Switched to Fable after a good bit of time with Opus 5.5, the claude-speak smell is immediately overwhelming. It did a more thorough job investigating and planning than Opus 5.5 tho, so maybe it's worth it.
Amazon's made it impossible to find any remotely complicated product - the search results are mostly garbage. This has to bite them at some point, no?
On the Luka vs Yaxel: it's a rookie vs the league's leading scorer. Yaxel locked won Luka pretty well, did not back down, didn't get rattled. In the end I gained more respect for Yaxel.
This is from a (lapsed) Laker fan.
Qwen3.8 Flash Next on a local 3090 via Strata and pi is completely usable as a daily driver. This makes my unreasonably happy. Can't wait for Qwen4.
Parand Darugar retweeted
Should Europe leave frontier AI to the Americans and the Chinese?
The idea has gained ground in Europe. It is a fundamental mistake.
Build or surrender: for now, the choice is still ours.
Full article below.
I'm seeing this AI cost cutting / rationalization quite a bit. This is emblematic of the knowledge/implementation gap between those who use AI effectively and the rest of the world. AI has incredible ROI, if you're cutting back on spending you're doing it wrong.
Europe's lack of presence in frontier AI will be a massive depressive force for them, making them vassals of US / China. I don't know if there's a solution - there's no appropriate investment apparatus to support their participation (unless they raise from US).
The weather: hot, hot, HOT, obnoxiously hot, rain, rain, nice weather, hot as hell. Dear management, please make up your mind, this is San Diego and we're too precious to deal with this nonsense.
I’ve long believed Franken-assembled networks would work great and speed up / obviate pre-training.
interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic, because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. years later, I started openai's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools we had
with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. the vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible, and their circuits beautiful. many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most, and possibly quite soon, as automated scientists keep improving. it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works
already-clean.goodfire.com/
The idea that LLMs will be able to solve math problems but will be unable to explain the solution is strange to me - they're generally great at taking complex topics and putting them into words. "Knowledge without understanding" seems intuitively unlikely.
The only domain LLMs have yet to conquer is writing like a human. Which is hilarious because that was their origin.
I'm still not sure what exactly @superlogical is building, but I'm excited to try it - the current in-terminal coding agents experience (in this case pi) could be a LOT smoother, and I hope that's what Superlogical will give me.
I had Pi + Qwen3.8 Flash Next, all locally hosted, build a non-trivial app overnight and ... it's quite good. As in, fully local app building is feasible. That makes me very happy.
I should have Opus 5.5 do the same and compare.
It's funny how easy it is to spot LLM authored text - generally just from the headline.
I'm guessing human speak will transform to be more LLM speak as this permeates.
Disappointingly Qwen3.8 Flash Next for (an admittedly quite complex) software design task did not work out well.
One big issue in running locally is context size limits - even if the LLM is capable, if it can't hold relevant context it suffers.
I am now trying Qwen3.8 Flash Next on a real coding project for the first time, let's see how it goes. Qwen3.8 27B surprised me with how good it was, this is supposed to be better.



