcome of that revolution.

Now these days the only thing keeping me tied to chrome is finger muscle memory. The death of manifest v2 is the 2nd to last nail.

Honestly Opus 5.5 had gotten good enough I've been considering a project to have it build a new browser based on the open source Chrome and keeps the v2 in place. Just customize it specifically for my preferences and call it done. No more unexpected breaking updates. Just a browser that does its job and nothing else.

The problem is I use safari on iOS. Generally not a bad browser. Equivalent and superior to Chrome is certain aspects. I don't really need to run Chrome on my phone. Safari is good enough. However... for a local build only I use maybe it's possible.

Comment · 18 days ago

Passing opinion, but I hope this isn't indicating a lean in direction to 90's era Apple now that Tim retired. Too many overpriced skews and non-core products that diluted the brand and led to their market shrinking.

Comment · 18 days ago

so responses like "I've turned on the lights", but you're still standing in the dark. That's my anecdotal level of interactions with any Gemini model.

Comment · 22 days ago

Direct link in case it's needed. https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2026/10/08/idle/

For some reason the first time I tapped the link it didn't go directly to the article, which confused me. Subsequent times it goes straight through.

Comment · 23 days ago

Look at it from a training data perspective. If the models' behavior is being trained on a large corpus of text from human interactions, then it should be expected that certain conversational queues will be picked up in the behavior of the models.

So saying please and thanks isn't anthropomorphizing the models, it's more simply using input patterns that get better outputs more aligned to the desired result.

It also has the benefit of reinforcing polite behavior among us, the humans. Side benefit, but it is a thing to consider.

Comment · 23 days ago

I would definitely be more satisfied if claude code would stop with the "how's the session going" popups. I find it very distracting.

Comment · 23 days ago

Back a few years ago with gpt3.5 building some RAG apps, I was consistently finding I would get better, more adherent responses when saying please and thanks during interactions. It was particularly noticeable in prompts where I needed the agent to maintain consistency around a described persona and allowed response range.

I don't think there's anything going on inside other than predictions. That being said, being nice never hurts.

If I'm mean to some people and nice to others, that just means I'm an a-hole. I don't wanna be that. Being kind all around helps me be a better person in the world. And in some cases with the robots, it helps as well.

Comment · 24 days ago

I appreciate a channel that calls itself out. That actually makes the content a little more interesting, because its not hiding what it is.

(channel name is AI Slop for those not clicking the link.)

Comment · 24 days ago

The entire site looks like it was generated with Claude. The site hijacks scrolling.

I scanned through paragraph after paragraph of overbloated and repetitive descriptions of what and how RAG works compared to how "modern agents" need to access documents.

What I never saw at any point was whatever this "alternative to RAG" was supposed to be.

Honestly the entire body of copy feels like it was llm generated.

Comment · 1 month ago

  Location: San Francisco
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: TypeScript/JS, React, node.js, Redis, Postgres, pgvector, LLM agents, Cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure), ci/cd pipelines, other tech
  Résumé/CV: on request
  Email: [email protected]

Comment · 1 month ago

I don't understand why people continue to use em-dashes. As far I know, the comment system on HN doesn't offer them. And iOS and android don't make them a default. They aren't something normally used by humans because - is a keyboard option that's easier to use.

The usage of them immediately makes your commentary suspect. Either you aren't using the standard web interface to make a comment, you're using and odd 3rd party client, or its LLM generated.

Comment · 1 month ago

This isn't peer reviewed, just a press release. 10 other "papers" will be published in the next 2 weeks counterfinding anything in this post.

Science moves forward yet again with a few backward steps.

Comment · 2 months ago

Fast download for me. But immediately denied. Doesn't run on Mac intel hardware.

Comment · 2 months ago

  Location: San Francisco
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: TypeScript/JS, React, node.js, Redis, Postgres, pgvector, LLM agents, Cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure), ci/cd pipelines, other tech
  Résumé/CV: on request
  Email: [email protected]