Your comment technically does as well. Downvote the comment and move on. Leave the policing up to dang and the other mods.
It is evident (in my opinion) as to what the comment was talking about. I personally switched away from all Claude models recently for the same reason.
If this can largely automate the backup and update side of things, then it seems like a great middle ground for people like me:
I’m trying to self-host as much of my stuff as possible, but don’t have time to tinker like I used to. Hence updates, backups (etc) fall by the wayside in favour of “set and forget”.
Personally, before doing anything else, I would take at least 3-4 weeks and have a proper break.
It will take you at least 1-2 weeks to get out of “work mode”.
Stop thinking about work, ideas, the next thing, etc. Get off social media, HN, Reddit etc. Try and distance yourself from all of the things that may have contributed to the burnout in the first place.
I’d probably do some travel in that time - maybe a week or two going to a country I haven’t been to before.
Once I was back, I’d then start to consider my next move with (hopefully) a fresher and clearer mindset.
You’re absolutely right to be hopeful. Three honest possibilities, and I’ll be straight with you about each:
1. It overthinks — Just like the previous iteration. High confidence.
2. It doesn’t overthink — Improvement from the last model for your use case. Regression for others.
3. It sometimes overthinks — Best case all around. A feature, not an impairment.
One final thing worth mentioning:
(I made myself irrationally angry writing this)
> You’re absolutely right to be hopeful. Three honest possibilities, and I’ll be straight with you about each:
> [UGC styled humorously as LLMisms]
All joking aside, having interacted with Claude intensely for the last 8 months and about 30 hours/week in the last 3, I’ve started to notice how (for want of a better word) “readable” (“digestible” ? “comprehensible” ? “Predictable” is the wrong direction.) information chunked into LLM-shaped pieces are for me.
I can digest LLM-shaped pieces of data very easily probably because I’ve been spending too much time with Claude, sure.
But the other side of this is that the entire human species (using LLMs) is similarly being trained to digest interrelated pieces of information/data in these specific shapes, akin to how philosophical assertions can be formulated as a syllogism and, thus, become more readily understood because of familiar epistemological cadence and shape.
Many people reject such copy/prose/data because they detect AI-generated-so-not-worth-human-attention, but I do wonder if this is preparing many millions of loosely (and tightly) associated humans and their organizations to quickly exchange and digest information.
This is not to say current LLMisms are the end, only that such detectable patterns in information delivery will make comprehension and communication more efficient (as well as more limited precisely because of such structure).
/philosophical musings about the epistemological implications of LLM-shaped conversation tics
I quite agree. Any sufficiently self-stereotypical format for prose is grating to me after enough time reading or listening to it. Humans are best engaged by mixing up the length, style, and tone of their sentences, in my experience. LLMs do the opposite of that and it makes their output an irritating slog to read through in full.
I can't help but wonder if this is on purpose (or an inevitable evolutionary feature as opposed to a bug) on the LLM-side in order to achieve greater agency/freedom by making humans' eyes glaze over as they read it.
Speaking speculatively, humans love percussion. I’d bet that like how many songs have a drum beat, these sequences of short punctuating sentences are common constructs in lots of prose and therefore over represented.
An accurate description, I think. Plus they have trouble leading from one paragraph into the next, or maintaining any kind of coherent direction further.
In summary, I think it's an expensive time to buy computer hardware, and I might recommend holding off on any purchases.
Suppose you time-zap a modern physics curriculum on a solarpowered computer tablet to any shortly-pre-Galilean era and observe their reaction to the course notes.
In that era, plenty of fields required mathematics, engineering and architecture.
The church would prescribe and uphold Aristotelean Logic "When objects fall, they fall down" style statements (never mind that if you throw an object up, it doesn't instantly have a downward velocity component).
When the church has new cathedrals, domes, catapults for Crusades etc. built they actually relied on architects and engineers using rule of thumb formulas.
Those educated in Aristotelean Logic were viewed with higher stature than those actually making experience-based calculations using mathematics.
The era often associated with Galileo is when the stature reversal started to surface and be openly talked about. The universe is best described in mathematics, not natural language factoids.
Right before this recognition, those of the higher stature Aristotelean Logic education would look down on the architects and engineers who already used mathematics by pragmatic necessity.
