Yeah I’m having a much better time reading Opus 5.5 output today vs. 5’s wall of nonsense. You still get a few telltale turn of phrases, though the load-bearing smoking guns haven’t turned up yet. It’s still a bit verbose compared to what I’d ideally like, but it’s tolerable now.
Code-wise it seems to still nitpick, especially in reviews, but it doesn’t seem to rabbit hole quite as badly on tangents and scope-creep. These are just first impressions though. It’ll take a few weeks of regular use to really have a sense of it.
Yes, one of the primary dysfunctions I see in business environments is a culture that doesn’t create space for timeboxed and clear discussion of tradeoffs. Everyone must have both the _appetite for_ and _implicit or explicit permission to have_ a reasonable discussion of option A vs option B and the long vs short term costs and benefits of each. There must be enough discipline to not rabbit hole or scope creep and decisions must be captured somewhere in a concise way so that everyone who is impacted is informed, and everyone who will inherit the downstream consequences can understand and articulate the decision chain that led to current state.
This is rarely if ever done in a sensible way. Instead you find Managers, Engineers or PMs avoiding troublesome stakeholders, hallway convos or Slack DMs that are never properly written into public record in a searchable/readable way, last minute overrides from higher ups based on limited context of the problem space or their own unaligned career goals, poor recordkeeping, panic mode bandaid fixes when systems break, etc...
IMO a lot of the “meat proxy” and “loop obsession” behavior we’re seeing is simply people using the sense of short term productivity gains as self-soothing against anxiety from corporate dysfunction that they have no control over.
I've seen it too, and it seems to be getting worse as companies move more and more communication onto Slack, ticketing systems, Confluence, etc. Modern channels are a huge high velocity dumping ground. The only way anyone can even pretend to keep up with all the - frankly - spam is arbitrary sampling.
Oldschool periodic reports and memoranda weren't perfect, but they did encourage taking time to curate one's message. And gave others somewhere to go for a properly curated message.
I would listen to every single episode of a podcast that could get the real skinny, not the sanitized feel-good post-facto rationalization, from founders who had a legitimate shot at being a major player in an industry but chose to sell out during their meteoric rise.
There are messages, by the way. I'm paraphrasing, but it's something like "So, Mark messaged me saying he thinks it would be a good idea if he bought Instagram, what if I tell him no" "He'll go into destroy mode" "What if I <something I forget>" "Then he'll go further into destroy mode"
But of course you can't tell the public this, Zuck's reputation in the Valley. So it indeed becomes the feel-good story about Our Beautiful Journey
Me too. Almost every Sci-Fi AI proceeds from the premise that we will make something very obviously machine and then have to train it to seem more human. I was completely caught off guard by us taking the approach of distilling all available human output into a statistical model and using it to brute-force something resembling thought and personality through sheer data processing scale.
The unsurprising part once it was clear that approach was viable, was that humans wouldn’t be able to help but anthropomorphize it. I feel like the movie Ex Machina is more relevant than ever.
The "benefiting all humanity" charters were immediately demonstrated to be a ruse. The business model is to hook users into endlessly chatting with your new friend, thus increasing their sales. Yeah, it was surprising and disappointing.
I can buy that Meta's model is that, and IDK about Grok because I stay far far away from it, and I think OpenAI are throwing business ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks.
The clear exception here is Anthropic, who seem to mostly be selling to software developers, whose general reaction to the bot is "please talk less and just do the work, I have enough going on without having to read you yammering".
Yeah, most of the list is pretty dismal, but there are some bright spots. Sonic movies. Fallout, Last of Us (and don’t forget Cyberpunk: Edgerunners) for TV.
The original Castlevania animated show was good, shame about the Warren Ellis situation. Would have loved to see him write Nocturne as well (which was fun but just had a much weaker script).
Also, I don’t think people have realized how much farmers markets now suffer from “dropshippers taking over Etsy” syndrome. Unless it’s a stand selling one or two specific things from a named farm or local producer, it’s likely you’re getting a lot of the same stuff that goes to the grocery stores, just at a markup.
Direct-from-farm delivery boxes are a better bet, at least the mainstay ones, but they’re certainly more expensive and the variety is more obviously seasonal (as you would expect).
