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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2646 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.

I saw this Code setup in one Zvi's roundups. Might be a bit OTT for your uses though:

https://github.com/garrytan/gstack

Thanks! For what it's worth, you might not be aware that Garry is going through what's best described as LLM psychosis, which I say despite being rather sympathetic and bullish to their utility for coding purposes. I'll mosey around, and see if I can find something useful in there!

The only trick I know is just asking it to 'do things wisely'. I think it genuinely helps. Sometimes Opus will take some weird shortcut or do things in a roundabout way. Asking for the wisest way to do something or for a wiser approach is quite useful I think.

I'll give that a go, thanks. But I do very much need a good harness and agentic setup, but I'll look for something along those lines.

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.

I would suggest using openai codex, it should be able to write code that can access the data you want. And its rate limits are more generous than Anthropic on the $20 plan.

I mean, I'm not soliciting more AI experiments. I am, in fact, exceptionally fed up with the idea. For the same reason that I've mostly given up on arguing with most skeptics after Mythos was announced.

Not because of anything you've said or done, I found it interesting to try your suggestions on models.

I have a lot on my plate, so no promises, but if I end up trying this, I'll let you know.

My apologies, I misread your post as such a solicitation.

It's fine. You can't read my mind can you?

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.

I agree, but it goes to the heart of my fundamental disagreement with the way AI is presented to the public. If Claude Code does that, that's great, but I wouldn't think I needed a coding LLM to look up basic statistical data from government sources. So whn someone like me who wants to use it for other things that seem like are in its wheelhouse try it and get crap for a result, we get pissed off. Believe me, this is only one of the LLM-assisted fails I've experienced in the past month. So I get the inevitable response of "Well, if you were using the frontier deluxe model that costs $200 a month..." at which point I cut you off and say "No. This software hasn't given me any indication that it's worth $20/month, let alone $200." It's like a mirage, where what I'm looking for is always off in the distance but I never seem to get there. We're now at a point where companies in perhaps the only industry in history that's worth a trillion dollars despite not being profitable at all have to use all that compute power to subsidize nonsense from the trivial (AI girlfriends) to the actively harmful (cheating on term papers) because they've relied on a business model where they'll grow rapidly by creating a hype cycle that allows them to raise eye-watering sums from venture capital to develop an expensive product with limited commercial use.

In a rational world, OpenAI would have remained a research nonprofit that allowed things like universities and the government to use its models for free until they had developed to the point that there was a viable commercial use for them other than creating glorified chatbots. And when that point came, the hype cycle would hopefully be muted enough that companies wouldn't implement them unless they were seeing real returns. Instead they've created this world where they've spent more money than they could ever hope to earn creating products that don't make money and still have pathetic monetization rates that they've gotten into the habit of offering to the general public for free. And they keep creating more bullshit to justify it like "inference is profitable". Really? Because when I hear that, I hear "If we ignore all of our expenses except one category, the company makes money". It's like justifying pouring money into a failing retail outlet because you sell every item for less than you paid the supplier for it. "We're profitable if you only look at COGS!" And even that isn't entirely the truth, since a large percentage of this revenue from inference comes from other AI startups like Perplexity that are themselves unprofitable hype machines propped up by venture capital. I apologize for the rant, but if you want me to believe in this technology that fails to do everything I ask it to that it could theoretically do faster than I can myself, you can't keep telling me that it's only because I'm not paying enough money. Because I'm sure that when Oeuvre or whatever they call the next Claude model comes out that cost ten times as much to train and five times as much to run, I'll be told that Opus or CC or whatever couldn't handle it but if I only paid the price of admission all my problems would be solved.

Edit: I ran the query again and it did try to code something to get access to the API, but was unsuccessful. It also failed to recognize that a lot of this data, if not all of it, doesn't require access to the API and is available in PDF documents available on third-party websites.

I wouldn't think I needed a coding LLM to look up basic statistical data from government sources

You don't at all. AI doesn't unlock this ability for you, it just means you can say "get me XYZ data from ABC source" and then go jerk off and it's collected (hopefully) when you're back. The unlock in many many cases is the automation, not the capability.

try it and get crap for a result, we get pissed off

I'm a big AI fan and it pisses me off all the time. It's simultaneously very smart, and simultaneously very retarded, sometimes on the same task.

