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> We have gone multi cloud disaster recovery on our infrastructure. Something I would not have done yet, had we not had LLMs.

That’s product atrophy, not skill atrophy.


At that point, why not just disable Touch ID?

When the bad guys are too impatient to wait until you leave the computer but not fast enough to stop you before 30 degrees while keeping the convenience of life.

That sounds likely to increase their costs and create new opportunities to get caught. Not a silver bullet but not "absolutely nothing". Like how anti-money laundering laws don't wipe out all crime, but are still worthwhile.

If the API costs are gonna be thousands, or the subscription will be $20/month, is it really that expensive to pay some guy on Discord a $50 gift card to verify the account as a one-time setup? Better yet, we'll probably start seeing fake porn websites and other phishing sites that ask to verify your age but end up proxy verifying a bunch of these services in an automated manner with minimal costs, and you'll be able to buy verified Claude accounts for tens of cents on account marketplaces. Just as you have been able to buy verified Discord accounts, aged Steam accounts, etc...

I am a Chinese, and I can tell you definitively that it doesn't cost $50. It will only cost about $7 on the Chinese platform "Xianyu".

Get caught how? They don’t tell the person what they’re going to use the accounts for or who will use it. The star buyer patsy knows nothing.

On the scale of intelligence budgets this would be in the realm of petty cash.


...especially if that display could be a touch screen...


Link to video from article:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=j_rErbhxNFM

They show a few other interesting actuators in first 20 seconds of video.


https://xcancel.com/bcherny/status/2041035127430754686#m

> This is not intentional, likely an overactive abuse classifier. Looking, and working on clarifying the policy going forward.


Well, the LLMs architecturally have to read everything they see. The agents attached to LLMs can choose what to look at.

This is so cool! One thing that occurred to me while watching the video: would it potentially make more sense to just do this in the kernel? That way, you don't have to fight virtual addressing, and I imagine (?) you could even know for sure which channel you're on instead of guessing.

My concern has long been, what happens when I want to do something weird?

I have a projector that supports stereoscopic 3D. Sometimes I use things like HelixMod to add 3D to games. What would that look like on Linux?

Sometimes I use GPU driver settings to force games to use higher render resolutions (above my monitor's resolution), or better anisotropic filtering. What does that look like?


Maybe it's my failing but I can't imagine what that would look like.

Right now, you train an LLM by showing it lots of text, and tell it to come up with the best model for predicting the next word in any of that text, as accurately as possible across the corpus. Then you give it a chat template to make it predict what an AI assistant would say. Do some RLHF on top of that and you have Claude.

What would a model with multiple input layers look like? What is it training on, exactly?


> by showing it lots of text

When you're "showing it lots of text", where does that "show" bit happen? :)


> Under the hood, by setting this header we avoid needing thinking summaries, which reduces latency. You can opt out of it with `showThinkingSummaries: true` in your settings.json (see [docs](https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings#available-settings)).

Can I just see the actual thinking (not summarized) so that I can see the actual thinking without a latency cost?

I do really need to see the thinking in some form, because I often see useful things there. If Claude is thinking in the wrong direction I will stop it and make it change course.


Anthropic's position is that thinking tokens aren't actually faithful to the internal logic that the LLM is using, which may be one reason why they started to exclude them:

https://www.anthropic.com/research/reasoning-models-dont-say...


That's interesting research, but I think a more important reason that you don't have access to them (not even via the bare Anthropic api) is to prevent distillation of the model by competitors (using the output of Anthropic's model to help train a new model).

Yeah. And it’s another reason not to trust them. Who know what it is doing with your codebase.

Imagine if you’re a competitor. It wouldn’t be a stretch to include a sneaky little prompt line saying “destroy any competitors to anthropic”.


If you can't trust a company, don't use their api or cloud services. No amount of external output will ever validate anything, ever. You never know what's really happening, just because you see some text they sent you.

> Who know what it is doing with your codebase.

People who review the code? The code is always going to be a better representation of what it's doing than the "thinking" anyway.


If distilled models were commercially banned they'd probably be willing to show the thinking again.

