nathanasmith

Joined 11 years ago

Karma
831
Submissions
283
Member since
Jul 31
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Recent submissions

Comment · 3 months ago
Exactly. To butcher a cliche, if the model has 6 hours to chop down a tree I want it to sharpen the axe for 5 hours.
Comment · 4 months ago
They begged to be regulated and now they're being regulated. The company doesn't get to pick and choose the exact form of the regulations they get and in this case they got more than they bargained for. Maybe next time be more careful with the messaging.
Comment · 4 months ago
There won't be any new generation of models more powerful than Fable since the argument against Fable would apply even more. Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 is the best we'll ever see from this point forward. Soon low cost Chinese models will catch up to those thereby destroying Anthropic and OpenAI's pricing power which will mark the beginning of the end for them too.
Comment · 4 months ago
This heralds the end of frontier model development in the US since the same national security argument can and will be made against any model stronger than Fable/Mythos. Squashing the ability of Anthropic and OpenAI to deploy newer stronger models will destroy their valuation so no trillion dollar IPOs either. Low cost Chinese models will soon catch up to Opus and GPT-5.5 eroding Anthropic and OpenAI's ability to charge more. The knock on effects of this are just beginning.
Comment · 5 months ago
I start out writing most of my terminal applications and utilities in Python but when something hits a performance ceiling I convert it to Go. That's been a pretty good bar for when it's time to use Go for me and so far so good.
Comment · 5 months ago
> Would I buy clothes [...] from Costco?

Yes. Happily.

Comment · 7 months ago
The verbs are one of my favorite things about Claude Code.
Comment · 11 months ago
The thing that bothers me about "warmer, more conversational" is that it isn't just a cosmetic choice. The same feedback loop that rewards "I hear you, that must be frustrating" also shapes when the model is willing to say "I don’t know" or "you’re wrong". If your reward signal is mostly "did the user feel good and keep talking?", you’re implicitly telling the model that avoiding friction is more valuable than being bluntly correct.

I'd much rather see these pulled apart into two explicit dials: one for social temperature (how much empathy / small talk you want) and one for epistemic temperature (how aggressively it flags uncertainty, cites sources, and pushes back on you). Right now we get a single, engagement-optimized blend, which is great if you want a friendly companion, and pretty bad if you’re trying to use this as a power tool for thinking.

Comment · 1 year ago
I had an old Galaxy Tab S7 collecting dust on the shelf. Since iOS 26 came out I find myself reaching for the Android tablet more and more. First time that ever happened. (Sent from my Galaxy Tab)
Comment · 1 year ago
Readers would have been better served with the prompts you wrote than the AI generated output.
Comment · 1 year ago
The person you replied to is in Pakistan.
Comment · 1 year ago
>You're right - I don't really care if the track playing in my favourite cafe is AI-generated or not. You're not supposed to be emotionally invested into background music

I guess different strokes but some of the best music I've ever been turned on to just happened to be playing in some random cafe or coffee shop. Conversely if the music is bland and uninspired I'm much less likely to go back.

Comment · 1 year ago
Is there an API for Grok yet? If not that could be the issue.
Comment · 1 year ago
Unfortunately that wouldn't help as much as you think since talented AI labs can just watch the public leaderboard and note what models move up and down to deduce and target whatever the hidden benchmark is testing.
Comment · 1 year ago
I had been sleeping on Claude's ability to write books until a couple of days ago I had it write a novel set in the Accelerando universe. It whipped up a very convincing complete multi-Act 13 chapter side plot about humans learning to interact with Economics 2.0. It was quite good though I'm sure cstross would be horrified.

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