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Nerds suck. They are smelly, have bad posture, manners, never leave their rooms and are generally unappealing.

They also have a nasty habit of being aware of nefarious practices, will resist all attempts to and harvest their data, or lock them into your service, and will drop you if your competitor makes a 3% better product, and will reject every upsell for actually profitable services.

Plus there is only so many of them.

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A wave of nausea hit when I first saw the warm, fuzzy, cutesy, kawaii, Teletubby-like avatar that Meta gave its Muse agent.

And now OpenAI has done the same thing with their fuzzy, friendly, colorful dots.

I am physically sick.

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im crying and throwing up everywhere. everything i use must be brutalist.

even seeing the linux penguin makes me want to punch my monitor and commit sudoku

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I think you missed the point. Things should look like what they are.

The Linux kernel is ultimately a friendly open-source project. There's no harm in it being marketed using a cartoon penguin.

These AI services, meanwhile, are the dangled lights on the heads of data-hungry environment-threatening job-killing leviathantine anglerfish.

Making the dangled light present as non-threatening is not a good thing for society, no matter how much you may personally like pretty lights.

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The one time a similar mascot to FreeBSD's would've made sense.
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Imagine 2001: A Space Odyssey with Meta's "Jolly" avatar as HAL instead of a blinking red camera lens.

So much more terrifying for a cute, round, fuzzy, friendly, rosy-cheeked plushie trying to exterminate the crew.

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> commit sudoku

Hilarious.

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I miss o3 in that regard. if GPT-4o led people into virtual romance and over-validation, o3 gave me the same sort of "madness" but with work.

when I tried GPT-5, I was sad mostly because GPT-5 had some added wordiness. fluff, if you will. o3, though, is a black hole you can talk to, and it only gave information back if there was something to give back. that kind of vibe is my dream coworker

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I miss o1-pro :/
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Yes, it is hard, psychologically, to grant trust to some silly perverse little thing I want crush like a surreal cartoonish cockroach.
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Absolutely ridiculous comment can't believe anyone would actually post this seriously.
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Physically cringed at this comment
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I remember a while ago the discussion kinda steered from "The leading LLM provider will be the one with the better model" to "...will be the one with more user history".

Tools like OpenClaw and Pi seem to remove that from the equation, letting you keep your 'history' and customization while using whatever inference provider you want. If Muse takes off, which seems to be built upon or atleast arch'd similar to OpenClaw, I think we'll see the rise of on-device harnesses.

This would further the efforts to "resist all attempts to.... lock them into your service, and will drop you if your competitor makes a 3% better product, and will reject every upsell for actually profitable services.", imo. In a model-agnostic harness all you care about is speed, accuracy, and price.

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> habit of being aware of nefarious practices

Not all Nerds are the same. I've been attacked for questioning why some companies still use Oracle, when most of the ones I've worked at either migrated off Oracle or were in the process of doing so.

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Everyone gets 'got' once
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> They also have a nasty habit of being aware of nefarious practices, will resist all attempts to and harvest their data

Lol what? Most of the hackernews gang consider themselves nerds and they lap this shit up! Every new overpriced and unnecessary product that gets released by google, meta, openai, anthropic, whoever, they lap it up!

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The usage of Chrome and even worse nitpicking of Firefox is such a strange thing about this community.
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Is everyone here actually a nerd? Or do they just work in tech. You might think they're the same but plenty of people wouldn't. There's certainly different types of nerds
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Not really. I use cloud AI a bit for development but I don't put personal data in it. That only runs on my local systems.

I also swap all the time for whoever is cheapest

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People jumped ship from OpenAI because of their involvement with the US Government / military / Department of War / what have you. That spike was enough that Anthropic was starting to noticeably struggle, which is why they had to rent compute from X AI to get their compute back up to normal, I honestly think if they didn't hit this wall they might have IPO'd much sooner, before they bought extra compute from X AI they downscaled how much compute you can use, but it was poorly done because people got used to much higher limits, they should have explored more strategic options, their changes also broke my workflow several times over. As a result of anthropic trying to deal with the bleeding some users left for OpenAI because it was "unlimited" for some time, then they added limits too.
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> AI companies are bad at making software

They should try using agents. I hear they can write great software.

