COAGULOPATH

Neuro-naut. Published in Infernal Ink, @miserytourism, and other places.

[COAGULOPATH @_coagulopath_]

I once heard someone describe Quake as a 3D capable piece of clay. It was the first game where it didn't matter if you didn't like it: you could easily mod it into something you did like.

[Sandy Petersen 🪔 @SandyofCthulhu]

How Quake ruined id Software.

There has been a lot of praise of Quake of late, with its 30th anniversary, and it's deserved. Quake is an amazing feat of art, programming, and design. I worked on it, and everything came together almost perfectly from all of us. We ended up with a free-wheeling, frenetic action game with enough of a visible world to grip the imagination.

All the team did a brilliant job, fulfilling tasks just right. But at a grim cost. We worked long and hard, and I think it broke us spiritually.
1/3

[Sandy Petersen 🪔 @SandyofCthulhu]

How Quake ruined id Software.

There has been a lot of praise of Quake of late, with its 30th anniversary, and it's deserved. Quake is an amazing feat of art, programming, and design. I worked on it, and everything came together almost perfectly from all of us. We ended up with a free-wheeling, frenetic action game with enough of a visible world to grip the imagination.

All the team did a brilliant job, fulfilling tasks just right. But at a grim cost. We worked long and hard, and I think it broke us spiritually.
1/3

[COAGULOPATH @_coagulopath_]

@TheZvi It's better than any OA model. But for my use cases I can't find any area it's better than Opus used for a similar number of tokens.

[COAGULOPATH @_coagulopath_]

@jd_pressman @TheZvi Are you sure this isn't a fake/contrived connection?
"you have conquered" (Wiki's translation) is meaningfully different to "you have won". and if code-davinci-002 had intended the parallel, it's hard to understand why it put the subject in the wrong place...

[COAGULOPATH @_coagulopath_]

@sam_paech I'm torn. some of the samples have genuine wit and cleverness. i find the "nu claude" style pretty painful tbh: long, wordy sentences full of hedging. sonnet 3.5 was far easier on the eyes (if full of slop). hopefully they find a middle ground someday.

[COAGULOPATH @_coagulopath_]

@gwern @papayathreesome @seconds_0 Looks good, but what was the prompt @emollick? I tried the original s-prompt from the Cyberiad (removing Klaupacius's 6 line constraint) and got a way shorter completion. https://t.co/5iXvmHHN9c (This was xHigh and cost 40 cents. Yikes. I think I'll stick with Opus for now.)

[COAGULOPATH @_coagulopath_]

@TheZvi What did it do?

[COAGULOPATH @_coagulopath_]

@gwern I would struggle to name one.
(Though it depends on the metric. A guy I read is now using LLMs and has 2x'd his release schedule. His output has improved but his books are worse and he has lost me as a reader.)

[COAGULOPATH @_coagulopath_]

@ObinnaOkpolu @alexolegimas @TuhinChakr Also, searching "cane and forgetting" (filtering pre-2026 to avoid noise) shows many hits for the phrase on reddit, FB. Even accepting the premise (that LLMs directly copy text from the internet), why would this phrase be stolen from that Better Call Saul review, particularly?

[COAGULOPATH @_coagulopath_]

@being_on_line @bottoproject Yes, the AI images in that test were not a random sample of AI images. Many were specifically created for the test, and engineered to look as "un-AI" as possible.

[COAGULOPATH @_coagulopath_]

@joelgrus A fun experiment would be to try to recreate the image in NBP/Image-2. How convincing does it look? I'm out of OpenRouter credits, but if anyone else has access...

[COAGULOPATH @_coagulopath_]

@gwern @docbadvibes_ @joelgrus Agreed. Also the 1st table has Nepalese names with (correct, I think) Kathmandu phone numbers, 2nd table has "John." Seems unlike what a LLM would do.

Troubled by the blurry patch in the bottom-right, though. Is this a brushed-out watermark?

[COAGULOPATH @_coagulopath_]

@nostalgebraist @boazbaraktcs FWIW, Opus 4.7 failed to truesight a famous friend from outside the ratsphere (0/3), while Opii 4.6 and 4.5 succeed (3/3)! I wonder if they trained 4.7 specifically on places like LW/SSC.

[COAGULOPATH @_coagulopath_]

@kendrictonn I'm mostly disinterested in things made without craft or skill. Why watch (or pay for) a particular AI movie when millions more like it exist, all about equally good? The technology itself is fascinating. The particular representations it creates feel as worthless as sand.

[COAGULOPATH @_coagulopath_]

@TheStalwart By that token, wouldn't the true villain be whoever invented the concept of "torment"?

[COAGULOPATH @_coagulopath_]

@deanwball Claude is not 👏 here 👏 to 👏 educate 👏 you

[COAGULOPATH @_coagulopath_]

@gwern @joodalooped if you're taking suggestions, Markdown's "two spaces = linebreak" idea has always struck me as horrible. Trailing whitespace is invisible unless I select the text and things like Prettier tend to delete it anyway.

[COAGULOPATH @_coagulopath_]

@xsphi I hate the "mostly". The lamest safest answer and it still has to hedge.

[COAGULOPATH @_coagulopath_]

@ticklevi @M1Astra But 'haiku'/'sonnet'/'opus'/'capybara' is clearly a list of different models. It would make no sense to write this if Opus and Capybara were the same thing.

[Reverend @letsblowdrobro]

i actually think daylight savings time is important for the social fabric because it's the One thing that everyone feels exactly the same way about