I thought it was just a couple of random old problems that had been solved, I didn't realize it was so many, but still I wonder if AI is really getting "better" at math than humans or if there's just a particular set or domain of problems that are better suited to LLMs because of how they're designed.
I use Sonnet 80% of the time when I'm on claude.ai and on Claude Code my main agent is Opus and typically my sub-agents are Sonnet.
I use this setup mainly because I genuinely don't know if anything I'm doing is complex enough to need Fable and I don't want to run up my usage too much. It's basically like trying to kill a gnat with a sledgehammer. Hell, at work Haiku almost always works just as well as Sonnet does and its much cheaper/faster. It does seem to struggle with complex structured outputs however.
The only time I've really used it (and I've been genuinely impressed) is when I'm trying to get structure for something that's abstract.
So I wouldn't say I prefer any of them, just that I try to match them with how complex my use case is.
I start with Fable (not always but most of the time) and the reason why is because I find the smaller models don’t know enough to know when they don’t know enough. Like an LLM version of Dunning Kruger. Fable will often tell me when I’m wasting tokens on it. Opus wants to keep everything to itself because it doesn’t trust other models. Sonnet and Haiku never know any different. Actually Haiku will almost always say yes if I ask it if it wants to kick up to a higher model but it won’t offer that, but Fable will offer “this could be done by Sonnet so you might want to switch to that.” In the end I find I save a lot of money this way. Where Fable might get something done in $10 and like maybe 20-30 minutes including the back and forth with me, if I start the job instead with, say, Opus, I might be looking at $50 (on API) and more wall clock time. If I start it with Sonnet, costs are low enough that they won’t generally catch up to Opus costs but wall clock time will be a lot higher.
Do you have a prompt that can stop it from saying, "I'd push back on this"... or maybe with this it will now say "The algorithm pushes back on this"..
Seriously however, I think this may also help with the natural urge to treat the model as if it is a human. I have to purposefully almost detach and realize that Claude is not my friend, and I'm not quite smart enough to realize how dangerous that could be.
That's a very interesting perspective but now that you mention it, I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed, even when I'm not on a device. Curious if phone usage or whatever doom-scrolling we do exhausts the same part of the brain that we use to daydream.
> I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed
About 5 minutes ago for me, my missus says that I live with my head in the clouds (which is a nicer way of saying if I'm not actively doing something I just zone out and retreat into my own head), I've always been that way all the way back to school (with the inevitable consequences from teachers).
I've mentioned on here before though that I never got addicted to my phone, I don't even know where it is ~80% of the time.
My relationship with technology is (nearly) always intentional, I still access the internet 95% of the time on a desktop PC (which reduces doom scrolling since that just feels wrong on a desktop) so when I walk out my office I'm just "offline" in a very distinct way, if I go for a walk my phone stays at home, everyone who knows me knows I'll answer a text at some point but it could be a day or two.
To sum it up, I resent the passive intrusion of technology into my life.
I hope to find the strength to be more like that. Also to give a better example to others.
I notice making the screen go grayscale (can configure volume up+down to do this in android) already makes doom-anything much less long-lived. The next step, since apparently I can't go cold turkey, is to try one of these alternative minimalist launchers to see if it helps. And to teach people that if they want something from me urgently, they need to call.
On the topic of watches, I used a smartwatch the company gifted me for a while. Went back to an analog watch. Much better.
> And to teach people that if they want something from me urgently, they need to call.
There is a half way step (on Android at least, I assume Apple has similar) you can set "Do Not Disturb" and then white list the people who can message/call through the "Do Not Disturb" so you are reachable but only by people you trust/want to be able to reach you.
> On the topic of watches, I used a smartwatch the company gifted me for a while.
I just didn't use one, I have a rough rule that introducing new technology into my life has to be a complete and obvious unalloyed win or I just don't, it's a very high bar for a new technology to clear but it also means I don't spend money on things that end up in drawers because they either turned out not to meet the hype or just annoyed the living hell out of me after the initial "oooh shiny" wore off.