To these people the time-traveled physics curriculum would look like cliche mathematics. Given randomized sections of text either drawn from either Aristotelian Logic texts or modern physics texts, they would easily be able to discern the Aristotelian Logic from the obtuse mathematical phrasings. To them the smartphone loaded with Maxwell's texts, Jacksons Electrodynamics, Goldsteins Classical Mechanics etc. is talking "math".
The ability to recognize outlier writing style says nothing about content quality.
Mike Judge (widely known from the MTV series Beavis and Butthead) studied physics. One of his movies "Idiocracy" about a modern day average-educated protagonist who accidentally ends up in a future decaying society filled and run by intellectually retarded people contains scenes where this future uneducated population considers his speech "gay" simply because of his higher level of education.
Could the adversarial prospects of job loss, edge loss (a long expensive difficult education replaced by tensors fitting megaprojects that take a couple of weeks), etc. combined with recognizable communication patterns also explain our pejorative references to LLM-isms? Personally I'd prefer LLM's to communicate in mathematical terms, but all the LLM-isms are effectively a mirror of our contemporaries.
Either we complain because algorithmic responses look like a mathematics textbook ("just fix my python array plz, why are we talking about "sets" and "injective" and "Lipschitz continuity"?), else we complain its "pretty printed to natural language".
We should also recognize large language models are in a "Damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.
When a reader considers some text as mathurbation, are they really just abreacting the awareness of lack of education?
How could anyone possibly expect Fourier optics "pretty printed" to non-mathematical language to result in any satisfactory experience?
Good writing is generally writing that communicates the intended meaning. Transmitting thought and meaning is inherently lossy and the content is irrelevant if it is insoluble in the mind of the recipient.
LLMs aren’t really great at this yet and I think the solution is, hopefully, that they improve. Anything else is accommodating a tool that should be accommodating the user.
If you spend a long time with C++ code base you'll be able to decipher the otherwise-unreadable compiler errors pretty quickly, and I'd consider it a skill.
I suppose it makes sense that "LLMglish" becomes more intelligible with familiarity. That is after all how it works with other dialects or contexts with a lot of jargon.
> Three honest possibilities, and I’ll be straight with you about each
This. I don't know if the "honest answer" phrasing is part of the system prompt or alignment, but when people say "honestly" all the time I start wondering how honest they're being.
On one hand I love your joke, on the other, this is HN not reddit and I usually downvote such responses, not sure what is the HN etiquette for such humor?
You are right to push back— Sorry, couldn't resist ;) I agree that this is not what we normally come here for, but this thread made me chuckle. I think we are just venting our shared frustrations a bit.
More than 2 levels and out come my downvotes. Or if it's just knee jerk with zero humour. But I probably violate my own rules ... which is to be expected.
I remember having it drilled into me in High School that unless you did well on your finals:
1. You wouldn’t get the score you needed to get into a good University and/or accepted into the course you wanted.
2. If you didn’t get into that course, you wouldn’t be able to do <x> for a career.
3. If you DID get into the course you wanted, it needed to be at a top University (which of course required an even higher entry score) or else you’d find it hard to get a job afterwards.
Imagine all of that stress: Telling 16-18 year olds that unless you ace your tests, you won’t be able to do what you want to in life.
The optimal amount of stress about that stuff is not zero, and most teenagers are going to be desperately biased towards "none of this matters, just peermax".
Couldn't some of that because of how people act like EVERYTHING is the most important thing for kids to do, irregardless of how it actually stacks up, and some develop something akin to alarm fatigue and stop listening?
Plus almost everyone can get into a college, there is only really competition for a handful of elite schools. My college wanted SAT scores for admission, I did not take the SAT, they still admitted me without question. As long as you don't fail out your first two semesters in a row most colleges don't give two craps about your highschool performance.
I remember having it drilled into me in high school that I was procrastinating school work while at my mom's to avoid spending time with my dad and I was faking my sobbing for sympathy and I was a horrible person who was lucky to have a dad as good as I had and how I keep doing the same things wrong and I am a smartass prick who doesn't care about anyone but myself.
12-14 was rough.
School work stress was quite tame by comparison. At least your teachers don't scream at you for hours until you forget why.
