site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1951 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 7, 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.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I'm amazed at how many people don't cough up even the $20 required for the full-fat experience. At least OpenAI has recently announced that they're making unlimited usage of a newer model, 5.6 Luna, available to the masses for free. It is still several steps down from Sol, which continues to genuinely impress me.

Google's "free AI" is an incredibly imprecise term. It can mean Gemini 3.5 (Flash? Lite?) when used through the Gemini app. It can be the search-specific Gemini 1.5, IIRC, used if you just "Google" something. As you can imagine, not even Google can afford to use the best of the best when serving so many people at such scale, with the majority being trivial queries.

I would pay a great deal more than $20 for an AI plan, but luckily, I don't have to. I've got tons of Claude Max, because I decided to accept payment in that form instead of figuring out intercontinental financial transfers after my participation in Unslop.

I remember when a Dutch junior of mine was consulting another senior for advice when working on a meta-analysis meant for a big name journal. I could have clapped like a seal when the latter mentioned Claude, in addition to ChatGPT, for help with the stats scutwork. Then I asked, and confirmed, that she only had a free plan. I was so dismayed that I immediately offered to share my Max, and walk her through things. It didn't hurt that she's a pretty girl, and it would have provided an opportunity to go out with her (that ended up happening anyway), but I am beyond annoyed when other doctors use free-tier LLMs for clinical work. They still function adequately, but anyone who can afford better should use better. $20 is really not an onerous ask for a significant amount of intelligence on tap.

I've got access to higher end stuff from work and I've found that Sonnet on the free plan is basically golden for most anything I want from it in my personal life. The main things I would get out of paying for a model aren't "better model" it would be things like better integration with my desktop files (since on the free plan you can't give Claude access to a folder) and longer uninterrupted sessions.

Why would anyone pay the $20/month? To be impressed? It wasn't long ago that someone asked what they're supposed to use AI for, and the response was a list of about a dozen completely frivolous things that can only be described as glorified low-grade entertainment. I'm sure some people find it useful for niche things. But for most people it's nothing more than a glorified search engine, and expecting people to spend money for it is like asking them to pay for a subscription to Google.

I am genuinely taken aback by this take. I know you're being sincere, but I can't understand where you're coming from. It's easier to say what LLMs can't do for me. And I very clearly benefit from the additional intelligence the paid models provide. They're not eating white collar work for no reason, they can do a surprising proportion of the work that a regular human can do on a computer.

Ignoring code (and writing/smut), non-exclusive, I've used Grok for :

  • car repair
  • air conditioner repair
  • repairing a three-phase fluid pump (fried IGBT, and entire chip line was out of production)
  • hobbyist drone assembly work
  • 3d printing model production
  • transcribing (public info) work documents
  • reviewing (public info) work document output for clarity and precision
  • translation.
  • designing a small youth-oriented faux-stained glass project.
  • testing internal policies against a compliance requirement for completeness before (outside, very expensive) human review

Some of these might have been solvable with google (air conditioner motor is pretty much a process of elimination thing, although even there Grok was a lot better at finding a local seller than Google is). Some of them not: the plain language search for a crankshaft position sensor error was universally 'bring it to a shop', and I'm very bad at 3d modeling. I'm skeptical that they're all frivolous.

I've gotten a few more uses from Claude, though I'll admit it tends to be something I burn more code-facing or writing-facing.

If LLMs cost 20 $/mo for "low-grade entertainment", they're in the same league as Netflix (without advertisements, 20 $/mo) and YouTube (without advertisements, 16 $/mo paid monthly or 13 $/mo paid annually). It's my understanding that lots of people buy temporary subscriptions to streaming services, in order to test them out or to watch a specific platform-exclusive show.

they're making unlimited usage of a newer model, 5.6 Luna, available to the masses for free.

In my ime, all cost optimized models are absolute worthless dogshit. A current gen cost optimized model is not as useful as early gen normal models (llama3 70b, gpt-4o).

My understanding is that current chatgpt free is 5.5 real with thinking=0 which is still a decent model. Luna (equivalent to nano, much worse than even mini), is a maaaasive step down. I think it's criminal to even let the masses have access to this piece of hot garbage, as it will provide negative information to a 100iq midwit.

This is true and I'm currently doing a project that has ABSURD unavoidable token read/write overhead (I'm processing ~300 cookbooks) and it takes 100 millions of tokens per book to ensure a reasonable level of accuracy.

