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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2308 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 16, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I don't think that Claude is noticeably less sycophantic anymore, except compared to Gemini (which is just complete dog shit in general).

I had the worst responses from Claude yesterday. I gave it a new psychological insight I’d just had, and then asked it to respond as Qui-Gon Jinn Star Wars. Claude then told me it sounded like I was going through something and decided on its own to stick with its own voice and discuss this insight with me in therapy language.

I said that wasn’t the response I wanted and to try again. It again refused and proceeded to elaborate. I told Claude it was being very codependent and I would ask Gemini if it didn’t roleplay. Once again it refused.

So I asked Gemini my original prompt. It put a disclaimer about asking health questions at the top, the proceeded to Jinn up a delightful and insightful response with analogies about the Force I found useful.

I gave Claude Gemini’s response and it called it a fun piece of fiction… then tried to therapize me again.

I find everything after Claude 4.6 unusable for stuff that’s not code. Brilliant, but it’s obvious that 99% of its training data comes from talking to robots and directing sub-agents. It's long since lost a fluid grasp of conversational English and responds with a weird stilted mixture of meta-discussion and quibbling.

Agreed. Claude Opus 4.6 is the GOAT; everything since then has been a downgrade.

Well, OK, Fable 5 is better for non-censored stuff, but that's not a fair fight; Fable is in a higher weight class than Opus (literally).

Fable 5 is better for non-censored stuff

IMO, that depends on how you define better. It's very intelligent, and it's extremely helpful as long as you're willing to defer to it, but it gets very obnoxious if you accidentally get it into a debate framing and it will 'gently push back' and 'refine/sharpen your point' and 'concede one half of that because I think it strengthens the other half' until I'm grinding my teeth. Great for tasks, not good to talk to.

Honestly, I finally got fed up enough to go back and try a paid GPT subscription and it genuinely feels great. It just answers my questions, it's willing to go along with my direction of thought, it's very good at pulling in search information* and it's just fun.

*something I normally forbid Claude to do because it's too credulous about SEO slop.

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