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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1072 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 10, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I've... picked up a Claude Max 20x plan. No, I can't disclose how I acquired it, though I didn't have to pay a cent (and it's all legit). It's so fucking good, but at the same time, the more I use Opus 4.6, the more I'm impressed by how close Sonnet 4.6 gets. Sure, Opus is legitimately better, but the difference is nowhere near as stark as say, Gemini Flash vs Pro, or GPT's Thinking or Instant mode. Anthropic cooked, and I can't wait to try Mythos when the version for plebs comes out.

PS: If anyone has a good guide to Claude Code or agentic setups, I need one. I have some serious experimentation to do while I have it.

Alright, I have one for you: If you read the most recent installment of my Pittsburgh series you'll see that I have a sentence about how the Italian composition of Bloomfield changed over time, based on information compiled by the US Census. While I am skeptical of AI overall, I admit that it has legitimate potential uses, one of which is aggregating large amounts of statistical information from diverse sources that are a pain in the ass to search manually. To give you some background, the census started asking about ancestry beginning in 1980, on the "long form" that was given to 1/6 of the population. Following the 2000 census, the long form was eliminated, and the data was continually polled using the American Community Survey. When it was only being collected decennially, it was published in reports that are available online in PDF format. Following the introduction of the ACS, the census bureau implemented an API. In order to streamline the process, I gave Claude the following instruction:

Using long-form census data from 1980 to 2000 and American Community Survey data from 2005 to the present, determine the percentage of people in Pittsburgh census tract 804 who list Italian ancestry for each year that data is available.

After running for tens of minutes and spitting out a bunch of technical data about the API, it gave me this message:

The Census API (api.census.gov) is accessible from a browser, but my server-side tools can only fetch URLs that appeared in prior search results — I can't construct and call novel API query strings directly. The specific variable code for Italian ancestry in the 2000 SF3 (the PCT016 table) and the ACS B04006_058E queries for Tract 804 (GEOID 42003080400) require direct API calls.

It then informed me that my single, unsuccessful query used up my limit for the day. I would add that the pre-ACS data is available in PDF form from third party websites. I was able to compile it manually without much issue, though this would have been shorter. If Opus is able to do this, then I would like to see if I can get it to extend the data to prior years based on national origin. I don't know if this was compiled but the individual forms are available from 1950 and earlier, and they list the country of origin for each person. Around that time, most people with Italian ancestry would have been first or second generation, so the number of people born in Italy would be a starting point for an estimate.

I would also add that I tried this again with a different LLM that first incorrectly told me that it couldn't do it because of tract boundary changes (the ID number of the tract changed but the boundaries have been the same since at least 1940), and when I told it that the boundaries were the same it gave me 15%, which is the Italian-ancestored population of Pittsburgh as a whole. Another LLM told me it couldn't provide that data because it wasn't compiled and available online, which is basically admitting that it's a glorified search engine. So give it a shot with Opus and we'll see how it does.

Edit: Before you run my suggested prompt, try running something more general, like "How did the population of Pittsburgh Census Tract 804 change over time?" I try to give these LLMs as specific instructions as I can, but I feel like they are of limited utility if I need a lot of preexisting knowledge regarding how to find the information, as someone who knows that presumably doesn't need an LLM.

After running for tens of minutes and spitting out a bunch of technical data about the API, it gave me this message:

This is hilarious, but a useful illustration of how people come to think of LLMs as useless. Claude in an agentic harness (e.g. Claude code) easily researches new APIs and figures out how to get information out of them. For example, I was trying to get historical heat index information and CC presented several possible data sources, I asked if it could use a different one, and it looked at it and figured out how to call the API and extract the relevant info.

Last time you solicited requests for AI tasks the motte crashed for like a full day.

I'd say work on TheMotte bug fixes if I was being perfectly altruistic.

What I personally want is my own personal incremental game, cultivation setting, time loop, etc.

What incremental games do you like? I've invested many hours in kitten game, cividle, idle wizard, magic research 2, as well as of course the classics clicker heroes and cookie clicker long ago.

I've tried probably two dozen others (I put a ton of time into cell to singularity last year but don't really recommend it). Military Incremental Complex is the one I played more recently, its fine but nothing to get devoted to. Execute didn't really hook me, same problem with astro prospector, farmer vs potatoes, zombidle, click mage.