So I'm basically stuck with subscription subsidized tokens, but Codex only serves the most recent models. I'd absolutely kill for a gpt-5 full size at low cost, but they don't offer the big old models at low cost (presumably bc expensive to run, but they're still much smaller than the base model of 5.5+) and Luna, while now gloriously cheap, is just so fucking stupid and myopic.

I could do this project with a 2 year old LLM most likely, it's just so deeply unergononic

Luna is incredibly useful if you have a task scoped right for it. Funnily enough, low effort seems to perform better than high/xhigh, because the latter keep trying to find a way to galaxy-brain their way around simple evaluation tasks.

Yeah, very recently decided to try the Claude Pro-tier AI for a month, and I'm very impressed. I did have access to Gemini 3.1 Pro through work, but it feels like a night-and-day difference.

We'll see if I still feel this way in a couple weeks, but for now I'm firmly in the "very, very useful" camp.

I'm actually a huge fan or 3.1 pro (high) personally. Opus and 5.x xhigh are definitely better at difficult problem solving but 3.1 pro can handle most things and is much more chill and less anal about many things.

Would be interesting to hear what specific tasks 3.1 pro underperforms on that opus can take care of

I've tried to use Gemini 3.1 pro to handle some basic coding tasks at work, and it does not do particularly well. I don't want to give exact specifics to avoid doxxing myself, but I can give you the shape of it. Skip to the most direct example if you don't feel like reading.

I have a java project. Currently it uses all-java libraries for image processing. Java kind of sucks for image processing because the integrated entry point always loads the entire raster into memory at once. If you have a limited heap, you're going to run into a world of pain trying to work with the standard library.

To get around that problem, I've looked at a native library that has java FFM bindings. Unfortunately, to use FFM, I had to upgrade to JDK 25. We had some test failures, and I figured that Gemini/antigravity could handle that kind of scutwork. It could not. It tried to make massive, architecture-level changes to two different subsystems in our codebase rather than just fix a classloader problem. Eventually I gave up and did it myself. I lost about a day to this.

After upgrading the JDK, I handed off the work to another developer to handle writing a small wrapper around the FFM library to unpack the native libs. She immediately tried to use Gemini, and lost four days to its confabulations. She came back to me repeatedly telling me it was impossible, and that we couldn't possibly do this on windows because Gemini gave her a trivially disprovable assertion. I eventually gave up and handed it to another developer who engaged his brain and had it done in a few hours, on all our supported platforms, with tests.

The most direct example: After that, I started converting one of our image processing routines to use the native lib. I figure that since the problem was easy and both the native library and the FFM bridge are both exquisitely documented, and they're both open source, this should be trivial for Gemini. Well, it turns out that both the native lib and the FFM bridge were both mostly written after January 2025, so neither 3.1 Pro and 3.6 flash consistently had the APIs inside their training window. It also didn't really have many examples to match on because this isn't a basic Python CRUD app.

You would not believe the absolute fever dream of a codebase it tried to cook up. It couldn't get function names right, and when it could, it couldn't consistently distinguish between the native library and the bridge. It frequently failed to even be consistently wrong. Eventually it finished, and it solved the problem by importing the FFM bridge but not actually using any of the underlying native calls.

I was a little disappointed.

It could not. It tried to make massive, architecture-level changes to two different subsystems in our codebase rather than just fix a classloader problem.

RIP in pepeloni. But to be fair most agentic ai loves to do this unless you prompt it correctly.

To be honest, I don't know if I can compare them fairly. My access to 3.1 pro was clearly a budget option or something, because I would constantly be shunted back down to "Thinking" because of pro being in high demand.

I also didn't have a Claude Code-like option, but attempting to feed 3.1 pro my code worked for a single response, and then it claimed to be unable to remember it for the next question. Possibly, I could have kept giving the entire 5k lines of code for every question, but that seemed ridiculous.

In contrast, I pointed Claude Code at my project directory, typed "/init" and it very accurately determined what the purpose of the project was and all the specifics from just the code, test output, and poor documentation.

With that said, for smaller code questions 3.1 pro was certainly adequate.

Ohhh you got access to the gemini.com app not access to the api wrapper. Yeah the app sucks, idk how google screwed it up so much.

Also the gemini bundled with the $25 google workspace accounts is especially gimped, it's much worse than thr $20 plan that normal users get.

3.1 pro high is good in antigravity, aistudio, and api.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats