[Grimblewald]

I wear a few hats, but as a chemist and I'm not happy with fable. As a statistician I'm not happy with fable. As a data scientist I am not happy with fable. As an academic and a researcher I am not happy with fable. It's useless. I'd be surprised if anyone can get any output from it that couldn't easily be replaced with a search from wikipedia. Given how verbose claude models have become, wiki articles are probably less verbose too, and the tok/s is unmatched for a wiki article pull.

[pneumic]

I work on software that talks to mass spectrometers and it consistently refuses to refactor even an input file parser, presumably because it can infer it’s related to biology? Useless indeed.

[ACCount37]

I was reverse engineering a medical device, and had to do a lot of trickery to get Opus 4.5 - not even Fable/Mythos, Opus - not to trip up its fucking CBRN filter.

What happened with Fable is basically what I feared when they announced those restrictions. They took the shitty Opus CBRN filter and made it even worse.

I pity the fools trying to use Anthropic AIs for anything biotech.

[pneumic]

Opus has been fine on proteomics and bioinformatics for me. I have never seen a Claude model refuse on such grounds before in the past.

Claude is still the best IMO, but it feels like its most frustrating and grating aspects are not down to the model’s abilities, but the increasingly heavy hand of Anthropic expressing itself within the model. Fable’s comically useless responses almost seem like a cynical marketing tweak.

“This model is so powerful we basically can’t let it do anything. How terrifying! We need more money to make it stronger. Now do you see why we should be the ones who write the regulations? We’re the Good Guy AI Company Who Will Never Ever Ever Be Unethical after all.”

As this entity gains more ground, their models become increasingly annoying to use and their little act becomes more transparent. The whole “I’m-just a befuddled ethically-minded AI researcher who is perturbed by the power that I unwittingly discovered and I must warn the world” thing? Yeah fuck off. Your twee pandering to naïve nerds and cynical technocrats is nauseating and ordinary people can smell it a mile away. Completely repellent leadership who put up red flags to anyone left with a working ability to read between the lines of both spoken language and body language. The tech company equivalent of a sex predator who plays as the nice guy. Gross.

Nobody likes these companies and their models are annoying, but we’re going to put up with playing middle manager to these obnoxious programs because our jobs depend on it now, and these products are still the best on the market.

A breakthrough in tools that facilitate user-owned models and infrastructure is desperately needed for the sake of our dignity and sanity, if nothing else.

[ACCount37]

My personal suspicion is that it went "medical hardware -> high-throughput screening -> biorisk" in that old Opus case.

I like Anthropic's work, and I would be the first to argue against all the usual "it's all PR" whine. But there is a limit. And whoever made those fucking filters needs to be fired out of a cannon into the sun.

[staticman2]

The filters are really bad.

Yesterday Fable rejected commenting on poetry because it had anatomy lines like:

got anotha round of acetylcholine from da boss.

[pbgcp2026]

"the tok/s is unmatched for a wiki article pull." This is absolutely wonderful, thank you for making my day!

[flexagoon]

> Given how verbose claude models have become, wiki articles are probably less verbose too

Telling models to respond in the style of Wikipedia is one of the best ways to make their output bearable in my experience (for chat models, not agents)

[TylerE]

I’ve been working on a rather complex mapping project and have been getting MUCH better results with Fable than Opus.

[TylerE]

So as not to be vague, and since I just pushed a version I'm starting to be vaguely happy with...

https://tylereaves.github.io/uk-rail-map/

This is the result of probably a few hundred round trips. The really interesting part of the problem is keeping it both relatively true to real geometry, while greatly exaggerating it horizontally so you can actually see the individual running lines/sidings, like a signaling schematic.

[prennert]

I love computational mapping projects, because there is this hard problem of which towns to show on the map.

Your Scotland map shows towns without rail (although some had rail previously, like Callander, Aberfeldy), it prefers insignificant (population-wise) places while ignoring the larger cities next to it (Scone instead of Perth, Bannockburn instead of Stirling, Inverness is missing, Dundee is missing, Aberdeen is missing). All these places are drawn on the map, but not labelled.

All this clearly shows to me how bad it is. Yes it makes it look pretty, but given your task, I would have expected to give you meaningful map labelling.

