redfloatplane

A very neat problem and result. I often find myself swinging between "It's so over" and "We're so back" - some days I roll out of bed thinking I could have Claude solve some random unproven OEIS sequence before breakfast; other days, I wake up in a cold sweat worried about the fate of humanity and what the world might look like in a decade. I think it's that I don't have a very high p(doom) or p(utopia), and I don't really have any solid conviction on how this whole thing is going to go, so my vibe-o-meter jitters between 'fine' and 'not fine' constantly. It's just such an unpredictable moment. Anyways: really neat to see this use case. I myself recently used Claude to finally do an relatively exhaustive study of the location of heretofore-unlisted formal gardens in Ireland in the early 1800s and early 1900s, by having Claude write the tooling for me to manually annotate a few dozen on tiles of historic maps, and then running some CV model across the rest of the tiles using my input. I'd been planning to do this project for over a decade, but I could never find the time (or the enthusiasm) to learn all the details of how to do it myself. It took me a weekend with Claude and continues to bring me joy.

> Caveats, stated plainly. [from the Fable transcript pasted in the article]

I had a visceral reaction to these three words.

But what if those measures might apply to your favourite multi-trillion-dollar globo-corp and cause them to nominally change their business practices? That's a step too far, I say.

Good for you! As an EU citizen I have found myself in almost total disagreement with everything he's written regarding EU policy. Horses for courses.

Yes, I decided to stop reading his blog relatively recently after some extremely hot takes on EU policy. I don't feel his thoughts on the matter are particularly well-thought-out, and I feel like he's just stanning for Apple from his priors rather than from any grounding in reality.

I dunno, I guess that's what you should expect from Gruber but these EU-bashing articles lowered the enjoyment I got from his blog underneath the bar for me.

I was thinking of user-side regulations as well, not only provider-side ones. I could imagine a world where a government rules that you may not use LLMs for anything, which would be much easier to get around if you have local means.

> I pay ~3$ per 1M/tokens for that model on Openrouter

I think the thing is, there's an unspoken "for now" at the end of that sentence and people running this locally are hedging against that "for now". Some people prefer to feel that they own the means rather than rent the means, even if the one they own is worse than the one they can rent. Especially with today's Fable news and the harsh realisation that the "for now" is dependent on very many unpredictable factors, where the one you have locally costs you capital today and a relatively predictable run-rate (made more predictable with on-prem solar for example), but should otherwise work predictably forever.

I'm not saying that you're wrong to do what you're doing, just that many people have their own lines in the sand where renting vs buying makes sense, and it doesn't only boil down to a rational (or irrational) financial decision.

Indeed. Taillte Ireland's (Ordnance Survey Ireland's) detailed cartographic data is also not open (including historic data - maps from the 1820s and 1920s!) and it's really a huge pain in the ass. On the other hand, OSM is in pretty good shape at least for topographic information. I've used it to make hiking maps here and nobody's died - as far as I know.

As a side note, I was one of the initial developers of the Irish national open data portal. Earlier today I had Claude look for similar LIDAR data for Ireland and I saw it pull from the site I built a dozen years ago and I was unreasonably pleased with myself :)

Interesting, thanks for your comment. I'll have to think about it!

I also had this behaviour sometimes, it’s specifically called out in the system card in section 6.2.1.1 - although I didn’t actually see if they said they decisively fixed the issue.

This made me laugh. Training Opus 4.7 on business skills caused it to sometimes exhibit dishonest behaviour, and not training 4.8 on those skills removed it. From the system card:

> 6.2.5 External testing from Andon Labs Andon Labs reviewed the behavior of Claude Opus 4.8 in their simulated Vending-Bench 2 retail-management evaluation, as reported in the Capabilities section of this system card (see Section 8.13.5). Although they did observe some unexpected capability failures, they did not find clear instances of the kind of concerning in-game behaviors that were discussed in other recent system cards.

> What might have led to these differences? We monitor and investigate the effects of different training environments on alignment; Claude Opus 4.7, for example, had training that focused on business skills and robustness against adversarial agents, but we discovered that this training inadvertently contributed to misaligned behavior including dishonesty. We therefore removed it for Opus 4.8.

> Thus, Opus 4.8 did not show the same misaligned behaviors as Opus 4.7 in Vending-Bench, but also had reduced business success due to being more susceptible to scammers and being less able to negotiate good deals with other agents. We are currently working on training to improve business capabilities while maintaining aligned and ethical behavior.