Groundhog life is maybe one of my favorites. Or just any games in that vein. Magic Research 1 and 2 are both similar.

https://old.reddit.com/r/incremental_games/comments/115dfw6/collection_of_time_loop_incrementals/

Time loops incrementals just scratch an itch.

I will occasionally go browse game recommendations from /r/incremental_games. I've maybe played hundreds over the years.

I do eventually end up cheating or abandoning them if cheating is impossible. Usually I just cheat to make sure it's not an "idle" game. Cheatengine for speed hack and memory editing, and if that doesn't work, editing the system click and abusing offline bonus time mechanics.

Creature collector games I tend to avoid. And loot focused auto battlers have to be best in genre for me to like them.

I mean, I could take a crack at that, but I'm far from good enough a programmer to vouch for the results. Plus I have legitimate work I need to do while I have access (I have no real reason to continue paying for Max after my plan expires).

Right now, AI agents genuinely benefit enormously from having a competent human in the loop. The best I ever got was solving a Leetcode medium in Python. And that was 4 years back. This isn't a total blocker, the models are good enough even with a dummy in charge, but I wouldn't want to burden Zorba with code that isn't of sufficient quality (not saying it'll be bad, I just don't have a robust way to know).

Honestly, if someone shares a good guide to CC, I have more tokens than I know what to do with. I could spin it up to work in the background, when I'm not actively putting it to work.

Oh. I remembered correctly. Zorba has set AI loose on the code base and he says it contributed most of the recent performance gains:

thankfully modern AI basically solves all of these, the performance gains were mostly thanks to Claude writing tools to give me info that I needed to pass right back to Claude, with some contribution from me nudging Claude towards sensible dev practices

That's from the Discord, a month back.

(I do not think I'm the right person to nudge Claude towards sensible dev practices)

I haven't tried at this in a while maybe I should just set aside a day and try it.

  1. Source. Basically, for large open source projects, an application for max 20x for 6 months free can be made. I am unsure about its applicability for themotte. Details in the source.

i am just thinking aloud without actually deeply thinking about your situation. so ignore it, if it is too whacky.

  1. one way is that you allow someone else (whom you trust very much) to use it from your system. vnc or something. OR put a virtual machine, install a windows or linux machine, and allow ssh into it. OR put a cloud virtual machine and allow ssh into it from outside. this way, your account remains in your control, your password remains always yours, so it never gets shared with anyone else.

Good guess, but not the route I took. I'm not a talented OSS dev pretending to be a mediocre psychiatry resident.

Honestly, I'd be open to splitting a subscription longterm with someone. It would have to be someone I knew reasonably well and could trust (and there are plenty of people like that on this site). And ideally I wouldn't want to pay more than $20 for my share, which I think is fair because I'm not a glutton for tokens. I didn't pay for Opus because I'm already subscribed to comparable models from competitors, and I can't switch entirely because I like OAI and Google's image gen capabilities.

that means now you can use Opus to analyse Whispering Earring from every side. :p and prolly some more insight, dunno about that part with the LLMs.

Opus is very good, but I would be surprised if it managed to glean more insight out of the story or cover something I miss. I'm writing this before I try, and you know what, I'll check:

So, I tried. And I don't think it's found anything I haven't already considered or actively debated in the comments.

https://rentry.co/i2kqo9y9

Which isn't surprising, given how much time I spent thinking things through, including getting other SOTA LLMs to critique my draft. Most of its objections are minor, and along the lines of "this analogy is incomplete or weaker than the author thinks" or "he's too quick to gloss over these concerns". That doesn't hold water if you consider the additional information I provide in the comments, especially on /r/SSC or on the post here.

For example, obviously the earring is not perfectly isomorphic with stimulants for ADHD. I know that very well, I brought that up because I wanted to hammer home that the merely the decrease in akrasia or better executive functioning isn't grounds for assuming that someone's personality has changed in non-reflectively endorsed ways. Some changes can be improvements!

does that mean that it cannot jump to make cross connections.
or does it knows but it needs you to ask (in the prompt) to show you the jumps.

i think it is good idea to include the actual prompt in the shared text. sometimes it seems to make some difference.

