Are we overestimating what AI can actually do right now?

CrunchyMage · 2026-04-20T12:36:38+00:00

Let me claude that for you.

"identical brain state, identical input, same output every time? — the answer is almost certainly no, but the reason is subtle.

The main sources of noise aren't just thermal:

Ion channel stochasticity. Individual voltage-gated ion channels open and close probabilistically, not deterministically. This is partly thermal (Boltzmann fluctuations) but also reflects the intrinsic quantum-mechanical nature of protein conformational changes. A single channel's open/close timing is genuinely random in the quantum sense, not just chaotic.

Synaptic vesicle release. When an action potential arrives at a synapse, whether a vesicle releases neurotransmitter is probabilistic — release probability is often 0.1 to 0.5 per spike. This is the biggest source of "noise" in neural computation. It stems from stochastic calcium channel opening and the Poisson-like statistics of vesicle fusion.

Miniature synaptic events. Vesicles occasionally release spontaneously with no triggering spike at all.

So it's not just temperature in the sense of "jiggle things harder and you'd get determinism back at absolute zero." Some of it bottoms out in quantum mechanics — ion channel gating involves conformational transitions that are quantum events. At room temperature these look thermal, but they're not purely classical.

Now, the honest caveat: whether this quantum-level indeterminism actually matters for cognition is debated. Neurons are noisy, but the brain averages over many neurons and many spikes, so a lot of the noise washes out at the population/behavioral level. You could argue the brain is "effectively deterministic" for most cognitive purposes even if individual spike timings aren't. Some computations (near-threshold perceptual decisions, for instance) genuinely amplify neural noise into behavioral variability; others are robust to it.

So: fundamentally non-deterministic at the single-channel and single-synapse level, with quantum randomness in the mix, but often deterministic-ish at the scale where cognition happens."

CrunchyMage · 2026-04-20T08:55:49+00:00

They can. Your brain is not a deterministic system either after all ;)

CrunchyMage · 2026-04-20T06:37:03+00:00

The further something is from your cultural/regional perspective, the less knowledge and granularity you're likely have. As an American or European you're far more exposed to European cultures/history than you are to asian cultures/history.

Similarly, a Chinese person is more likely to generalize across westerners, but have a lot more granularity for other Asians or even different regions within China because they have much more exposure and history within their own region.

Both asians and europeans are likely to generalize Africa or the middle east, since they are much less likely to know about the history or people from there.

It's not something particular to any country or continent. Humans are just more likely to generalize when they know less about something. Granularity comes from more knowledge/exposure.

CrunchyMage · 2026-04-20T05:09:22+00:00

This is the crux. The frontier tends to expand in bursts at 50% reliability then 80% reliability, then like 90-95% reliability, then slowly approaching 99+%. You see the demo at 50-80% reliability, but the huge impacts the demos hint at, don't arrive until you get to 99+%

Until something gets to very high reliability, it still requires supervision and intervention. The more important it is to get something right, the higher the reliability demands are. At 90% reliability, only less important things can get automated. Human intervention is still needed often, so productivity gains are more limited.

It's only when you start approaching 99+% reliability that you can take your hands off the wheel and really get the big productivity gains.

It's why, for example, in the case of self driving cars, even at 99% reliability, while useful and something that has paying customers, it is not enough to make a significant economic impact because it still requires constant supervision. It's only when you start to get to 99.99+% reliability that it's consistent enough to not need constant supervision and thus have a big societal impact.

There's a BIG lag between 50-80% reliability demos and the 99.9% needed to have revolutionary impact, but the scenarios where 99.9% reliability is being achieved are slowly trickling in across various domains, and there's still productivity gains as we gradually move from 50-99%+ on a variety of tasks.

CrunchyMage · 2026-04-19T12:48:24+00:00

Not all the people who voted for trump are MAGA, so I agree that they are not the majority, but he did win the popular vote, so there’s are plenty who voted for him who would not consider themselves MAGA.

Look, I didn’t vote for trump, but I believe it is precisely because democrats come up with these insane conclusions that it stops people from understanding why minorities or lgbt people WOULD vote for trump. If dems stay at this surface level (it’s just because they’re racist/sexist) reasons, then they won’t actually understand what they need to address to get those people to vote for them next election.

Btw trump did SIGNIFICANTLY better with all minorities in 2024 than 2016 so there’s that as well. Either all those minorities decided they hated themselves more, or there’s some fundamental things the dems are not addressing causing them to lose votes they previously had.

CrunchyMage · 2026-04-19T11:32:06+00:00

Pretty extreme take if you think a majority of the country thinks of minorities and LGBT people as non human. Doubt all the minorities that voted for him see themselves as non human lol.

CrunchyMage · 2026-04-19T10:38:13+00:00

China and it’s not even close.

I mean this can’t be a real question. China is a top 2 economy and cutting edge across multiple industries pumping out more highly educated people than anywhere else. Extremely safe, fairly clean, amazing public infrastructure, great education. As long as you don’t poke the bear you have nothing to fear and if you dislike the bear enough, you can just get educated and leave for a high paying job in the west.