No. This software hasn't given me any indication that it's worth $20/month, let alone $200.

That's fine if you don't think so. Don't pay for it? The $20 plans are insanely good value, although they are in the process of enshittifying them as we speak. I currently pay for the $200 plan as I'm using a lot of tokens right now as I code myself some websites/tools I always wished existed, but I do not plan to pay for it much longer as I'm (hopefully) almost done.

I also use it a TON at work, it's deeply useful and changing everything I do at my white collar finance type job.

The $20 plan and the $200 plan basically only differ in the amount of compute you get. Although both OpenAI and Google offer a smarter model at this tier. I quite like ChatGPT "pro" and it is noticably better than their "thinking" mode but not 10x better.

The real capability gap is those using the free vs those paying $20. What you get on the free tier is worse than useless. Instant mode should never be used by anyone. To

to develop an expensive product with limited commercial use.

Have you missed the whole "agentic coding" thing? Or all the stuff about Mythos (is a lot of it marketing? Yes. Is a lot of it also real? Yes).

Instead they've created this world where they've spent more money than they could ever hope to earn creating products that don't make money and still have pathetic monetization rates that they've gotten into the habit of offering to the general public for free.

This does seem like a silly call on their part, we'll see how that shakes out.

"inference is profitable". Really? Because when I hear that, I hear "If we ignore all of our expenses except one category, the company makes money"

You're kind of being ignorant here. They make money selling AI compute, then they spend a bajillion times that on R&D. The implication here is that if they stopped training models, they could comfortably sell ChatGPT5.x or Opus4.x at a tidy margin.

Of course, they can't right now, because any company who stops setting giant piles of money on fire to train a better model will lose market share to those who do. Which also kind of proves the point that there's utility here...

To be clear, you can use Claude code with the $20 a month plan. You can even use something like opencode and a cheaper model paid by the token on openrouter. Or you can even run a local model like Gemma for ~free once you have the hardware.

Despite the name, it isn't really coding specific. I presume "Claude cowork" is largely the same as Claude code but with a name that doesn't scare the hos.

I do recognize the frustration that Claude can't look up the API details through the web interface. Perhaps there's some security considerations and they didn't want to have the . model call arbitrary endpoints.

As far as profitability goes, we shall only know when these companies IPO or go bust, but Anthropic revenue growth is massive.

Despite the name, it isn't really coding specific. I presume "Claude cowork" is largely the same as Claude code but with a name that doesn't scare the hos.

From what I can recall, Cowork was announced back when Claude Code was still only available through the terminal, and Cowork was the easy ho-accessible version. And then they make Claude Code available through the Claude app anyway, so not really clear what differences there are anymore

Their revenue growth is massive to the point of suspicion, especially since they admitted that they're using unaudited internal numbers that don't use GAAP. Why wouldn't they be using GAAP? The only explanation is that the GAAP numbers are pretty crappy. In fact, we know they're crappy because in court filings Anthropic stated they made 5 billion in total GAAP revenue between 2023 and the end of last year. The huge numbers you see are annualized projections that aren't representative of any actual revenue.

In fact, we know they're crappy because in court filings Anthropic stated they made 5 billion in total GAAP revenue between 2023 and the end of last year.

How does that follow? Taking their stated numbers literally (10x/year, $100M annualized in Jan 2024), you get:

Jan 2023: $10M annualized / 12 months per year = $0.833M in the month
Feb 2023: $0.833M * 1.21 monthly growth multiplier = $1.01M
...
Jan 2024: $8.33M ($100M annualized)
...
Jan 2025: $83.3M ($1B annualized)
...
Dec 2025: $688M

for a total of $3.94B. They put a "+" in their chart, which easily explains the 20% disparity. Their "0" in 2023 is a literal rounding error at $35M for the entire year.

Their revenue growth is massive to the point of suspicion

I guess I don't really understand why you mention this?

I like using AI, I find it extremely useful for many things (and useless for many others).

I don't care if AI companies earn $0.50 or $100 billion annually. I'm not an investor in them, it doesn't matter. I use whatever AI tools are available to me at a price and quality level that I find reasonable. I don't care if openAI and Anthropic explode, they'll be replaced by a better run company who can sell me AI tokens instead.

