davidhs
I personally find GPT-5.5 to be a better programmer than Opus 4.8, it is extremely thorough, but I don't like the code it generates ("austere"), and find Opus 4.8 to write more "human friendly" code. The programming comments GPT-5.5 makes is pretty awful where-as Opus 4.8 is good. I feel like Opus 4.8 is better at grasping my intention than GPT-5.5, and honestly find GPT-5.5 to be kind of "autistic". I do prefer the language (not the writing) of GPT-5.5, as I find the philosophical flowery language of Opus 4.8 kind of annoying.
I have only managed to try Fable 5 a little bit, which feels like a much more generally smarter version of Opus 4.8, that is much better a programming and grasping your intention, and I think even the intention of your code, and is _really_ good at spotting bugs or problems with logic in your code. It feels wicked smart but is extemely expensive. It feels smart in the sense like it has a "bigger brain" and is much more sensitive to subtleties/details.
These are different "brains", have different "personalities", etc. I think the best thing is to develop a feeling for it yourself.
Honestly, why bother with it? They are effectively just releasing the model in-name, but we just get Opus 4.8.
Today I have medium-ish hypophantasia, but I remember when I was doing phantasia exercises, in particular "snapshotting" and "memory streaming", at least two times, there was a subtle shift in my perception and all of a sudden I could remember a ton of things, as if I opened a door. It would only last maybe 10-20 minutes (I would practice 30 - 60 minutes per day).
It wouldn't surprise me a bunch of those memories are in the brain but you just don't have access to them in everyday waking consciousness.
So, for me, it feels like a lot of my memories are visually indexed, and if I can't visualize then I can't remember, but once I configure my mind through meditation and these exercises, it is like I can "tune my mind" to mind's eye access (radio/TV analogy here) and with it the memories.
Then once I stopped the exercise (for the day) it would go away in around 10-20 minutes (kind of like how a muscle pump goes away rather quickly after exercising).
But, I don't know. I tend to view these (reasoning) LLMs as alien minds and my intuition of what is perhaps happening under the hood is not good.
I just know that people have been using these LLMs as search engines (including Stephen Wolfram), browsing through what these LLMs perhaps know and have connected together.
AIs are RLHF'd to have a corporate-pleasing interface w.r.t. metrics.
Self-driving is probably “AI-hard” as you’d need extensive “world knowledge” and be able to reason about your environment and tolerate faulty sensors (the human eyes are super crappy with all kinds of things that obscure it, such as veins and floaters).
Also, if the Waymo UI accurately represents what it thinks is going on “out there” it is surprisingly crappy. If your conscious experience was like that when you were driving you’d think you had been drugged.
When was the last time you had full attention on the road and a reflection of light made you super confused and suddenly drive crazy? When was the last time you experienced objects behaving erratically around you, jumping in and out of place, and perhaps morphing?
Before the release of the model Sam Altman tweeted a picture of the Death Star appearing over the horizon of a planet.
Mind's eye/visualisation/phantasia is not seen through one's physical eyes. From how I've heard people explain it, it's:
* (1) Seeing inside your head. * (2) Feels like seeing behind you or/and somewhere else. * (3) Seeing through another set of eyes (mind's eyes) * (4) As if I just saw something, but not with my own eyes.
People can have no mental imagery or visual perception in one's thoughts, aphantasia, to very low/unclear/fuzzy/uncertain mental imagery (hypophantasia), to regular phantasia, which is not as real as looking through one's eyes, and hyperphantasia, where it's almost as good or as good as seeing through one's eyes (the fidelity, resolution, etc.)
Then there's also "prophantasia", or the ability to project visuals in one's visual physical scene, or what one might describe as being able to visually hallucinate. These are the visuals one can see through one's eyes. Prophantasia also is on this low (being able to voluntarily project unclear shapes in the visual noise in one's eye lids in the dark), to high (being able to project "holograms" in one's visual scene).
When people talk about it online they seem to not disambiguate between these visualization modes.
There are potentially other modes of visualization out there that I don't know of.
EDIT: your imagination can also happen in other sense modalities, including sound, olfaction, taste, bodily sensation, etc.
Async Rust is rather nice to use when you're writing a web server. Structuring your code in an async manner is honestly very useful. Writing a composite Future or a Future state machine by hand is super tedious. Async makes most of that pain go away.