This was my take as well. Those all seem to be second order effects of people socializing much less, which must be having negative effects on kids as well?
Or if the agent literally just hallucinates a crime
Opus 5.5 decided to just randomly `pkill` everything on my laptop the other day. Jailbreaking models is still easy AF. Every single release like this brags about their "safeguards", but none of it really works at the end of the day.
In actuality, it feels a lot more like project and middle managers getting rid of ICs
I can feel it in the air, every single software business is itching to get rid of as many developers as possible, and move everything to their PMs. Hiring has already almost completely stopped, and some have already started the layoffs. More will come.
Project and top/middle managers exists basically to keep track of what other people are doing and to make sure deadlines are met and processes are followed.
The problem with 5 wasn't just the verbosity, but its insane way of communicating. It had this bizarre circuitous sentence structure that always buried the lede, and always tried to be faux profound. I'm okay with verbosity if it's actually readable.
Opus 5 has made me question my sanity on a daily basis, especially as all my coworkers started lobbing Opus 5 slop grenades everywhere. It had the worst and most infuriating writing style I've ever seen.
I hope Opus 5.5 is better, if for no other reason than all the Claude slop I have to read will be at least more tolerable.
One funny side effect of all of this: realizing that coworkers that use AI for almost all the text they generate at work have their writing style change every time a new model ships.
I really wonder how it converged on its style. It's pretty unique and terrible. It's not like it's just mimicking something or it was purposefully design to be that way. I mean the reason may be diffuse and uninteresting... just the result of a lot of factors and lack of control over the writing style probably.
But oddly enough its still great at coding. Just like a lot of people it either interfaces well with people or machines but not both.
I assume it’s largely a side effect from the final RL in post training?
That’s the step that causes the most significant gains in agentic performance.
But the RL doesn’t care about anything except maximizing the score, so if you only score based on coding benchmarks, anything can happen to the writing style (as long as it doesn’t hurt the coding performance).
That’s why it often gets worse on models that simply had more RL post training from the same base.
Reinforcement learning for specific use-cases like coding that degrade it's writing style... makes sense. Maybe it stands to reason later version of Opus were improved more by this sort of fine-tuning. Feels consistent with the observation of diminishing returns and worsening writing style. Wonder what changed (supposedly) in 5.5.
Does Xiaomis approach help with this? They do all the post training steps at the same time instead of one by one, switch topics after a couple prompts so writing style is mixed with coding and tool use.
Apparently it helps generalize skills between areas, which makes sense when you compare it to how humans learn but I don't know if it's the same for LLMs.
I have a theory that they pushed the model away from human writing styles to not get copyright violation nags. In Opus 5.5 they've found a better point in the latent space of styles that is still far away from the human ones.
I've been listening to some old Acquired podcast episodes and they do often talk in this type of Claudish. So it's getting it from Silicon Valley startup podcasters... Great...
Astra is better here, but the one I'm the most impressed with is Gemini. It's always been good, but 3.6 Flash is even better. It writes in a pleasant, human style. Not perfect, but it has a good balance between technical accuracy and readability that is better than what I've seen from any other mainstream model.
Yes, it made me want to vomit. If the new Fable only changed the writing style to just sound like a human, same performance for everything else, I'd be pretty happy.
It's not X, it's Y, not A, not B, not C, and he haven't even woken up yet! Here's the catch, the detail is in the devils and the twist is that it's designed!
You're right to call this out, and what's more, it's not even solving the original problem. I overlooked this in pursuit of the load-bearing seams and finding the wedge needed to uptick engagement.
> Nothing leaves your phone and there is no account.
This is good to know, but it's the exact type of thing Claude is obsessed with putting everywhere once you tell it NOT to do something. For example, if I tell it to commit but never push changes to GitHub, it can't help but leave "Changes committed; nothing was pushed." to EVERY SINGLE MESSAGE. The model just can't help but report back about everything it's NOT doing, and it drives me crazy.
I love how even all the copy on the site is clearly AI generated. We're starting to completely lose even our ability to write a single paragraph of descriptive text.
The name is also much more engaging. As we all know, naming things is hard. While NearbyGlasses is simple and descriptive, it's not emotionally charged like ZuckOff.
I would say that rationalists have some commitment to their religion being factually accurate (or at least grounded in empirical observation), which is more than can be said of most others
Same. I've scrubbed my presence as much as possible from the majority of the internet (except HN for whatever reason) to prevent future models from being trained on my output, but the damage is already done. Part of me exists in pretty much all AI models now, without my consent. And those models are actively stealing my career and passions.
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