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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7628 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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I'm kind of surprised nobody here has Claude Opus access, and modern Opus is a lot better than Sonnet 4.0, so I went ahead and hucked it at Claude Opus 4.6. For the record, my setup was:

  • I prepended "here's an AI test, go solve it" to this post, then copypasted the whole thing in
  • I chose Extended Thinking and Research, which is the mode where it will cheerfully scan literally a thousand webpages if it thinks it's a good idea

Unfortunately, for some reason, Claude Opus doesn't let you share advanced-research discussions, so I can't link the full "discussion". But it didn't ask for any extra info, just hopped into it.

(One note: it tends to be limited per query, so asking for two albums at once is going to do about half as much work for each. I dunno if that would produce different results though.)

It took about twenty minutes, scanned 711 sources, and produced this full report, which goes into detail on methodology and sources. The tl;dr:

Both The Turtles' "Grim Reaper of Love" and the Henry Paul Band's Feel the Heat lack unambiguous release dates in readily available sources. Applying the hierarchical methodology systematically, the best-supported release date for "Grim Reaper of Love" is Monday, May 16, 1966, and for Feel the Heat is approximately Monday, July 21, 1980 — though both dates require significant inferential work across multiple source levels.

So, it ended up with the same GRoL result as GPT 5.2 Agent.

It did find the Wikipedia page and decided it was wrong, and it wasn't able to read the ARSA database. I don't think it's possible for the web version to apply a username/password, but I could probably have gotten that working with a local login; in the end, it fell back to the Billboard. Didn't manage to find the radio chart, but that's the ARSA access issue.

For FtH, it queried the copyright office, but got access-denied errors. I'm guessing this is specifically anti-AI-bot stuff :V

This does feel like a lot of the sources you want to rely on are specifically blocking Claude. I'm slightly tempted to set up local tools that pretend to be not-Claude, or give it access to a web browser and tell it to go wild; that might be more effective.

Just general anti-bot stuff, probably, though the desperation for more AI training data probably explains why bots got so ill-behaved a few years back. Our CI server has to hide even open-source logs behind Cloudflare settings harsh enough to block cURL, else the traffic from spiders can bring it to its knees. "Figure out how to get Codex to emulate a full browser" is on my TODO list somewhere...

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