"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law

"Sometimes, magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect." -- Teller (of Penn & Teller)

"Sometimes, any sufficiently advanced technology is just spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect." -- an LLM's original thought, probably

In meme form: https://imgur.com/a/rlmZuU1

(I hope this is ok to post on HN!)

$2M TC. Job: AI cheerleader.

> Jarred prompted Claude to try again, and it spent a day and a half coordinating about 60 Claude subagents, which this time went much deeper: between them, they ran 2,400 shell commands and wrote hundreds of Python scripts.1

If there is anything to learn from the history of science, it is that breakthroughs happen via better or new theory and not by brute-force compute [1].

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.27794

I feel justified in not expending any effort learning "prompting technique".

Reality has become more absurd than the cyber punk cheese from the 80's that tried to imagine an absurd future

Looking at the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident and the difference in what "persistent" models do, it seems reasonable. Like: is this a solvable problem? How much work does the model think is intended to solve this problem? Each input raises the expectation.

And then finally both model output and human input become one world frame for the model, and the human adding a "you can do it!" isn't just input but a frame that colors not just the next step for the model, but also all previous steps (since at each step the model is viewing the totality of the transcript).

That this makes sense only makes it all the more absurd

Broke: the AI is sycophantic to me

Woke: im sycophantic to the AI

Indeed, that's a paragraph straight out of Lem's Cyberiad.

it's pretty much a marketing attempt to humanize the LLM (it seems successful from the reaction I see)

Another technique I've used is to tell agents something already exists. "Grok already solved this" seems to help, or claiming to have suddenly noticed a fatal flaw[0].

0: https://sgnt.ai/p/terrible-mistake/

It’s so delightful how the economy is propped up by circular finance.

It’s so delightful that these genai corpos are undemocratically forcing data centers into our neighborhoods.

It’s so delightful that the data centers steal water, run up the price of electricity, and expel excessive greenhouse gases.

Only a deranged sociopath would find licking the shit stained taint of oligarchs delightful.

> I remain delighted at how absurd our current timeline has become.

"delighted" is doing a LOT of work there, tbh ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I do share @simonW's skepticism though. (His blog is my essential reading, FWIW)

On the actual blog post, I'd would be more enthusiastic if Anthropic showed us if the results were repeatable, reproducible, and consistent.