The media coined the term "dual quality" for a European food scandal a few years back, in which conglomerates (including Coca-Cola) adulterated products with cheap, substitute ingredients, if they were destined for distribution in specific markets (mainly, lower-income).
The packaging exteriors were the same. You wouldn't know which version you got unless you were paying close attention to taste. It was essentially what the software industry calls "A/B testing", except with sneaking things into what people eat.
I don't have any good reading links on hand; here's one source,
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_... ("Dual Food Quality: Questions and Answers")
I'm a bit disappointed with how this nonsense is spread across HN today.
Are you saying that the many, many people posting and experiencing this are wrong and you are right?
And not just in this instance, nerfing has been complained about in a cyclical fashion for many months.
But, they're all wrong?
You're so confident in your experience that you cannot think that other's experiences are also true?
Like most experiments do not save the company money, there was an experiment to test the new fable, people got to use it at opus-5.5 usage. But this experiment clears the thinking blocks when people go back to the vanilla model; not sure if Anthropic overlooked this, but idk, it does not sound like "nerf on purpose".
There are experiments to adjust the effort level, at the moment the ones that I've seen switch to a higher effort. Again this is not a nerf; might be annoying perhaps, the model does start to behave differently (and consume more tokens). But it's not a nerf.
Then there is apparently one experiment that replaces opus-5.5 system prompt with the one from opus-4.8; the model is the same; this experiment is perhaps a bit more questionable, but still it's not "anthropic nerfed the models".
If people think they are getting nerfed they should check what experiments are enabled (claude.json and session logs).
No, it gets complained about constantly even if there is no model coming out. A completely unrelated thread on Claude will feature comments like "can I just say that [model] has suddenly become useless this week?" Merely asking that question is bound to get people agreeing with you because we are evaluating all of this on vibes and placebos.
I too feel that way sometimes, I don't think it's ridiculous that Anthropic might silently downgrade you as demand warrants. But asking others if they "feel" something I feel is less than useless.
"Could all these people seriously be wrong?" Yes, yes they could.
if they just straight up dont sell you something you bought then its fraud.
I think there is a ripe opportunity for expanding the definition of fraud to include changing the "ingredients" of a named product on the market. It is not limited here, we see it with food, and even in the medical field
(I will die on the hill that medical fraud was committed when mRNA therapy was used as a treatment for covid and it was 'sold' to the public as a "vaccine" despite not being the same thing as any vaccine before it. The definition of vaccine was expanded to include it without sifficient public disclosure to warrant informed consent imo. This is not a statement about conspiracy or the efficacy of vaccines or a moral judgement on whether it was for the greater good or not.. it was simply an act of fraud that robbed the public of proper informed consent by making people believe it was X when it was really Y.)
So yes, I think there is a large need for the public to at the very least put a strong handle on the ability to change what a product name means. It is a trivial problem to solve considering it is only a problem due fraud or fraud adjacent activities.
heres the solution: You have your product name, and then any changes to it REQUIRE a new version name. Like how you have Coke and Diet Coke, only formalized such that Coke cannot legally replace the ingredients of regular Coke with the ingredients of Diet coke and still call it Coke. With Software they could at least use version numbers and release modifiers. most of the time its built in already, but it needs to include the full stack. if they change anything that has an interaction with the user it should change the label seen by the user for the product.
thank you for coming to my ted talk
A Opus 5.5 is not a Opus 5.5. Its Opus 5.5 of some checkpoint.
mRNA btw. was well known how it worked, it wasn't hidden and some people waited for the non mRNA version because of it. I never seen or read the argument you make and I do not get it.
A vaccine is something which protects you from an infection. What definition do you think changed in humans? That we make the protein? How is that so different from viral vector vaccines?
The consent is a certain level of trust from the society to a group of researchers limited by being humans and having to act in a certain time frame.
Nontheless, I do agree I would like to have a fingerprint and proper changelogs etc. for products I buy including digital and analog. But this has a downside as usual: The smaller you are, the more it costs you to (probably) register, maintain and change.
You know the good thing about Claude etc. right now? It doesn't matter. My invest is not 4 digits and there are that many changes, i'm quite happy to have been upgraded for 'free' from Opus 4.8 to Opus 5 (what do you call this upgrade, which was significant better?)
I also agree that if its too formalized with registrations and such that it could be a negative pressure on small business. documenting what the labels mean could have separate rules and smaller business could operate on trust and face penalty if counterexamples are shown, for example. obv this would be the start of a much longer conversation about implementations but i think it's important
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with respect to the covid vaccine, i want to be clear that i dont pick this fight lightly, I love science. The rare side effects of the mRNA therapy did actually kill people due to severe myocarditis. I believe it is unjust to change who is at risk without doing everything you can to inform people of exactly what it is they are getting. They treated the mRNA vaccine like we are Gods commanding the body to do whatever we want and not like we never have actually fucking know if something is going to kill someone or not. People can be allergic to things, for example, and its only okay because they themselves agreed.
>A vaccine is something which protects you from an infection
this is the new definition.
the old definition was accepted as: "a preparation of killed microorganisms, living attenuated organisms, or living virulent organisms that is administered to produce or artificially increase immunity to a particular disease"
this aligns with informal understandings and how it was taught to people. you get 'infected' with a safe amount of the actual virus to trigger your body's natural defense mchanisms
the definition was changed in 2021 to mean: "a preparation or immunotherapy that is used to stimulate the bodys immune response against noninfectious substances, agents, or diseases".
informally, and biologically, this is fundamentally different. i admit it's a grey area, in that the word vaccine was used to describe it in research phases.. but it was 50-50 and nearly always included 'mRNA' in the label.
But it was still deliberate misdirection that over-emphasized calling it something common and familiar and omitting whats different about it to push a new thing (new to the public, as it would be almost everyones first exposure to mrna therapy) and not only did they refuse to emphasize the differences and make an effort to educate people but they conflated anyone who asked questions about it to be the same as an "anti-vaxxer" and pushed the narrative such that the new 'vaccine' could not be viewed as its own thing. And then they changed the literal definition of the word vaccine to 'cover the tracks'.
it was backwards. everyone should have been informed, proper consent collected, and i think it would have been better received overall. whether people can articulate the problem as i am or not, they felt it. I felt it, and spent a lot of time and energy developing my understadning of teh situation as to be properly nuanced in my opinion of it and not actually go into conspiracy theory territory.
I still talk to people today who have no idea the covid vaccine is not dead covid virus being injected. They should have been informed that they were receiving something different.
again i never said mRNA didnt work or wasnt effective. but it was still fraud. they wanted to move fast, as if all other medical progress was somehow not operating with lives on the line already and that informed consent was just something we do for fun. Covid was serious and required a serious response with funding to scientific education and research, not lazy manipulation tactics. There should have been 24/7 news about mRNA therapies and their history, booths popping up everywhere to answer peoples questions, etc.
The response was lazy and fraudulent and sets an extremely dangerous precedent of allowing future reactions to scientific education problems to be handled through authority rather than education.
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If you want to get me started on an actual political issue of the same form to understand why i havent let it go nad only become more emboldened with my opinion since covid, go research how the use of the term 'domestic terrorist' has changed over time. The laziness and use of authority to make things be defined however an authorty wants rather than through actual public consensus is only ramping up.
the danger is that the public is slowly being cut from the conversations completely. when a patient is too uneducated to understand any of the treatment you are giving them, is it still consent?