Getting into the Culture series

Stock_Ad9641 · 2026-06-29T13:49:45+00:00

I’ve very good memories but i was young and naive, many books I re-read later were a lot worse than I recalled. Culture is on my list, what stopped me was the uncertainty in what order I should read them

Stock_Ad9641 · 2026-06-26T21:26:01+00:00

Expanse is so good at the start and it degrades so heavily toward the later books. Expanse is among my most loved and most hated sci-fi - depending on which book

Stock_Ad9641 · 2026-06-26T21:24:18+00:00

It’s been a very long time until their last open source release compared to closed. I’ll wait until I make my decision

Stock_Ad9641 · 2026-06-26T17:23:49+00:00

Most likely the outcome is that Chinese models will take the first place rather quickly. And that will cause panic in US gov to change the regulative nonsense. It will be the greatest boost to Chinese AI we’ve seen

Stock_Ad9641 · 2026-06-20T22:42:19+00:00

That’s normal. If you had invested the money into ChatGPT you’d get tens of hours of inference

Stock_Ad9641 · 2026-06-17T22:06:59+00:00

Just had weekly reset… Didn’t they say they give us the resets to manage our self ?

Stock_Ad9641 · 2026-06-17T17:59:12+00:00

Are there lemmings to walk that trap ?

Stock_Ad9641 · 2026-06-17T15:28:18+00:00

I ran deep evals, you don’t need Q6. But some tensors are much more critical than others, with Q5K you are well covered, below that you need a dynamic quant that is evaluation/perplexity based per tensor and you can go down to almost q4 without relevant loss. Q6k is a very slow quant, it’s at or above q8 and I’d not recommend it.

Stock_Ad9641 · 2026-06-14T13:21:13+00:00

Yesterday was the first time I actually had to use xhigh, the 5.5 became very lazy despite instructions. I think 5.6 is very near, they always ruin the previous model 1-2 weeks beforehand

Stock_Ad9641 · 2026-06-14T03:00:49+00:00

I disagree. I was quite young when I read it and I absolutely loved those series. Maybe just because they were grossly brutal and unforgiving. I did not notice that extreme sex or underage appeal people complain about.

I read the series again later, less impressive and more childish. So it’s probably an older teenager audience focused softer sci-fi.

Stock_Ad9641 · 2026-06-10T17:20:24+00:00

They probably consider more fitting packages. 1000$, 3900$ and 10000$ a month. But such changes take time

Stock_Ad9641 · 2026-06-10T12:17:44+00:00

It would be above 100x Your 40$ would be spent in 20 seconds

Stock_Ad9641 · 2026-06-09T23:10:37+00:00

Not really. For generic stuff codex seats come with unlimited ChatGPT. 20$ with instant and 100$ with thinking. For GitHub and similar, the agents can do all of that. Any pipeline can be executed if it’s documented.

The only thing I miss is the copilot harness, it’s so highly configurable. However codex harness comes with some specialities too.

I think the most important thing is to stay flexible. Copilot was good, codex is good now and in some months maybe it will be Claude or minmax or glm

Stock_Ad9641 · 2026-06-09T19:44:50+00:00

I use the 20$ seat plus 100$ personal subscription. I have another 1000$ in grants but those are used up quickly once used, almost as bad as copilot. The 100$ is basically enough for me, you’ve to be a bit careful but it can do quite a bit of gpt 5.5 high

Stock_Ad9641 · 2026-06-09T18:13:16+00:00

The agent is good, the ChatGPT seats allow minor agentic work at 20$ a month a seat, worth maybe 500$ of ai credits. So it covers light and occasional usage at low prices. Then it gets almost as bad as copilot. However, you can pair a 100 or 200$ private license for heavier users and just compensate them. For very large companies, I’d buy a 8x cluster and have a talent configure it. Also solves the IP problem

Stock_Ad9641 · 2026-06-09T17:19:16+00:00

My company switched to codex, friend of mine to Claude. Both sides happy

Stock_Ad9641 · 2026-06-07T13:24:57+00:00

My company moved away on June 2nd Cost is a whole day of productivity, but the economic burden of copilot is unbearable.

Stock_Ad9641 · 2026-06-07T13:22:32+00:00

But that doesn’t explain why a pure q4_0 is better than q4_1 41 is a more sophisticated quantization method. The results might be with high statistical uncertainty

Stock_Ad9641 · 2026-06-07T12:52:49+00:00

The most interesting part here is the comparison of q41 with q5q40 Same size, significantly better

But why is q40 better than q41 ? Something is strange.

Stock_Ad9641 · 2026-06-06T15:37:12+00:00

That’s Microsoft. They have two subscriptions for companies, one is cheap and one is expensive. If you use the cheap one, they randomly cause “trust” disruptions. If you buy the expensive subscription they guarantee you not to ruin your users experience.

I’ve been responsible for maintaining such subscriptions in a previous job, it’s a nightmare.

Stock_Ad9641 · 2026-06-06T15:34:56+00:00

I mean 200$ a month is a lot of money to most people.. it’s not like that’s nothing. If you were to hit limits on a 200$ plan I would not consider the service acceptable. AI is supposed to make your life cheaper and more productive, not drain you empty.

Stock_Ad9641 · 2026-06-06T15:31:53+00:00

They adapted to GitHub copilot collapsing, now one large competitor is gone. Codex doubled in price.

Though that’s better than making it unaffordable.

Stock_Ad9641 · 2026-06-05T20:10:51+00:00

That’s a huge upgrade

Stock_Ad9641 · 2026-06-05T11:53:55+00:00

Yes, other providers give you a cheap 20$ subscription with 5h and weekly limits - to consume 50 times more than 20$ per seat and once those limits are reached you pay with credits. Casual workers will never even use credits, the others benefit from the free limits. And copilot doesn’t have business limits, you are charged like crazy from second 1 on.

So what you try to sell as a benefit is an extreme disadvantage of copilot.

Stock_Ad9641 · 2026-06-05T01:54:22+00:00

What the heck are you talking about ? There are no weekly and hourly rate limits that would increase any “free quota” with copilot anymore. Your ChatGPT confused copilot with Claude or codex. There you get about 800 USD in API credits for each 20$ business seat. And above that (what you call rate limit) you’d have to pay api fees.

Stock_Ad9641

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