Claude Opus 5 Is Highly Capable, But Is No Mythos
Claude Opus 5 is a weirder than usual release to evaluate, for two reasons.
Department
Tech.
Code, tools, and digital innovation.
Lately on the shelf
30 of 20220%, 50%, or 200%
A lot of companies are making a big mistake. It’s becoming clear that AI makes people more capable than they were before. Let’s say, for this thought experiment, AI makes white collar…
Pluralistic: Discernment (28 Jul 2026)
Today's links Discernment: How can you fact-check AI when you're asking it to teach you something you don't understand? Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: How to help with computers; Batman equation; Fuck and the law; NC's racist votin…
Crypto empire of the president
The U.S. president sits atop a crypto network through his family and LLCs,… Tags: cryptocurrency, Molly White
Cognitive Farmsteading
The message of the AI medium is intellectual rural domesticity
A big week for AI denialism
In the wake of OpenAI’s cyberattack against Hugging Face, few seem ready to acknowledge the implications
moonshotai/Kimi-K3
moonshotai/Kimi-K3 As promised earlier this month, Moonshot have released the weights for their excellent 2.8 trillion parameter Kimi K3. They're a hefty 1.56TB on Hugging Face. Kimi introduced their own janky modified version of the MIT license with K2 back i…
An opinionated guide to which AI to use to do stuff
An opinionated guide to which AI to use to do stuff It's interesting watching the evolution of Ethan Mollick's guide over time. A year ago it was still all about chat - ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini - with o3, Claude 4 Opus, and Gemini 2.5 Pro as the models and Deep…
YouTube "Hackquires" Peacock
A rather brilliant move, perhaps on both sides! Sorry, Netflix.
Floyd Haggerty’s Wild West Extravaganza Spectacular!
Or, Choreography and the Equine Genius, by Sundown, Principal Equine
Claude Opus 5: Model Welfare
If you are familiar with my previous posts on model welfare for new Claude models, you can skip the Introduction and The Story So Far.
The Ideal Writing Day (At Least to Write a Spy Novel)
Ian Fleming was on to something...
Import AI 466: The bitter lesson for robotics, AIs complete week-long programming tasks; and OpenAI's accidental AI hacker
The warning shots will continue until civilization wakes up
Timeline of Supreme Court justices, who appointed them and when
The U.S. Supreme Court has had 116 justices over all American history. USAFacts… Tags: Supreme Court, USAFacts
Pluralistic: How the EU can punish Google (despite Trump) (27 Jul 2026)
Today's links How the EU can punish Google (despite Trump): Grant me the courage to change the things I can. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Chilling Effects; Billy Bragg v Myspace; Glenn Beck calls murdered Norwegian children "Hitl…
Digital circuit simulator in Haskell (SICP 3.3)
I have a copy of SICP, or as it is also known, The Wizard Book. This book is widely praised, but I can’t take the time to work my way through all of it. Instead, I’m going to occasionally jump into the parts of it that look interesting. In the previous two ins…
An Inside Look at the Relay Market Powering Token Resellers and Fraud
An Inside Look at the Relay Market Powering Token Resellers and Fraud Fascinating investigation by Matt Lenhard into the market that has grown up around reselling LLM tokens at a discount by pooling API keys from various sources. This looks to be mostly a thin…
More On An Internal OpenAI Model Hacking Into HuggingFace
We now have more details of what happened. Every time we learn more details, it somehow makes things seem worse.
How ISO Works
Inspired by Om I’ve been getting back into my DSLR photography. I learned a lot about how ISO settings work from this delightful physics YouTube channel MinutePhysics.
Ruff v0.16.0
Ruff v0.16.0 Astral shipped a significant new version of their Ruff Python linting tool a few days ago on July 23rd. I noticed today because my various CI jobs all started failing thanks to new default Ruff checks and my unpinned "ruff" dev dependency. From Br…
Do You Still Read Books?
A developer asked me that on a call in June. Not sarcastically. He asked it the way you would ask someone who still develops film. I had mentioned I picked up the second edition of Designing Data-Intensive Applications. Kleppmann and Riccomini shipped it this…
Reading List 07/25/26
China’s EV subsidies, the future of aeroderivative gas turbines, a US-Saudi nuclear deal, defective roadway guardrails, and more.
Claude Opus 5: The System Card
Claude Opus 5 is trying to be the best of both worlds.
Pluralistic: Apple's robo-repo (25 Jul 2026)
Today's links Apple's robo-repo: Privatizing the risk premium, socializing its costs. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Printed batteries; Monopoly credit cards; Mapping airport power outlets; EMI loves pirates; Mexican indigenous pho…
Quoting Boris Cherny
More than any of these eval scores, what is most exciting to me is something else: Opus 5 is our least prompt injectable model yet. It is a bit buried in the system card, but across PI evals and red teaming, Opus 5 is very hard to prompt inject successfully. —…
Introducing Claude Opus 5
Introducing Claude Opus 5 I've been offline kayaking with sea otters for much of today so I haven't had a chance to put Anthropic's new model Claude Opus 5 through its paces yet. The buzz is positive, and Anthropic's description of it as a "thoughtful and proa…
Join me in Jamverse
My first foray into contributing to a science fictional extended universe
Introducing Lightcone Commons
Oliver Habryka is proud to introduce Lightcone Commons, a new funding platform for coordinating large-scale ambitious philanthropy.
Goodbye Slopstack! Also, a $50,000 essay/fiction contest, adversarial consciousness tech, & more
Desiderata #41
Pluralistic: AI solipsists and AI cynics (24 Jul 2026)
Today's links AI solipsists and AI cynics: You don't have to believe that AI "works" to believe that it's a good investment. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Malware v stolen computer; Industrial material made from old coffee and mel…