Neither of these is a solution to nutrition at scale. It’s difficult to balance the economies of scale that consolidated distribution brings against the corruption that comes along with increased supplier leverage. Monopsony is just as pernicious as Monopoly (and they tend to feed each other, with large grocery and restaurant chains preferring large distributors).
I got an M1 Max studio w/ 64gb when they first came out and I love it. Price was obviously a lot more reasonable at the time. I’m fortunate to have dedicated office space, and there is definitely a nice psychological effect to having a desktop in a specific spot and “going to the office”.
I’ve since purchased an m3 MacBook Air as my thin client and for lightweight travel use, and when my wife needs to take a call in the office or whatever I pop out to the living room and either hop on Remote Desktop or SSH into my Studio. Highly recommend this setup. If you’re primarily doing thin client on a local network, a neo should be fine for that (and to use as a media player/communicator around the house).
That said, I have been eyeballing Omarchy…
I think a lot of this is the cultural force of the US being the gravitational center of world politics and finance for several decades. It’s always had a strong anti-intellectual faction, and now as we enter it’s “decaying Roman Empire” phase, it will behave increasingly erratically as it’s elite strip it for parts and the citizenry watch in shock.
As China rises to become the new gravitational center, it will be interesting to see how they reshape things in their image. On the one hand, they seem to be more engineering-brained than lawyer-brained, which bodes well (might be a more viable path to cyberpunk). But just as the west has been haunted by its history of white supremacy, China will be haunted by its history of Han supremacy, so I am not holding my breath that we net out to some sort of multi-cultural utopia.
> As China rises to become the new gravitational center
I don't think you can just state something like that as some sort of axiom without providing any rationale. Obviously China has become much more powerful and important over the past 4 decades, but I highly doubt they will be the new "gravitational center", for two primary reasons.
First, their demographics are horrible - their population peaked 5 years ago and will continue to decline, meaning they will need to look inward to dedicate more resources to supporting their aging population. While fertility rates are well below replacement in nearly all of the developed world, the extreme ethnic homogeneity and near complete inability to assimilate immigrants long term make East Asia's demographics much more problematic.
Second, nobody wants a conformist autocratic society to be the "center of gravity" of the world. For decades following WWII, the US, despite all of its problems, really was looked up to as a beneficial force by many (yes, again, I know we did some extremely shitty things during the Cold War, but just looking at surveys of different countries' views of the US it was overwhelmingly positive in the Western world). Whereas today, despite China being essentially "the world's workshop", basically all of their trading partners look at them with suspicion and reticence.
I think we're looking at a near and mid-term future where there is basically no (or a crumbling) center of gravity. And this is basically what existed in the areas of the former Western Roman Empire for centuries after its collapse until the rise of Charlemagne, so I think your comparison to "decaying Roman Empire" phase is apropos.
Fair points all around. I am perhaps unduly extrapolating from a lifetime of there always being a “superpower” and assuming that the power vacuum left by US decay will be inevitably and directly filled by China.
In truth, I don’t think anyone can predict how things will play out at this point. China may well settle for regional control and having a globe full of trading partners with whom they work to build trust, they may double down on their “loan shark” leverage strategy with other developing nations, or they may build up their military and go full colonizer, which may or may not erupt into a hot war. The US might go long slow decline, or may erupt into civil war or widespread civil disobedience, or unlikely as it seems get its act together and course correct. The EU might fall to infighting and dissolve or rally and lead. Rogue nations might pull a truly batshit move with nukes or bioweapons. Who knows how India and SEA will play out at this point? Climate change acceleration will likely put incredible strain on all systems, and the jury is out on the ultimate trajectory/timeline of AI and robotics.
We have been blessed and cursed to live in interesting times if nothing else.
Really great take. Can't emphasize enough how much I agree with your "I don’t think anyone can predict how things will play out at this point" and "We have been blessed and cursed to live in interesting times if nothing else" statements.
Code-wise it seems to still nitpick, especially in reviews, but it doesn’t seem to rabbit hole quite as badly on tangents and scope-creep. These are just first impressions though. It’ll take a few weeks of regular use to really have a sense of it.
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