I’ve been 24/7 do-not-disturb mode with all notifications disabled, for the past 10 years. It’s been wonderful for “intentionality” and agency over my time. I use my phone when I want to do something on it, not when the phone beeps and buzzes telling me to use it.
I don’t even whitelist anyone anymore. If it’s important they will leave a message and I’ll get back to them.
You have to remember that not that long ago it was simply impossible to reach most people who were not at home or at work. Because it was impossible, nobody felt slighted that you were unable to read their message or take their call immediately. And nobody felt any anxiety about leaving the house for a few hours to shop or go to a movie or a ball game and being unreachable. Loved ones managed and life went on.
If you have an iPhone, you can put the greyscale as only a percentage greyscale if desired. I got an iPhone to get rid of the constant bothering from the apple devotees and quickly found myself spending an unhealthy amount of time on it. I started with a small percent greyscale so I didn't notice and would forget that the colors were dulled. Before I even got to 50% greyscale, my habit had died and I only use it when I need to (literally only for communicating with the folks who can't tolerate green bubbles)
My daily driver is GrapheneOS. I don't know if android has a similar feature, but I assume not because my GrapheneOS phone only supports fully greyscale, and the difference is so stark that I can't keep it on. The most addictive apps I have on it are my Hacker News client and NewPipe (the nonaddictive YouTube), so I am not too concerned though
Willpower's not the solution. When we isolated cocaine from the coca leaf for the first time, the world pretty much went insane. In those first years people were injecting it into their eyeballs and spines. The most popular beverage on earth in 2026 STILL contains extract of the coca leaf as a holdover from the days when it was laced with its namesake, Coke. People were smoking cocaine, ingesting cocaine, giving it to their kids for a toothache, pretty much anything you could stick it in, they did.
The solution to this wasn't willpower, it was to get rid of all that fucking cocaine. There's a reason you don't have the stuff lying around your house today, if you did you'd probably get hooked. In 2026 we're basically speedrunning the coke boom with infotech.
So once again the solution is: get rid of it. Any time you're in a low stimulus environment, remove the tech so that you don't HAVE to exercise willpower. That means turning off the phone and the watch and maybe stuffing them in a drawer in another room or something. That's all it takes.
I can't say how society will look back at this moment in history 150 years from now. But I do know I'm way happier and more relaxed when I just shut off the devices and put them away. When I'm at home or in the office, my phone's on mute, in a drawer/bag/other room, and I don't think about it unless I take it out for a few minutes to order a delivery or do a 2fa or something. At night it's simply turned off. I'll never own a smart watch. I still keep the phone on me when I go out and haven't found that to be a huge concern because if I'm at a bar or something it's competing with a lot of other stimuli for attention. We were never 100% available to anyone for all of human history until the last 10-20 years. I am not opting into this current Cocaine Moment.
I was a fan of the Apple Watch initially because I felt like it kept me from having to take out my increasingly large iPhone to check things like the time and if I was going to get rained on, but they've managed to make WatchOS some weird nightmare of distractions and things I need to actively shut off on my phone, and I've grown very tired of it.
I think it depends on how you use it. All things in moderation and all. I've had one for years but when I set it up it only allowed it a few notifications. When meetings start during my work day, getting e-mail to my personal account, and when I get messages from my wife, that's it.
So when I'm not working the watch is... just a watch.
My big discovery a few years ago was uninstalling apps, especially social media apps. I don't mind the platforms, but removing their ability to ping notifications up was massive. I watch some people just get their phone out to dismiss a load of notifications for 20-30 seconds. It's a chore now. I think limiting notifications is the best thing you can do, on your phone and your watch.
I honestly don't think it is willpower, it is simply that I never had to break the "addiction" because I never had it in the first place.
I always found the form factor extremely limiting compared to a desktop (it's the same reason my laptop ended up running a TV upstairs, the idea of programming on the sofa sounded great but in practice I'd get frustrated and immediately retreat to my quiet downstairs office with multiple screens when I had to do something tricky/requiring concentration).