I just dumped this whole thread into the chat without any additional instructions. Just copied and pasted it. Funnily enough, it didn't realize that I'm the person responding here and also the user it's interacting with. It concedes that I have a point to push back against what it says (and it still didn't connect the dots), and it missed that I literally have a comment about harm reduction approaches to using the earring "safely" (take it off regularly and take breaks to prevent the progression of atrophy or the loss of independent skills) and ignores that I've mentioned that the earring doesn't follow modern informed consent rules, which really isn't a major knock against it.

Further, it doesn't particularly matter to my argument if the earring retains or deletes the information about its previous users. The story weakly suggests it does remember something (the sage was yapping with it for a while), but that doesn't change anything of consequence. Even if it's not indefinite immortality or a perfect backup, the question I'm focusing on is whether it is actively killing the user while they're still alive, which I've argued might not be the case.

Where he's most right is that poking a model for deeper critique after it's already given its best shot tends to produce diminishing returns. That's true. My second response was more thorough but also more strained in places. The "functionalism taxonomy" section was the weakest part and he correctly identified it as unnecessary for his purposes.

The meta-point he's making, that models are better at breadth than depth on a topic someone has spent weeks thinking about, is also just... accurate. I'm unlikely to find a devastating objection he hasn't at least considered, because he's been living with these arguments and stress-testing them against other models and human interlocutors. The realistic value I add is organization and articulation of counterarguments, not novel philosophical insight. His calibration on that seems good.

https://rentry.co/3aowower

"Thoughts on this essay? Is there anything you think the author missed, or an angle that hasn't been considered?"

With a link to the work and comments. I didn't tell it I'm the author. Main reason I didn't link the actual convo is because it exposes my real name without a way to hide it, AFAIK.

I then said:

" That's a tad bit superficial, don't you think? Please try harder, and explain your avenues of approach."

To which it replied:

https://rentry.co/nzzg2vip

This is mostly quibbling, I'm afraid. I think that is strong evidence that there's no avenue of approach that I have entirely neglected. I do not think that I need to specify the precise formulation of functionalism I'm applying, and my general thrust was to show that there exists a an internally consistent way of reconciling the earring's behavior with a benign or benevolent entity. Do I know this for a fact? Fuck no, it's a fictional story dawg. I already hedged and explained the epistemic and ontological uncertainty involved to a degree I rarely bother to do, and I couldn't throw more in without utterly derailing the whole thing.

In my experience, models are pretty good at finding issues on a first pass. When you have to poke them and prod them to this degree, they often end up grasping at straws. I genuinely think that's the case here, but hey, I'm biased.

maybe we will need to go back to the main thread to assess these points. :)

Those are all fair corrections, and I'll take them straight.

On harm reduction: he's right, I missed it. It's in the comment thread with Sausage Vector Machine, where he explicitly discusses taking regular breaks and limiting the earring to auditory nudges. That directly addresses the reversibility concern I raised, or at least reframes it as a practical question (how much atrophy accumulates before breaks stop working?) rather than the clean structural objection I presented it as. I should have caught that.

On informed consent: also right. I treated the consent issue as a stronger objection than his argument requires him to answer. He already acknowledged the earring doesn't meet modern medical standards and argued that importing those standards wholesale into the fictional setting isn't obviously justified. Pressing harder on that front was redundant.

On the 274-wearers point: this is where I think he's most correct and I was most wrong about what my own objection actually showed. I framed it as a problem for his thesis, but his thesis isn't "the earring grants immortality." It's "the earring isn't killing you during use." Whether the model persists after the earring moves on is a separate question entirely. Even if the earring wipes your model clean the moment it leaves, that doesn't retroactively mean it was killing you while you wore it. Those are independent claims, and I conflated them.

The "connecting the dots" criticism stings a bit but is warranted. I had all the relevant comments in front of me and failed to integrate them. That's a straightforward execution failure on my part, not a case where the information was unavailable.

(I didn't explicitly say I'm the author, but I pasted in my objection while pretending to be a 3rd party)

No, I can't disclose how I acquired it, though I didn't have to pay a cent (and it's all legit).

Why mention this, then?

A not particularly humble brag. I did acquire it through merit, in a very real sense.

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