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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   24900 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 15, 2026

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Question, are you using Opus 4.8 Max ?

People's experience with claude is heavily dependent on which model you use.

This is all great for experienced faculty: at least in theoretical disciplines they can already greatly speed-up the research process without spending more or time on pesky grad students with the bonus that Claude doesn't mind if you're mean to it. For younger faculty, postdocs, and graduates students not so much.

100%. I see this exact pattern in coding as well. Senior engineers are empowered, junior engineers create more slop and headaches.

and slowly but probably surely, the pyramid scheme of Academia will collapse.

Pyramid schemes, by definition are immune to touching grass. They are fraudulent from day 1. It's like saying "now that we found a fully intact fossil of a dinosaur, support for creationism will collapse". If the pyramid scheme of Academia was to collapse, it would have happened by now.

In both scenarios, academia has basically signed its own death wish. For the reward of extremely high-productivity for very AI-savvy professors over the next few years, the system that brought us so many world-altering discoveries will basically be dismantled.

Every layer of abstraction takes you away from the raw experience of the science itself. It's like playing football by mashing buttons in Fifa.

I worry about a 'medium is the message' style collapse of science. Scientists will only investigate topics that feel amenable to ai-agents. In such a world, computation gets reduced to combinatorics. I hate it. In a real numbers shaped world, AI would never intent complex numbers. In a classical physics world, AI would never suggest a relativistic model. These are not combinatoric outcomes. They're ...... 'romantic'. Ai-agents are another step in what's a century long erosion of romance from science. (statistics -> RCTs -> computers -> internet -> ai).

I use opus exclusively at work. I can't honestly say I've noticed any meaningful difference between 4.6-4.8. 4.6 was the last one I used where I was like "Yeah this is just better".

are you using [latest_model.safetensors]? [previous_model] is dogshit compared to it.

It's all so tiresome. On top of that, opus 4.8 is seriously reviled by half of the llm addict community.

On top of that, opus 4.8 is seriously reviled by half of the llm addict community.

Isn't this mostly the half that use Opus for ERP?

Seen some serious researchers who are not a fan of 4.8

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