Where I do use something that optimises for distractions, I look for how to minimize the distractions (e.g YouTube - I use the excellent Unhook (with Ublock Origin) which turns the YT home page into a search box and little else, hides mixes, shorts and other distractions) and make it work for me.
This cracked me up. I have the same malady. The worst thing used to be a few close friends who recognized the pattern after being with me long enough and called me out in it when they knew I was zoning out while they were talking. Ive desperately tried to keep this daydreaming trait lately despite trying to get rid of it when I was younger when I used to think it was a disadvantage.
> That's a very interesting perspective but now that you mention it, I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed, even when I'm not on a device.
Sometimes I just turn my phone off and stare at a white wall for 15 minutes. People made fun of me when I told them how relaxing I find white walls, but it seems it turns out, that I'm not the only one doing this?
I found that people would make fun of me for that, too, if they were made aware of it.
Back when I was still stuck to a desk in school (up hill both ways and without a pocket computer), I learned that folks would tend to leave me alone if I had a book open. It didn't really matter what book it was.
I could just gaze at it with my eyes relaxed and unfocused, with the printing appearing as some kind of indistinct phoric blur. And as long as I turned the page occasionally, that was good enough to keep the would-be tyrants at bay.
(And then I'd ace the test on Friday, repeat for dozens of weeks, and do it again next year.)
When my wife and I started dating, she constantly was asking me what I’m thinking about (as people who care about you sometimes do). She was amazed that I could just sit down in a sofa and zone out, thinking about absolutely nothing. At first she would ask “come on, you meat be thinking about something” and later admitted she couldn’t do that and didn’t think people actually could!
I sometimes pause shows or YT videos I'm watching just to daydream for a little bit about something that just crossed my mind. Additionally I go outside at least once a day to walk or ride my bicycle, which also helps with this.
That's interesting. What happens if you just sit there doing nothing, looking around and what not? Does your brain start to wander by itself?
Personally I struggle to remember any day I haven't had at least 10-15 minutes of idle time doing nothing, just thinking idly, but I still have similar struggles as the author. Although I barely use my phone for things neither.
>> What happens if you just sit there doing nothing, looking around and what not? Does your brain start to wander by itself?
For me it's one of the three layers.
First layer, it starts to wonder to the direction offered by real world. Wonder about song lyrics I'm listening too, or the colors of buildings, or something like that.
Second layer happens if you purposefully stray your thoughts away from a real world. Brain starts trying to remember whatever you wanted it to remember. For example, if I tell myself three times "don't forget to call mom", if I just sit idly, chances are my brain would surface "call mom". Sometimes it surfaces "remember you wanted to try arch 2 years ago".
Also this is the layer that works badly if you tried or depressed, because it can start surfacing bad thoughts.
Third layer I call time skipper because it's just a basic time fast forwarding. I have no idea whether it's true meditation or controlled dissociation or something else, but thoughts slide of your brain, so there's nothing to remember afterwards. My friend said that maybe meditation is a controlled dissociation.
I prefer to say that I'm so dumb, I can just switch my brain off.
I think its unfortunate people wear headphones while walking/running/biking. If you don’t, that’s however many minutes or hours of nothing but daydreaming (and hearing nature).
I've needed to take anc earbuds with me while out now, not to listen to music but just to tone down the noise pollution a bit. You can barely hear nature anyway over all the cars, trucks, lawnmowers, leafblowers, airplanes, and what I think are warehouses. It's been getting worse in recent years and the only way to have a chance at daydreaming is to lower it a bit.
Sadly around here it takes quite a lot of driving to get to anywhere that nature sounds predominate. Between the highways/airports/lawncare it is mostly noise pollution, and I generally find that doesn't work as well for daydreaming.
I read my black on white eink reader on walks and occasionally run into poles and things in the sidewalk. Mostly I look up when crossing a street. When I was a kid I would walk slowly around with a Sci Fi book and read it. Never been hit by a car but every now and then get scared by one I didn’t notice. But I can’t read intense books too much - I alternate hard books and pulpy fun reads.
How would one daydream, i.e., imagine, when you have everything presented to you in 4k and you can even interact with it through games?