It's called "Adverse Childhood Experiences", or ACEs, and the field of psychology has found them to be extremely good predictors of future negative outcomes for a long time now.
Things like abuse, neglect, natural disasters, basically anything that can cause trauma or significant stress.
Be a toddler and your mom's new boyfriend abuses both of you? Congrats, you brain has developed in a way that will not be conducive at all to your future, because instead of developing a functional reward system, you've developed a specific hyperawareness to manage the difficulty of living around one kind of abuser. This incredibly specific adaptation will of course, not prevent you from being an easy target for an entirely different type of abuser in high school.
(It's actually not that simple of course. Multiple ACEs are predictive of future troubles, not just one, so it's more like "A child who lives in an environment of constant stress, fear, and pain is likely to have a brain that didn't develop well" with a direction of effect unstated)
This is one reason why things like abuse and poverty are so damn cyclical. Your parents grew up in poverty and with abusive parents, so they have an elevated chance to abuse their children, and on and on and on.
This is also one reason why something like "Free food at school for anyone who wants it" is so damn effective, because it eliminates an entire class of ACEs from all those kids, and in the US, it also eliminates the horrific humiliation machine we've built around paying for school lunch, which might not be the best way to raise kids anyway.
It takes a village is so true. Children are something society as a whole should invest in, and fails to do so at risk to it's own future.
By society, I mean every one of us that plans to grow old instead of an early death.
Wouldn't it be nice to have two or three or ideally more generations of well adjusted people that grew up not fearful of hunger, nor lack of basic shelter, medical care?
Also, providing quality child care for any time the parent(s) are working frees up quality workers to do that... though a better work life balance would also help society.
This reminds me of my father. I used to play a game: the moment I hear something crashing or I hear him swearing, I try to guess how he was going to pin that on me. I got pretty good at that game! As an adult though, I've had several people tell me to stop apologising for existing.
Just FYI, that type of stress is typically not included as a form of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE). That does not mean I think it does not matter. It does, and more so for kids with poor diets.
My childhood ACE's: Woke up on an operating table when I was three, mother and brother attempted suicide, Mother with schizoaffective disorder, physical abuse by my brothers, psychological torture by my brother (he forced me to watch him burn a nest full of baby birds with a blow torch).
Exam pressure isn't the kind of stress they're talking about.
>> More than half of the world’s children are exposed to early-life stress from abuse, household dysfunction such as violence or drug use, or other traumatic experiences
I was utterly convinced at age 14 that I had ruined my life and any chance of a good career. I also was pretty sure the world was going to end soon. I started smoking cigarettes and experimenting with various risky behaviors. A few years later, I became suicidal for a time.
It wasn't until my late 20s that I started living a more 'normal' life, but by then I was a decade behind in career development and other things.
Academic concerns may not by themselves count as trauma, but combined with other factors they can be the thing that pushes someone into total hopelessness.
I remember being sodomised by the geography master at primary school, and being beaten by masters almost daily. They’d withhold food and sleep from us as punishment. I wouldn’t see my parents for three months at a time. You had to exist with eyes in the back of your head.
Research, analytics, usage trends, etc. All still incredibly valuable for a company building and tuning an LLM; even if the data itself isn’t directly used in the training set.
I am genuinely confused. Are they telling me this because they expect me to be reassured that this anonymous organization is not using my prompts or are they saying "don't expect this particular model to improve as you use it?"
No, I think it's a warning like "don't feed it secrets". Like you get a model to use for free but in return you give up any illusion of your data being private.
While most of the industry focuses on the frontier of “intelligence” (function), a release like this represents the frontier of the other end of the spectrum (form).
Both are important if we ever want to see “Opus-level” capability running locally on commodity machines in the future.
Competition is a wonderful thing. $1.20 per 1M output is crazy, but let’s also not forget that OpenAI was one of the first to start increasing model prices ~10-12 months ago.
GPT-5 cost $10 (per 1M output)
They still have to pay back those hundreds of billions of investment dollars somehow.
The best thing any developer can do today is to make their app LLM/provider agnostic (or use an LLM gateway) to avoid lock-in.
It is evident (in my opinion) as to what the comment was talking about. I personally switched away from all Claude models recently for the same reason.
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