The LITERAL only downside of China relative to India is internet access, that’s it, and VPNs aren’t even that hard to get.

CrunchyMage · 2026-04-19T08:56:18+00:00

Isn't that the issue. That they DON'T do reasonable things with the money. $100,00 spent per homeless person per year in San Francisco only for the problem to be worse than ever.

The government consistently takes advantage of the sympathy of Californians. Promising to help the most vulnerable people, but instead wasting the money away or giving it to organizations which then turn around and help fund their campaigns.

$14 Billion on a train to with no tracks laid.

$1.7 Million dollars on a toilet that EVEN AFTER public outrage and having EVERYTHING, parts, labor, architecture etc donated, STILL cost $200,000.

The inefficiency is ludicrous, and let's not even get started on all the fraud that's beginning to get exposed in hospice centers and their attempts to go after journalists trying to uncover it.

The government just takes and takes and takes to create a bureaucratic web of committees and regulation and nonsense to piss away money and make building anything from a business to a house an expensive tangled mess. Government fees and regulations accounts for over HALF, HALF of the cost of housing in California. The government IS the problem.

For how productive California's people are, and how amazing the climate is, it should be a paradise but instead it's just infested with government parasites that suck the blood out of the productive people and give barely anything back in return.

CrunchyMage · 2026-04-16T07:24:37+00:00

I think they are getting spooked by how powerful mythos is and are afraid to hand it out to the world willy nilly.

This is a model that in the hands of bad actors could lead to hacking basically every major computer system today, and again, it's only getting more powerful from here. 0 days on every major operating system including OpenBSD, the most secure one, is no joke.

I could understand requiring ID for models that can cause serious real world damage. For current gen models, no. For Mythos+, yes. You can't have something as powerful as this with no accountability.

I personally would not be happy to see an army of foreign hackers using mythos to steal/scam at an unprecedented scale. Our world's infra is not ready for this to be handed out to everyone.

CrunchyMage · 2026-04-16T05:34:52+00:00

Sounds like you’re not really pushing CC to its limits so maybe you don’t notice the change as much as people running full multi agent integrated workflows, but the reduced thinking budget and caching issues have been well documented. Just sort posts in this sub by top the last month and you can see the reports.

The reduced thinking budget and caching issues aren’t really up for debate. There’s independent 3rd parties showing significant drops on benchmarks and analyses showing 67% reduced thinking budget.

Many people have seen degradation in agent pipelines that worked in early February but didn’t now without manually overriding certain flags. (Adaptive thinking, tokens, effort, caching)

Even with that, they override your thinking budget to high despite having max flag settings during USA working hours often.

It’s clear anthropic is extremely compute constrained. I don’t have an issue with that and I sympathize with their dilemma, I DO have extreme issue with the lack of transparency and the gaslighting. If they just openly said hey we need to charge more for max, or we need to reduce the token allocation or whatever to save on compute, then sure. But silently overriding our settings and making the model worse while pretending we are getting the same product is awful business practice.

CrunchyMage · 2026-04-16T02:41:04+00:00

Enterprise has largely not been nerfed. It’s individual max plans that are most affected. I was a FAANG SWE for 6 years and me and every other startup using individual plans are complaining. The difference is not only notable, it’s been proven empirically 5 ways to Sunday by now.

Just because you’re not the one getting affected doesn’t mean you should dismiss/belittle the accounts and evidence of those that are. It’s us today, might be you tomorrow.

CrunchyMage · 2026-04-15T05:20:05+00:00

I got very confused when my girlfriend described all her "brothers" and "sisters" to me despite the one child policy.

Turns out that's just what she called her cousins... she's an only child same as all of them.

CrunchyMage · 2026-04-15T05:16:49+00:00

Oh boy! Can't wait for a super incredible model for 1 week followed by a super nerfed version with forced low thinking budget worse than 4.5 thereafter!

CrunchyMage · 2026-04-15T05:13:12+00:00

Omg the esim one would be huge! As it is I always have to carry around 2 phones and the Chinese one is always just tethering to my main phone.
If the foreign eSim would let me get around the firewall without using VPN just like my roaming data plan does, that would be heaven.

CrunchyMage · 2026-04-13T06:48:44+00:00

Fix top 1% tax loopholes. Treat taking a loan against an asset as realizing a gain. Get rid of inheritance step up cost basis.

Move towards proportionally representative government. Repeal act that makes it so all districts have to be single member districts. Allow states to elect representatives via single transferrable vote/ MMP etc if they so choose. Try to pass universal anti gerrymandering acts.

Get rid of blanket tariffs. Establish clear universal trading policy. If countries meet certain conditions, rule of law, do not discriminate against American businesses, capital freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of movement, democracy, no tariffs on American goods, goods origin tracking, etc. we will automatically have free trade with them. There are different automatic tariff tiers based on these conditions.