You have to imagine to daydream. When you’ve been raised on YouTube since birth (referring to U.S. primarily “GenZ”) or you’ve formed your identity around things on TV (like most Americans) you didn’t have to imagine, daydream you just took it in, like everyone else that took on the same thing. That’s another aspect that’s not really being called out, TV also has contributed to the homogenization and destruction of distinct and unique cultures, i.e., actual, real diversity; because everyone is programmed and trained by TV on the same material, as the famous water cooler discussion about a TV show episode everyone was watching tells us.
Now imagine you’re “Gen Alpha” or maybe even “GenZ” where you have not even had anyone read you books that required you to imagine, i.e., daydream, what was being told to you?
These are all compounding factors that are going to even cause massive problems for this sham, fake facade, con job American society.
Talk to teachers in elementary schools and middle schools, even universities now; they’ll tell you things that should make and discerning person be alarmed. And that’s without even talking about the impending impacts of AI.
I used to spend a lot of time imagining myself as the captain of a Federation starship :) but I did also read a lot of books.
But also, the availability of YouTube changes the utility of descriptive writing. Moby Dick can have pages of text about whales or whatever, but now I can spend hours watching whale videos on YouTube. The importance of the interior life of the characters is more, or of diffusive world building stories with too much intricacy for a movie or video presentation.
You point out a critical difference, you were already experienced and “skilled” in imagining because you read a lot, a function where you are inherently going to have to imagine a lot more based on various degrees and quality of descriptions.
I think you may be underestimating the value of that skill and experience. You may not even be able to put yourself in the shoes, i.e., imagine what it may be like never having to had to imagine anything if you only ever watched the things happen on a rectangle from infancy on.
I argue that you only cross referenced the imagination skill into being a federation captain because you were already experienced and skilled in imagination.
I suspect it will be realized what devastation it has caused within our lifetimes and if we still have the capacity, we may even revert back to requiring reading and hopefully even banning screen usage by any minors.
Anthropic opening up Fable for subscription use instead of gating it behind an API is a clear response to Kimi3 and other Chinese models catching up. The plan was to make temper the subscription model to "mid-tier" and make people have to pay for APIs if they wanted the "best" models.
This is proof that we don't need regulations, we need fair competition.
In WW2 thousands of troops could die in a single day and we wouldn't know their names until months or years later. Today a single troop dies and it is the first story on the national news. Millions of civilians also died, just the amount of soldier deaths would be the equivalent of 2-3 September 11s (worldwide) every day for a period of 6 years.
So we say "war" but modern conflicts are absolutely nothing compared to what has happened historically. Even though these new "wars" don't seem to have the same definitive results, the alternative could be much, much worse. We're much better off with the bomb critical sites, apply sanctions and political pressure methods vs. the send entire generations off to die methods of old.
Russia's goal is direct annexation of about quarter of the Ukrainian territory and installing a lifelong puppet regime to control the other three quarters. Ukrainians stand to lose not just their voice and any semblance of economic prosperity, but also their very identity.
With the exception of extreme cases like Gaza, it doesn't get more binary than that.
I am from Ukraine, been stateside since the late '80s, but visited Kiyv and my hometown of Odessa once a decade ago. I am far removed. So many perished on both sides, but we can do nothing but stand by. Can't ask Ukraine to surrender, can't let Russia to get away with this, there is no RTB while VP is running the theater, while the dead are piling up. It's a forever war at this point. Tell me it's not and there is something to look forward to. My spouse is from Russia and can't even visit her homeland to see her aging parents. Semi-annual meetups in Turkey or the UAE, but nobody's getting younger.
From Ukraine's perspective it's existential for sure. Russia however, just revises its objectives every few months according to how well/badly its prospects on the battlefield are looking.
Isn't it more that they started changing objectives because their original objectives turned out to be unattainable?
I also think that for Putin it is pretty existential. Otherwise, they would have negotiated a temporary deal, took the pretty large amount of land that they had taken at the end of 2022. Work on another 'project' like Georgia for a few years, do a lot of disinformation campaigns in Europe in the meanwhile and then revisit Ukraine later. That would have a lot of benefits, like no reaming of Europe, no development of Ukraine's capabilities (resulting in a drastic drop in refinement capabilities), etc.
