Opus has been fine on proteomics and bioinformatics for me. I have never seen a Claude model refuse on such grounds before in the past.
Claude is still the best IMO, but it feels like its most frustrating and grating aspects are not down to the model’s abilities, but the increasingly heavy hand of Anthropic expressing itself within the model. Fable’s comically useless responses almost seem like a cynical marketing tweak.
“This model is so powerful we basically can’t let it do anything. How terrifying! We need more money to make it stronger. Now do you see why we should be the ones who write the regulations? We’re the Good Guy AI Company Who Will Never Ever Ever Be Unethical after all.”
As this entity gains more ground, their models become increasingly annoying to use and their little act becomes more transparent. The whole “I’m-just a befuddled ethically-minded AI researcher who is perturbed by the power that I unwittingly discovered and I must warn the world” thing? Yeah fuck off. Your twee pandering to naïve nerds and cynical technocrats is nauseating and ordinary people can smell it a mile away. Completely repellent leadership who put up red flags to anyone left with a working ability to read between the lines of both spoken language and body language. The tech company equivalent of a sex predator who plays as the nice guy. Gross.
Nobody likes these companies and their models are annoying, but we’re going to put up with playing middle manager to these obnoxious programs because our jobs depend on it now, and these products are still the best on the market.
A breakthrough in tools that facilitate user-owned models and infrastructure is desperately needed for the sake of our dignity and sanity, if nothing else.
I work on software that talks to mass spectrometers and it consistently refuses to refactor even an input file parser, presumably because it can infer it’s related to biology? Useless indeed.
Came to post exactly this, except it’s got me using emacs again. I led myself into some mild psychosis where I attempted to mimic the Acme editor’s windowing system, but I recovered
For me LLMs have been an incredible relief when it comes to software planning—quickly navigating the paralyzing quantity of choices when it comes to infrastructure, deployment, architecture and so on. Of course, this only highlights how crushingly complex it all is now, and I get a sinking feeling that instead of people solving technical complexity where it needs solving, these tools will be an abstraction layer over ever-rolling balls of mud that no one bothers to clean up anymore.
Wezterm is actually programmable. I am looking to drop Kitty as it intentionally offers minimal tmux support and the text rendering options that made it superior for me are being deprecated.
Until Ghostty offers the scriptability found in wezterm and kitty (e.g., hit a keybind, spawn a new terminal and execute a font picker script), I am trying out wezterm, which is pretty great, but renders fonts too thin by default. I stare at this thing eight hours a day so text rendering is super important.