I admire people who don't lie about past drug use on their clearance forms. Sure, it might delay their clearance, but I still admire them.

The core social problem with drug addiction and alcoholicism is this concept of telling people what you think they want to hear from you, not telling them the truth.

I do wonder why diffusion models aren't used alongside constraint decoding for programming - surely it makes better sense then using an auto-regressive model.

Diffusion models need to infer the causality of language from within a symmetric architecture (information can flow forward or backward). AR forces information to flow in a single direction and is substantially easier to control as a result. The 2nd sentence in a paragraph of English text often cannot come before the first or the statement wouldn't make sense. Sometimes this is not an issue (and I think these are cases where parallel generation makes sense), but the edge cases are where all the money lives.

But I do wonder if diffusion models will be used in more complex Software Architecture for their long-term coherence, no exposure bias, and their symmetric architecture could work well with interaction nets.

I think that's because Opus 4.6 has more "initiative".

Opus 4.6 can be quite sassy at times, the other day I asked it if it were "buttering me up" and it candidly responded "Hey you asked me to help you write a report with that conclusion, not appraise it."

Sometimes it states "Gittifying...", the first time it happened to me I was smashing the Ctrl+C keys in panic.

When I first started using Claude I was pretty annoyed by the cute phrases. But when I built my own wrapper I started using them because I had gotten used to them. But added in a setting of course: [Fun Phrases Show playful status messages while waiting for responses. Disable to show only "Thinking..."]

Why Anthropic can't provide such a setting, we will never know!

It’s ridiculous, but they have recently introduced a feature to change the list of messages, so you can just set it to Working or similar now:

    "spinnerVerbs": {
      "mode": "replace",
      "verbs": ["Working"]
    }

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6814#issuec...

Anthropic is mocking developers here :)

They bothered to let you override default nonsense messages with custom messages, but they still don't want to let you see what you are actually interested in. The actual information is kept hidden.

Luckily, new open weight models from China caught up with Anthropic, so you can use a sane harness with a much cheaper subscription and never look back.

Token efficiency is a good argument actually.

> This suggests that scaling alone won't eliminate incoherence. As more capable models tackle harder problems, variance-dominated failures persist or worsen.

This is a big deal, but are they only looking at auto-regressive models?

I don't think it's fair to say there's no skill in it - one of the new problems with AI coding that I have found, is I now have to go away and think more.

I think that the bottom line is that the bottlenecks are - the specific model you use & your skills, experience and reasoning capacity (intelligence); and you control only the latter, so focus on that!

I like to use the term "--no-clobber", so to set a script to not delete any information but re-use the previous configuration or files, otherwise error out if not possible.

It's a really bad time for Microsoft to force consumers to upgrade - even computer parts from 5 years ago are price hiking.

Which Microsoft really should have been able to see coming, since it’s largely their money that’s being used to soak up all the supply of computing hardware.

Someone inside Microsoft probably did see it coming. That comic of their org chart being individual bubbles, all pointing guns at each other really does explain that company's behavior.

Microsoft doesn't seem to be one unified entity, but a bunch of smaller competing companies under the same umbrella, each trying to destroy the other.

Allegedly Sony saw the writing on the wall and secured a good amount of GDDR supply for their consoles. Microsoft did not, and has had to raise the price of the Xbox Series X as a result.

I don't think that Microsoft knows what Microsoft is doing.

Doesn't say it's programmers though but middle management:

> Amazon slashed 14,000 white-collar jobs in late October, with CEO Andy Jassy stressing the need for the company to eliminate *excessive bureaucracy* by trimming operational levels and reducing the number of managers.

I woke up to two of my engineer friends telling me they got laid off, so it’s not all middle management

Yes but this is a lie, a vast majority of the cuts in both rounds from October and today have been individual contributors, not managers.

Do you have a source for that?

I work at Amazon and I see who got cut.

You can also check the WARN notice in WA.

You can find the warn notices here. [0] From a quick script I wrote up, it seems that ~60% of layoffs noted on 1/26/2026 are from individual contributors

[0]: https://esd.wa.gov/employer-requirements/layoffs-and-employe...

The new notice came out, that one is for Amazon Fresh only I think. It's 84% ICs now.

Seems sus, even if they got rid of half the managers, would that add up to the layoffs they've done?

Ah thanks for clearing that up.