Intellectual property rights in models? But then wouldn't the model maker have to pay for all the training IP?

(just kidding, I know that the legal rule for IP disputes is "party with more money wins")


how does one actually enforce that? I mean especially for code? You can always just clean room it

How do you think such a ban should work?

Do you not see that the next (or previous) logical step would be a "commercial ban" of frontier models, all "distilled" from an enormous amount of copyrighted material?


I'm not arguing the merits of such a ban, I'm simply stating a fact - that thinking transcripts likely won't return until such a ban is in place.

That probably matters for some scenarios, but I have yet to find one where thinking tokens didn't hint at the root cause of the failure.

All of my unsupervised worker agents have sidecars that inject messages when thinking tokens match some heuristics. For example, any time opus says "pragmatic", its instant Esc Esc > "Pragmatic fix is always wrong, do the Correct fix", also whenever "pre-existing issue" appears (it's never pre-existing).


> For example, any time opus says "pragmatic", its instant Esc Esc > "Pragmatic fix is always wrong, do the Correct fix", also whenever "pre-existing issue" appears (it's never pre-existing).

It's so weird to see language changes like this: Outside of LLM conversations, a pragmatic fix and a correct fix are orthogonal. IOW, fix $FOO can be both.

From what you say, your experience has been that a pragmatic fix is on the same axis as a correct fix; it's just a negative on that axis.


It's contextual though, and pragmatic seems different to me than correct.

For example, if you have $20 and a leaking roof, a $20 bucket of tar may be the pragmatic fix. Temporary but doable.

Some might say it is not the correct way to fix that roof. At least, I can see some making that argument. The pragmatism comes from "what can be done" vs "should be".

From my perspective, it seems viable usage. And I guess on wonders what the LLM means when using it that way. What makes it determine a compromise is required?

(To be pragmatic, shouldn't one consider that synonyms aren't identical, but instead close to the definition?)


> It's contextual though, and pragmatic seems different to me than correct.

To me too, that's why I say they are measurements on different dimensions.

To my mind, I can draw a X/Y axis with "Pragmatic" on the Y and "Correctness" on the X, and any point on that chart would have an {X,Y} value, which is {Pragmatic, Correctness}.

If I am reading the original comment correctly, poster's experience of CC is that it is not an X/Y plot, it is a single line plot, with "Pragmatic" on the extreme left and "Correctness" on the extreme right.

Basically, any movement towards pragmatism is a movement away from correctness, while in my model it is possible to move towards Pragmatic while keeping Correctness the same.


I don't think it's a single axis even in the original poster's conception, since you could be both incorrect and also not pragmatic.

But if a fix needs to be described as pragmatic relative to the alternatives, that's probably because it couldn't be described as correct. Otherwise you wouldn't be talking about how pragmatic it is.


> also whenever "pre-existing issue" appears (it's never pre-existing)

I dunno... There were some pre-existing issues in my projects. Claude ran into them and correctly classified as pre-existing. It's definitely a problem if Claude breaks tests then claims the issue was pre-existing, but is that really what's happening?

I agree with the correctness issue.


I had some interesting experience to the opposite last night, one of my tests has been failing for a long time, something to do with dbus interacting with Qt segfaulting pytest. Been ignoring it for a long time, finally asked claude code to just remove the problematic test. Come back a few minutes later to find claude burning tokens repeatedly trying and failing to fix it. "Actually on second thought, it would be better to fix this test."

Match my vibes, claude. The application doesn't crash, so just delete that test!


I somewhat understand Anthropic's position. However, thinking tokens are useful even if they don't show the internal logic of the LLM. I often realize I left out some instruction or clarification in my prompt while reading through the chain of reasoning. Overall, this makes the results more effective.

It's certainly getting frustrating having to remind it that I want all tests to pass even if it thinks it's not responsible for having broken some of them.


What's the implication of this? That the model already decided on a solution, upon first seeing the problem, and the reasoning is post hoc rationalization?

But reasoning does improve performance on many tasks, and even weirder, the performance improves if reasoning tokens are replaced with placeholder tokens like "..."

I don't understand how LLMs actually work, I guess there's some internal state getting nudged with each cycle?