Something basic like this would get you a long way:

    0. cluster population centers into commonly known cities (i.e. show London instead of Islington or Walhamstrow)
    1. display names of the top 10 population centers in the UK
    2. display towns with stations (if crowded prioritize termination points and junctions, and prioritize larger places over smaller places)

Having said that, its pretty cool to see the new and old network when zoomed in (assuming that it is half-way correct)

[TylerE]

Point taken, andf I was actually already doing a fair bit of that, but there was a bug where town names identical to a station name were getting culled. Fixed and uploaded. Also have the data for a few other countries crunching away.

[clbrmbr]

Fascinating. Can you explain why southern London is DC while northern London is AC?

[TylerE]

Prior to 1948 when they were all nationalized into British Rail, there were various railroad companies operating across the country. One of these was the Southern Railway, which, well, operated in the South. They started electrifying very aggressively in the mid 1920's. At the time most of what little electrification there was was in London on the Underground.

Compared to AC, 3rd Rail DC is cheaper to install, especially as a retrofit (Overhead wires require bigger tunnels, and increased spacing around tracks for the masts). Downside is that it's not really great for speeds above about 60-70mph, as well as being a bit of a pedestrian hazard. (Ever the one about not peeing on the rails so you don't get shocked? That's 3rd rail DC.)

For the Southern, with it's mostly short routes with many stops, electricfiation was a pretty obvious win, and doing 3rd rail made sense because they could do it quickly and cheaply.

In contrast, the northern routes were electrified muuuch later, after steam had gone away. The main East Coast Mainline from London up to Newscastle and on to Edinburgh wasn't fully electrified until 1991. By the '60s and '70s, with train speeds increasing to 80mph and up, overhead AC was the clear winner.

If you look closely there are a few exceptions - the Merseyrail network in Liverpool is DC. Built 1970s, but using some existing underwater tunnels, and slow speed commuter. Then running ESE from London you have the high speed AC lines leading to the Channel tunnel. Well spotted, the trend generally is quite distinct.

[enraged_camel]

To make the discussion constructive, can you give specific reasons (ideally with examples) about why it is so useless for you? How exactly are you using it that you think any output from it can easily be replaced with a Wikipedia search?

[SuperShibe]

The cybersecurity and bioweapons filters reach so far that they set in as soon as the model even glazes anything STEM-related. It might give a good impression of ones ex or write a decent fanfiction but anything that could bring humanity forward is strictly off-limits.

[cge]

The filter is not simply a bioweapons filter: the model card seems to say that the filter triggers on anything related to biology or chemistry.

[senordevnyc]

Guessing you meant “grazes”

[Grimblewald]

Am I being paid to do anthropic's work for it? See my comment history for some examples in another thread, but generally I see no reason to catalogue this for a model Ive seen no evidence of being worth the effort. I'm overworked as it is, doing this for no reason isnt something I can justify.

The successes I have had with the model were strictly worse than output from deepseek v4 pro on the exact same task.

[mpalmer]

What a strange subset of capabilities to neuter, eh?

[nonethewiser]

>I'd be surprised if anyone can get any output from it that couldn't easily be replaced with a search from wikipedia.

I dont understand. This is just hyperbole right? The outputs are basically infinite and wikipedia most certainly isnt infinite.

[satvikpendem]

> The outputs are basically infinite

If the model refuses to output, then it's actually finite, zero.

[nonethewiser]

No, of the model always refuses to output then it’s finite

[satvikpendem]

For certain use cases, it seems it does always refuse, therefore it's finite.

[nonethewiser]

No.

B + C = A

B is finite

C is infinite

Therefor A is infinite

[satvikpendem]

That's over all categories. If A is cyber security and B is biology topics, then C is still zero, therefore finite. Anyway, I think you're reading too much into an offhand comment.

[torben-friis]

The decimals of 1/3 are infinite as well and they don't contain a better-than-wikipedia article.

And even if they did, it would be useless if it's buried in useless data and your chances or pulling it are effectively zero.

This is regardless of the general discussion, just pointing that your argument isn't solid.

[nonethewiser]

Sorry but that’s not the claim. The claim is wikipedia can return the same information. Please find me a migration script given my current db schema and new target schema.

The claim is absurd.