The huge numbers you see are annualized projections that aren't representative of any actual revenue.

Of course they are representative of some actual revenue. It's an annualized extrapolation of the past month of revenue. I don't deny that it doesn't mean that they made that $14B in the past year (but neither is anyone claiming it is), but it's not a random number as you seem to be suggesting. Huge growth in monthly income is real growth.

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’ll never forget how I learned hexadecimal. When I was very young I was a curious kid and I loved my video games. I ended up getting irked at one point playing Diablo II where I found it too difficult to advance in the game so I started looking for ways to manipulate the engine and get all the most advanced items and then just destroy my way through everything.

I ended up downloading a hex editor, and I located and then started editing the .d2s save files to max all my character attributes, stats and abilities during runtime execution. The rush of euphoria I felt was awesome. I felt like a God. Naturally you could only make it work seamlessly in offline play, once you connect to the server you start battling against direct memory inspection. I didn’t have time for that. Most of the techniques used even today though, remain the same as they were 20-30 years ago: entry point analysis, patching conditional jumps, tracing serial verification subroutines, etc.

Forging CD-keys was fun back in the early days of StarCraft and Battle.net. One thing I ended up finding out was that StarCraft used checksums for a license key. Checksums are just very rudimentary expressions performed on a block of binary data, such as simply adding all the numbers together. In the checksum StarCraft used, the 13th digit was used to validate the first 12. So you could literally enter anything you wanted for the first 12 and simply generate the 13th and create a valid license key for the game. It's why you could generate keys like 1234-56789-1234 that you could register, and it was widely used to pirate the game. Not all checksums are equal in this way, but the type of way they calculated it was very simple:

x = 3;
for(int i = 0; i < 12; i++)
{
     x +- (2 * x) ^ digit[i];
{
lastDigit = x % 10;

There were two approaches you could take to cracking this. You can run the algorithm and calculate the correct value of the last digit. Or, the other way, is you can brute force it because there's only one digit you have to figure out and you only have to calculate from 0-9. Had Blizzard been more careful they would've hashed the keys beforehand. Not great security hygiene still, but it adds another layer to wasting a hacker's time; and it's essentially how Microsoft verifies legitimate software through digitally signed keys. Spyro the Dragon also had a hilarious anti-piracy scheme.

We use similar schemes in other ways. Credit cards work the same way, incidentally. The digits on your debit/credit card aren’t derived arbitrarily or at random. The first digit is the “start code,” often referred to as the major industry identifier (MII). This specifies the industry it’s in (e.g. banking, airline, etc.) and network (e.g. 3 = Amex, 4 = Visa, 5 = Mastercard, etc.). Those are all 1-6. The remaining ones are your account number and the last digit is the checksum used to validate your identity. People mistakenly think credit cards XOR the card number with your PII at the point of the interchange but that isn’t how that works. Your card number isn’t a “secret,” to someone who’s determined to know it. It’s like knowing someone’s bank account number. That information isn’t terribly relevant if someone has it, unless coupled with other information. All it is, is simply a pointer to your database. I don’t care if someone hacks or obtains it. But only ‘some’ payment processors validate the name. Most don’t. For modern systems, name and number are distinct and separate fields.

Reverse engineering is extremely fun on closed, proprietary systems to me but difficult as hell as you move on to more complex things. If you try performing dynamic analysis on a binary and you see ones that are packed with a loader like VMProtect that decompresses, decrypts and generates the code in memory, it becomes a gigantic pain in the ass. It’s much more complex than battling against say UPX where today you can easily automate its deobfuscation. Myself and a couple friends of mine once spent a night trying to examine how it worked. It works by substituting native machine code into a customized bytecode format that runs on a VM. Trying to find the OEP before the packer added its layer can leave you feeling like you're going insane. If the entropy of the code section is high, everything you do is going to amount to an examination of the loader stub and not the real code. Those are all wasted hours.

RE is one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done in my entire life. In another life it’d have consumed 100% of my attention and I’d be doing that professionally. I’ve reached some very high levels of mathematical proficiency, but even so I was never one of those guys who could see the matrix. I'm a very visual and intuitive learner. I have to touch and feel what it is I'm doing, otherwise I can't understand it. I envy the former type of people.

(Edit: Hey Lydia!)

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)

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

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