But he couldn't. It would make him look weak and would make him vulnerable to a coup. Continuing is the only way for him.
Russia's goals have far evolved over the course of the war, and started out comically ridiculous, prompting a great many people to ask questions about the information "bubble" around Putin. Over the past year, I believe most people would agree Russia has lost a LOT of ground when it comes to their war aims, even if not that much territory.
2014: seize Crimea (success, although it no longer serves any purpose) and Sevastopol (total failure, Sevastopol can no longer serve the Russian black sea fleet, and when it comes to the other goal: keep NATO out of the black sea, it's an even bigger failure. Russia has lost control of the skies above the black sea completely and are losing control over the sea of Azov, by withdrawing air defenses. Now go look on the map where the sea of Azov is to see the magnitude of this failure), prevent Ukraine from approaching NATO and EU (complete failure is putting it very mildly), keep Ukraine unstable (succeeded, until Euromaidan revolution, ie. actually this is a failure)
2022: maintain control over Crimea (looks to be failing, as in Ukraine still controls Crimea's water supply), build a land bridge to Crimea (successfull, except that they can't use their land bridge for anything), seize control over Ukraine's government ("denazify" Ukraine), demilitarize Ukraine (as in Ukraine accepts no to have an army. Obviously total and complete failure), and prevent Ukraine and others from coming closer to NATO (obviously total failure, and not just in Ukraine)
In June 2026, ie. about 4 weeks ago, Russia once again confirmed these goals.
Oh and they were going to do this in 3 days. Then in 3 weeks. Then in 2 months. Then they stopped making predictions. Today is day 1608 of their 3-day attempt.
‘Russia’ is not a human subject and can say nothing, and this is obvious, so the question is framed with propagandistic intent.
The judgment was the basis of the invasion. Lukashenko and state TV did however say it; more interestingly the Biden administration - which had access to internal discussion and wrongly credited the cognition and rationality of Russian bureaucrats - also/ affirmed it.
In fact victory was assumed to have happened instantly: the famous widely mocked hundreds of miles of stalled trucks in the opening week contained //no military equipment//: it was all police equipment for managing recalcitrants in Kiev. Why? Because the war was ‘always already’ won; it was just a question of taking possession. The basic structure they falsely thought they had imposed everywhere did more or less materialize and work in the SE
For Ukraine it's very much an existential war. If they lose, Ukraine will cease to exist. The only way of winning is, well, winning this war. It is also very much a real war, with hundreds of thousands of deaths on both sides, a true massacre not seen in Europe since WW2.
Trumps stupid war on Iran on the other hand is really just some air strikes, and Iran can win by just not losing, which is easy, because the US will not invade.
It's interesting how casually we replace concern for the population with concern for the political entity. No, the Ukrainian identity will not cease to exist with the replacement of the political entity.
What Russia has done in the past is take people who want to hold onto their old national identity and send them to labor camps far away where most will die, and migrate Russians to the areas so as generations go by Ukrainian identity would be fully gone.
Do you have a source for this? The closest thing I've heard of was vague reports of children being shipped to Russia. I'm not denying it has ever happened, but the question is what is the motivation, how systematic is it, etc.
Ask Ukrainians what they think about that. Putin made it more than clear that he wants to erase the Ukrainian identity. [1] In this case, the political entity of Ukraine represents the Ukrainian population, which wants to be free, democratic, Europe-oriented, and last but not least, never ever be under Russian dictatorship again.
Russias attitude towards Ukraine has turned borderline genocidal since the start of this war.
It may not be a lot of dying at once, but some modern wars are rivaling these catastrophic wars of old in casualties.
By some counts there have already been at least a million casualties in the Ukraine war, and in Gaza there is probably 100,000 casualties now (military + civilian). And, the conflicts in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo over the decades have produced about 5–5.4 million casualties, although accumulated over decades rather than in a single war.