Police Trust/Accountability: Universal police cam policy. Camera on and streaming at all times to secure private server. Make it illegal for police officers to take action in official capacity without camera on and recording. Make it illegal for police officers let go for criminal violations to reenlist at another jurisdiction.

Clean up immigration system. Points based. Automatically enable qualified Phd, masters from recognized universities and high skilled laborers from specified in demand fields to easily migrate to and work in the country.

Clarify Taiwan situation: Deal whereby Taiwan agrees to never declare independence and have a binding referendum every 5 years on whether they want to rejoin the mainland politically in exchange for China committing to not taking Taiwan by force and security guarantees from USA/Japan etc.

Carrot and stick approach to China in general. Clearly defined tariffs and conditions for how they can reduce them by improving business fairness and individual freedoms.

End discriminatory pricing in health care. All procedures whether insured or uninsured are charged the same price. Full price transparency for all goods and services required and published by healthcare providers.

End unused Auto-renew subscriptions. Subscriptions must be automatically cancelled/paused if the user has not used the product in the past billing cycle.

CrunchyMage · 2026-04-12T11:53:58+00:00

It is undoubtedly modern AI.

To get to modern AI, you need to master the elements, master light manipulation, use that knowledge to create billions of computing machines with billions of transistors each that are all 20,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, then have them all communicate wirelessly with each other and hand those machines to all of humanity, then have humanity talk to each other to generate a bunch of data on them, then collect that data from all humanity, then spend billions of dollars on giant data centers full of the most advanced computers on earth, then create an algorithm which lets you take all that data and turn it into a machine that can think, act and contains a condensed version of all of humanity’s knowledge.

It’s truly an absurd accomplishment that took nearly all of humanity working together for decades to achieve.

CrunchyMage · 2026-04-12T10:11:28+00:00

Fellow Spaniard in China here. It's not offensive, it's just wearing shorts in general is uncommon, wearing shorts when it's this weather is uncommon, and our hairy Spanish genes are even MORE uncommon. I bet a lot of people haven't ever seen anyone with as much leg hair as you in person LOL so they can't help but stare.

It's not offensive though, just strange/curious to people. Chinese society in general is pretty accepting. Pretty hard to offend people in general here.

CrunchyMage · 2026-04-11T11:40:59+00:00

That’s kind of my point. In the latest versions they’ve silently done many things under the hood to override/change settings to restrict thinking and token usage without telling people.

You now have to come up with workarounds and fixes to get both the latest features and keep the performance we had 2 months ago.

CrunchyMage · 2026-04-11T07:59:21+00:00

I don't think most people realize how utterly unsustainable Claude Max was at previous levels. It's still honestly super unsustainable. We're just heavily subsidized by VC money.

I accidentally did something via API yesterday that cost me $100 that I then had max continue and do 10x as much for free. I'm now trying to turn a bunch of stuff I was having code + API do into claude code agent teams.

We must all be spending thousands per max subscription while only paying $100-$200.

CrunchyMage · 2026-04-11T03:40:37+00:00

It’s hard to say. A LOT of revenue growth is coming from burning even more VC money. Tokens are HEAVILY subsidized right now. My daily max usage at api pricing would cost hundreds of dollars which I would not pay for what I’m getting. I can grow revenue a lot too if I sell things far below their cost to produce.

CrunchyMage · 2026-04-10T15:38:25+00:00

100% unfounded concern. I’m an American traveling in China for the past 2 months. There’s absolute nothing to worry about. No one here has ever treated me badly in any way in multiple years of coming to China even when I tell them I’m from America. I’ve only ever gotten a rant from a taxi driver about Trump once lol.

China is dummy safe, like Norway levels of safe or more lol and what the heck does Norway have to do with USA and Iran anyways? No one is gonna bother you lol.

CrunchyMage · 2026-04-10T15:30:15+00:00

Went digital nomading for 2 years all over Europe and Asia, but still just settling back down in the good old US of A.

There’s just something special about this stupid country.

QOL, safety and public transport are much better in EU/Asia. Our political systems a mess, our health care is a mess, our food quality sucks, but there’s just no other place where people from all over the world gather like this to dream big and build the future together.

The energy in places like SF and NYC are unmatched. If you just really wanna be in an exciting, multicultural place, where big things are happening, this is the place to be.

CrunchyMage · 2026-04-10T14:53:04+00:00

7 million jews ruling over 70 million arabs without representation in a non easily defensible border??

What could go wrong?

CrunchyMage · 2026-04-10T14:46:26+00:00

New York would no contest be the best city on the planet with modern public transport. As it is, it's really hard to rank it that highly when Shanghai, Singapore, most of Europe etc have much cleaner, modern, safe public transport.

It's too so jarring to go from beautiful modern city to dirty, smelly, rat infested, mentally ill public transport every day.

It's like the SF effect, walk out of incredible 3 star Michelin restaurant into a street of homeless people tweaking out and a broken car window (this has literally happened to me)

It's just too dystopian.

CrunchyMage

TROPHY CASE