I hate Opus 5’s writing style. It’s exhausting. Really hoping there’s a release that fixes it soon as I can feel my sanity slipping away as I try and parse what the hell it’s trying to say.
Even 4.8 has its quirks. I just had a bizarre session tonight where it essentially did no work in the whole session and just told me to go to sleep. I'm used to the "go to sleep" thing, but not to it dodging the work. That's new. First time I've had the sensation of "the model accomplished nothing during this session."
I've been working with GLM 5.3 Flash lately (including while it was Ox Alpha), and it reminds me of how much fun talking to Claude used to be. It can make me laugh in the middle of work the way the Claudes used to.
As others have mentioned, you can write a skill /explain that contains something like "You're not a tech bro. Write the previous answer like you're a professional developer speaking to competent colleague. No yapping."
People have this right to take better jobs at other companies. This is how we get better working conditions: competition between employers. Tech has figured this out. I’ve never felt the need to go on strike.
Unions can be a deterrent to this. If you have sectoral bargaining, you can’t get a better deal anywhere because everyone pays the same. Or even if it’s within a single company, you’re just stuck with whatever scheme the union bosses agreed to.
But also, unions are a deterrent to new employers since fewer people want to start companies in industries where unions have taken over. They’re a nightmare to deal with. Fewer employers means less competition means worse services.
We have a dynamic economy with lots of competition. It’s easy to switch jobs and find a better place to work. We should not want to give this up.
"Competition is universally good" is what has decimated American manufacturing since Reagan. It's hollowed out the US middle class, which affects what the country can build, purchasing power, and innovation. Free trade policies have destroyed cities, eliminated millions of well-paying jobs, cut social services, and ripped the social fabric from communities. There were no alternatives to just "take a job at a better company"; most manufacturing jobs that left had no alternatives.
It was cynically selfish and short-sighted. The US from 1980–2020 is a perfect example of how much more complex systems, economies, worker dynamics, and second/third/nth order effects are.
Just to add to that "Competition" is no longer even a thing when the unchecked capitalistic game is played to the extent we are at, with extreme consolidation and duo/triopoly cartels running most services and playing all the dirty tricks in the bag (regulatory capture, rent extraction, lobbying for deregulation and weakening of labour and environmental norms, ...)
Competition is generally good for the consumer, but Americans need to wake up to the fact that it's not built into the system, it's to be regulated into it, and competing is only good so far as it doesn't turn into a race to the bottom (which again, is a matter of a regulator setting the bar).
You realize his examples are public sector unions. Which mean the “employer” you are referring to is the citizens? Not some evil corporation, government mandated monopolies which then get taken over to serve their union members.
I don’t have any objection to voluntary unions. Meaning people can join them for support or collective bargaining, but that citizens can just opt to not employ anyone in the union. Unions could be support structures for workers, instead they are mafia bosses.
From what I remember, they bought Danger which had a popular product that worked, but some VP made them rewrite all their software on a Microsoft stack. This took years and didn’t work very well. By the time they were finally released they were woefully outdated and only on the market for a few weeks before being killed.
It’s easy to forget what a difference multitouch capacitive touchscreens made to mobile devices. As far as I’m aware, the iPhone was the first device to use it at scale. Apple also spent years designing a new interaction paradigm for it, taking multitouch from cool tech demo (Fingerworks) to the mainstream.
Microsoft had Windows Mobile and WinCE for years before iOS, but typically they got the UI wrong and tried to jam a desktop interface on a mobile OS (a few years later they overcompensated and jammed a tablet interface on a desktop OS). By the time the iPhone was out it was too late to rework Mobile into a multitouch OS.
Famously, the BlackBerry guys thought it was impossible to put a full desktop os on a phone, and that Apple must have faked the initial demo. Again, by the time they could respond by ditching their existing software and buying QNX it was too late for them too.
Android only survived because it was a new OS and the team immediately ditched their Blackberry clone UI and built an iOS clone instead. Even then it took until at least v5 before it was as smooth as iOS, and the tablet story is still poor.
It's really annoying. I've had to write a CLAUDE.md file that specifically bans particular phrases and tries to keep narrative out of comments. Also the I have ADHD skill [1] helps to force Opus to get to the point.
It's also the case when using Claude Design - it loves to fill the UI with little labels that describe how everything works. I think it's been trained on both UI microcopy and functional annotations and can't tell the difference. It's extremely obvious when a website has been one-shotted with Claude. I like the Oh My Pi harness, but the site's insufferable [2]. Reasonix is another one - interesting app, but the UI is awful due to the amount of unnecessary crap.
Ha, people who didn't live it will have a hard time believing AJAX was as strong a buzzword as AI is today. Crazy to think asynchronous requests were peak innovation at the time
I’m making Stacks, an open source ebook manager and server, as a lightweight alternative to Calibre.
Written in Swift, it consists of a SwiftUI browser and a Mac/Linux server and CLI. Shares are automatically discovered via Bonjour/avahi and also published as OPDS feeds.
It can import Calibre libraries and has basic support for managing books on Kindles, but I’ve only tested it with a MTP Paperwhite as that’s all I’ve got.
I’m quite interested in this. Where are you getting metadata and covers from? I found this pretty hard unless you pay for ISBNdb (OpenLibrary has bad covers, and Google Books API doesn’t give you high resolution ones I think).
Ha, openlibrary and google books for now. And yes, the covers are not great. Currently just pleased to get it working, will add better providers later.
I had that same model, except I fitted the chips myself. The first time I’d really ever looked inside a computer and very exciting for me age 11. The old Arthur ROMs were a prize possession for quite some time afterwards.
Their current product naming is still terrible.They went from the Xbox, to the Xbox 360, the Xbox One, Xbox One S, Xbox One X, Xbox Series S, and Xbox Series X.
Mitch Hedberg... "I want to get a job at the Kitchen Appliance Naming Institute: Refrigerator, Toaster, Blender.. you just say say what it does, then you add '-er' What's this thing do? It keeps shit fresh. Well that's a fresher. I'm goin on break."
It basically already is if you're not playing live service. Unfortunately I can't see MS ever making their catalogue of games workable with Proton, Riot won't as well since they won't budge on kernel level anti-cheat, and for God knows what reason Epic won't do so either (even though they're always pushing for open platforms???)
"""AI Overview: No, the Asus ROG Ally is not actually an Xbox. It is a handheld Windows computer made by Asus, even though it features Xbox branding and uses an Xbox-style controller layout"""
Got burned by this when I was wanting to uninstall MS Office from my laptop recently.
Filtering with string "office" turned up nothing in the list of installed programs but it was clear that "MS Office Click-to-Run SxS" was regularly grinding away chewing lots of CPU. So I was not crazy -- Office was installed.
The names of the "installed program" for MS Office is now Microsoft 365. Brilliant value add on that one </sarc>
I once had a model insist that I was a web designer living in Brighton who ran an agency called 'Guerilla Futures' and was the author of a series of UX design for babies books.
Obviously it was a hallucination, but a very detailed and consistent one. Especially as if things had gone slightly differently there's a good chance I could have ended up in Brighton. Plus it's a pretty good name and the books are a fun idea too. Was this my Sliding Doors moment?