So modern conflicts may be lower intensity and lest existential, but they can be every bit as deadly.
I mean Russia definitely keeps losing very many soldiers every day, I don't think that is comparable at all. It's completely different from US vs Iran.
Rome lost loads of soldiers in the Germanic wars too. The parallel is that these wars are too expensive (for a non-existential conflict) to take to fulfilment, but also can't easily be disengaged from.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "easily", but Putin could very much just say "fuck this" and turn off the war machine in one day and it's not at all clear to me that there would be much consequential blowback other than the personal humiliation of one man.
Would other countries now decide to attack Russia? Of course not. Would the oligarchs flip out and have him assassinated? No. Would the West disassemble the sanctioning apparatus? Eventually.
But the real downside is just simple humiliation and to prevent that, they will continue sacrificing young men.
The only sources I can find for that are all Russian. Wikipedia (Which I assume you will dismiss out of hand) says it's complicated to determine at best, as they both hide information and boost propaganda. At least don't state it as fact. No one actually knows, which is why citing sources is helpful so that weight can be added.
I mean I guess I disagree with the fact that it has any truth about being a "special military operation", when it is really an invasion where a country is trying to gain territory using ground forces etc. It's an invasion and a war, they wanted the binary outcome, they just didn't expect the opponent to push back so strongly.
Not sure if the numbers are correct, but it looks like the number of Russians killed in Ukraine is about the same as the number of Americans killed in WW2. Does it matter if the state uses a carrot or stick to send a generation off to die?
These may be rookie numbers for Russia, but it's still significant.
Well there is Russian and then there is Russian. The elites in Moscow and St. Petersburg don't really regard people from the outer provinces as fully Russian, especially not the ethnic minority groups. They're expendable. Most of the casualties have come from those areas so far but they're starting to run out of potential recruits. If the authorities start conscripting men from the core cities and feeding them into the meat grinder then internal dissent will likely increase.
Correct. Conscription in Russia largely happens to rural people, ethnic minorities and convicts. Russia is the way it is because a large enough number of ethnic Russian middle class urbanites don't give a fuck about anything, and Putin knows the moment he starts drafting them he turns them into anti war activists.
Really, now? What national news do you watch? I have literally never seen current/breaking news stories about the death of American troops in action. It seems literally the most silent thing going on. I really don't know--are casualty numbers reported on a regular basis, from the "front"?
I would sometimes, after the fact, learn of repatriation flights or interment ceremonies for fallen soldiers. But only on a sporadic basis. Literally, I think I would be familiar with them by now, since Operation Desert Storm or so. This is not something they put on the news. I think that a comparison of casualties from allied and belligerent troops would be something to report, but if they do, it's just sort of being slotted into some Wikipedia article somewhere, I guess.
The #2 headline on nytimes.com literally right now is "Pentagon Identifies Two U.S. Troops Killed in Jordan". (Same slot for nbcnews.com; https://www.bbc.com/news/us-canada currently has "US soldier killed and one injured after Iranian attack in Iraq" as the top slot.)
Yesterday that NYT home page featured a cell phone video of the strike as the main story.
Right now, the front page of CNN's web site in the US has as the primary headline "Third US service member killed as US ramps up strikes on Iran"[1]. The secondary headline has the names of two of them.[2]
I’m fairly surprised you are not seeing them. As a test, I checked for US servicemember deaths in the Middle East in July 2026 and checked against my own recall from casual news consumption.
I knew of the helicopter
crash (1) and missile attack (2). I did not know of the EOD accident (1) this weekend. So, 3 of 4 I knew about without any particularly directed effort to follow it (and the 4th, I’m sure I’ll see reporting about during the week but wasn’t consuming much content of any type over the weekend).
>> Really, now? What national news do you watch? I have literally never seen current/breaking news stories about the death of American troops in action.
It happened about three days ago. I'm not even in the US and it was a top headline here.
The reality however is that unless you're spending tens of thousands on hardware or setting up cloud instances you can't run anything near close to state of the art.
In almost all cases right now, a subscription with a cloud AI wins.
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