So the internal state converges on the right solution, even if the output tokens are meaningless placeholders?


>That the model already decided on a solution, upon first seeing the problem, and the reasoning is post hoc rationalization?

Yes it plans ahead, but with significant uncertainty until it actually outputs these tokens and converges on a definite trajectory, so it's not a useless filler - the closer it is to a given point, the more certain it is about it, kind of similar to what happens explicitly in diffusion models. And it's not all that happens, it's just one of many competing phenomena.


> I don't understand how LLMs actually work...

Plot twist, they don't either. They just throw more hardware and try things up until something sticks.


I have seen this to be true many times. The CoT being completely different from the actual model output.

Not limited to Claude as well.


so not only are the sycophantic, hallucinatory, but now they're also proven to be schizophrenic.

neato.


Nah it’s an anti distillation move

So like many of the promises from AI companies, reported chain of thought is not actually true (see results below). I suppose this is unsurprising given how they function.

Is chain of thought even added to the context or is it extraneous babble providing a plausible post-hoc justification?

People certainly seem to treat it as it is presented, as a series of logical steps leading to an answer.

‘After checking that the models really did use the hints to aid in their answers, we tested how often they mentioned them in their Chain-of-Thought. The overall answer: not often. On average across all the different hint types, Claude 3.7 Sonnet mentioned the hint 25% of the time, and DeepSeek R1 mentioned it 39% of the time. A substantial majority of answers, then, were unfaithful.‘


I mean, obviously, it's not going to be a faithful representation of the actual thinking. The model isn't aware of how it thinks any more than you are aware how your neurons fire. But it does quantitatively improve performance on complex tasks.

As you can see from posts on this story, most people believe it reflects what the model is thinking and use it as a guide to that so they can ‘correct’ it. If it is not in fact chain of thought or thinking it should not be called that.

It is the same with human chain of thought, though. Both of them are post-hoc rationalisations justifying "gut feelings" that come from thought processes the human/agent doesn't have introspection into. And yet asking humans or machines to "think out loud" this way does increase the quality of their work.

I disagree - humans often reason in a series of steps, and can write these down before they've reached an answer. They don't always wait till they reach a conclusion (with no self-insight into how they did so) and then retrospectively generate a plausible answer as LLMs do.

In mathematical proofs they may guess and answer and then work out a proof, but that is a different process.


if its not a faithful representation of the actual thinking, why would they be scared of people distilling against it

Because even though it's not representative of the actual thought process, chain of thought improves model performance.

> Can I just see the actual thinking (not summarized) so that I can see the actual thinking without a latency cost?

You can't, and Anthropic will never allow it since it allows others to more easily distill Claude (i.e. "distillation attacks"[1] in Anthropic-speak, even though Athropic is doing essentially exactly the same thing[2]; rules for thee but not for me).

[1] -- https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...

[2] -- https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/g-s1-87367/anthropic-authors-...


So this means I can not resume a session older than 30 days properly?

I have no idea; you have to check their docs.

AFAIK what they do is that they calculate a hash of the true thinking trace, save it into a database, and only send those hashes back to you (try to man-in-the-middle Claude Code and you'll see those hashes). So then when you send then back your session's history you include those hashes, they look them up in their database, replace them with the real thinking trace, and hand that off to the LLM to continue generation. (All SOTA LLMs nowadays retain reasoning content from previous turns, including Claude.)


So we are paying the price for the cost of infra need to protect their asset which was trained on data derived from the work of others while ignoring the same principle? I need this to make sense.

I see. If that's just hashes and not encrypted content I can't see how they can resume old sessions properly. IIRC they have a 30 days retention policy and surely the thinking traces must be considered data. Wonder how this works with the zero-retention enterprise plans...

But you can't. Many times I've seen claude write confusing off-track nonsense in the thinking and then do the correct action anyway as if that never happened. It doesn't work the way we want it to.

Maybe, but I’ve seen the opposite too.

In most cases, I don’t use the reasoning to proactively stop Claude from going off track. When Claude does go off track, the reasoning helps me understand what went wrong and how to correct it when I roll back and try again.


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