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Claude Tag could actually be really useful. Unfortunately, it's too much of a black hole for money. I tried adding it to incident channels, but if a channel gets left open for a few days, Claude will find ways to burn tokens waking up with empty prompt caches and doing nothing. $400 burned by Sonnet 5 on a single incident created because some alarms were oversensitive and didn't distinguish faults from errors. And I still had to prompt it like 5 times to get it to adjust metrics and tweak alarms correctly. Absolutely insane for a change that I could've made as a human in 10 minutes or had a directed Claude session under me do it in 2.
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> unnecessary products no one asked for (see Claude in Slack),

Hey, I never asked for it, but Slack Claude (ie. Claude Tag) has actually turned out to be a useful tool for a few things.

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"AI companies are bad at making software"

Claude Code and Claude Design would like to have a word. Absolute killer products.

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We should be grateful there are at least two serious competitors, and hope for more. (Come on Europe/Mistral, please do something interesting . . . )

If ever the competition reduced it would turn into an absolute shitfest of nonsense very very fast, and that is a prime reason not to allow them to "pace the frontier".

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> Come on Europe/Mistral, please do something interesting . . .

lol. At this point, they're miles behind home-appliance-manufacturer Xiaomi.

(Admittedly Mimo v2.6 is legitimately quite good, and really pushing the frontier in certain respects. For e.g., it's the only music generation model that actually listens to instructions.)

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Don't know why this is grayed out... europe does not matter for AI. Nobody thinks or cares about them. Mistral makes some good OCR models but that's it. Nobody is making products primarily for the euro market and euros make nothing even equivalent to months old cheap chinese models. Europe is completely irrelevant.
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Did Claude actually lose the lead? They definitely lost a lot of good will but the only people I hear talking about actually switching away are people on message boards. Hermes/Openclaw users did as well but it was always reluctantly to something worse. At work it's still very much Claude first and only sometimes others if Claude fails, which is increasingly less often
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> the only people I hear talking about actually switching away

Opus 5 had really bad writing so I switched to OpenAI, though Opus 5.5 largely addresses that and it's not like them building some Slack integrations (or any other non-core stuff) halts the actual model training in any capacity. For what it's worth, Astra is a pretty good model and for all I know the new Sol will be as well, it's just that it's getting more expensive.

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The people who switch back and forth between providers every month are a very small, but loud, minority.

OpenAI did pull ahead in limits and quality for a while. Anthropic took it back with the Opus 5.5 rollout. I maintain subscriptions to both providers and use both daily. I can confirm these differences were real, not "it's just vibes and nobody knows anything".

I would bet that 99% of each company's paying customers either did not notice, or did not care enough to consider changing.

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They've definitely lost many experienced devs who can see Anthropic's offerings are insuperior to OpenAI/Codex; I know I am not the only one.
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I think it's pretty subjective if you mean "lead" to be capability and not raw number of users. I jumped back and forth quite a bit last year because there were some pretty major shortcoming in both. Now they're both quite reliable without too much hand-holding. Codex now consistently works better for the kind of work I'm doing, and it's good enough that I'm not inclined to go to claude, because I don't have any significant problems.
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The "generous subscription" was actually just heavily subsidized usage.

People seemingly ignore how ruinously unprofitable those companies are.

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They're just trying things. It's not a conspiracy to "distract" anyone.
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I don't think it's a conspiracy, they're just making the same mistake many other software companies have in the past. When you sell your products to the most discerning and well-informed consumers, you enter into a cutthroat race to the bottom. OpenAI would like to diversify to more profitable ventures, but since ChatGPT they have yet to release something novel that was truly successful, nonetheless profitable, and thusfar nearly every experiment has been a flop, so to speak (ChatGPT Atlas, the Sora App, Instant Checkout, etc).
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Codex is for a small software/programming market.

To survive they need to capture different wide population markets. Can't really fault that logic. The whole point of "SI", is general purpose right? So that would imply being used by multiple markets with multiple products.

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The generous subscriptions are wildly unprofitable and both companies are just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, it's that simple.
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This is the standard VC enshittification playbook, people predicted this years ago. You subsidize prices with funding until you establish a monopoly, then you raise them as high as your customers can afford. It’ll continue to get worse from here.
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The bitter lesson
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The Bitter Lesson is significantly more interesting than watching researcher companies cosplay at ...whatever you call what they're claiming to be doing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_lesson

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