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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17723 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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Nevertheless, I think the complexity argument might fail for accountants. Complexity actually favors AI. They are good at it.

AI fails for accounting not because of complexity but because of care. Accountants have to get the numbers right, and occasionally hallucinating shit isn't going to cut it. Maybe it would work for mob accounting, but I suspect the mob wants their made-up shit to be less random.

Maybe it would work for mob accounting

I doubt it - the IRS don't start with your fingernails when you make an error.

If you have three independent AIs do the numbers and they match, they’re likely right.

The hallucination argument is losing power. Harnesses will fix hallucination much like they have for coding.

I'm not going to straight up ask Astra to do my taxes, but I'm fully confident that Astra+harness is capable. So now we just wait for the harness. No doubt lots of smart people are working on it.

Accountants don't get the numbers right anyway which is why I do my own taxes now. It's a boring, frustrating job and attracts people who like money more than having interesting work with predictable effects.

Harnesses will fix hallucination much like they have for coding.

Harnesses fixing hallucinations is news to me. I just spent an hour today putting a Junior's head on straight after codex sent them down the garden path for a day and a half.

It's not really about "harnesses" as some dedicated tooling, it's about meta-instructions and models generally becoming good at following instructions over long horizons. Like, I just wrote in my AGENTS.md some stuff to the effect of "periodically spawn subagents for independent blind audits, create teams with different scopes and domain-customized personas, check with web access, sometimes step back, iterate until you get clean results", and even the latest DeepSeek will diligently execute all that and massively improve its reliability. Astra Ultra won't even need such handholding. They'll still make mistakes, rabbithole into irrelevant minutiae, perform suboptimally on cost, but for labs this is all easy to improve with More RL, and humans are flawed too. I am sure that a junior's level can be automated today.

models generally becoming good at following instructions over long horizons

And yet.

ChatGPT Sol absolutely.

insists on

writing.

Like this.

In a shitty.

broken up.

style.

If I ask it to demonstrate a writing concept or somesuch and there are people in the scene. It will happily tell what the problem is and how to supposedly prompt it away but will then keep on writing like that. So much for "good at following instructions".

ChatGPT Astra is meaningfully better than Sol. I of course agree it's still disgusting. It's also nice news for me because literally Fields Medal winners are getting automation anxiety before I have to worry about competition in bespoke shitposts.

The issue with writing style is that they're not built to write for humans. These are agents. The process by which they output almost every given token over their training is getting rewarded conditional on its contribution to the final outcome of a programming (or programming-shaped) task.
Be thankful you don't have to deal with raw CoTs (unreadable now).

The hallucination argument is losing power.

No, it most definitely is not.

Do you use these tools on a regular basis? My experience with hallucinations is that they are extremely reduced.

Same. I can't recall seeing one with Codex and 5.6-Sol.

It is still a problem with whatever models people are using. Just had to deal with a pretty bad incident at work a couple of weeks ago (thankfully not one due to any failures on our part).

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