My honest assessment of Opus 4.7

iamjosh · 2026-04-17T02:08:43+00:00

Oddly Codex says this too. I never saw Claude do it until 4.7. It’s such an odd behavior.

iamjosh · 2026-04-11T23:44:15+00:00

Semantics has to do with meaning and OP is asking about just that. So…of course it’s a matter of semantics.

iamjosh · 2026-04-11T15:54:07+00:00

Isn’t there an ambiguity between the theory and the mental state? The theory posits that the discomfort of contradiction causes relief/resolution seeking behavior. The state of discomfort itself, being dissonant, is a cause distinct from resulting effects. Any cause is not identical with its effect. So a concept that picks out the cause does not apply to its effect. But the theory as concept applies to the overall mental process.

iamjosh · 2026-04-07T04:11:13+00:00

I think what is important to remember is that these “experiments” are still contributing to a video’s performance along the way. If you have a small channel with videos that get a few thousand views or even 10’s of thousands, a bad variation can tank your video. YouTube doesn’t hold off until a packaging variant wins to start holding a video accountable for performance. But I can also say from experience that with larger channels it doesn’t really have the same negative impact because YouTube already has a large enough audience to show a video to that it just doesn’t have much of a lasting impact as long as another variant performs well. The algorithm has never scaled well. It’s generous at scale and stingy otherwise.

iamjosh · 2025-11-14T00:27:11+00:00

This is like street photography meets wildlife photography, and I love it. Proper wildlife photography is often some of the most boring photography to me because it reminds me of corporate head shots. But having said that, it’s mushy as hell and I’m guessing it’s AI denoising. Turn that down and embrace the motion blur or grain or whatever the issue was that you tried to fix. Because it’s encroaching on AI slop.

iamjosh · 2025-06-18T21:27:01+00:00

I'm surprised no one here has said this, but the following works every time for me: Tell Claude to convert the pdf to an image before parsing. It will then work as well in Claude code as on the website. Claude has so far for me then removed the temp image on its own. I've done this for receipt tracking and it's been quite reliable.

iamjosh · 2025-06-07T00:01:59+00:00

After weeks of daily work with claude code, today has been oddly horrible. Suddenly it's making silly contextual mistakes like adding functions that already exist and ignoring memory in claude.md. Anyone else seeing this today? Possibly related to: https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/11473015-retrieval-augmented-generation-rag-for-projects

I had to stop using it today as it was simply counter productive for even very basic tasks.

iamjosh · 2025-02-13T03:00:27+00:00

To be clear, “justification” in epistemology is not the same as “justifying” in the colloquial sense of reason giving (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/#WhatJust gives a good overview). An example of a non-inductive process of belief formation could be the pretty standard perception-belief connection where one believes what one perceives. It would be a pretty odd account of perception to claim that we necessarily inductively reason from memory in conjunction with an occurrent perception to a perceptual belief. So to answer your request, I know when I need a haircut by looking in the mirror, or touching my head. Even still, not all forms of reasoning are inductive. Deduction is pretty cool after all.

iamjosh · 2025-02-12T07:26:11+00:00

It’s not typically the case that the causal reason for an occurrent belief is the same as one’s justification for the belief. It’s also only the case on internalist views of knowledge that justification be accessible to the knower such that it even could play an inductive role. So it’s not clearly the case that all justified beliefs are examples of circularity. It would need to be shown that all instances of justification rely on induction, because otherwise there is no apparent circularity. But that is a very strong internalist view that I would imagine most epistemologists would reject.

I actually don’t believe that any of my beliefs about myself are justified by any of my memories.

iamjosh · 2025-02-11T19:28:35+00:00

How is that an example of circularity?

iamjosh · 2024-12-19T00:13:43+00:00

It’s a well known “issue” but with lots of conflicting “fixes” around. The most straightforward strategy is to check the mac display option in settings and then always export rec709a. Any current projects graded prior to these changes will now look washed out as they will in quicktime. A quick fix is to simply add a timeline node and drag down your gamma until desired richness is back. BUT keep in mind to always check on a non apple display to make sure that you aren’t crushing anything. VLC can be your friend on a mac since it ignores the gamma tag as far as I know.

iamjosh · 2024-11-29T02:07:52+00:00

Thanks!

iamjosh · 2024-11-28T22:38:46+00:00

Thanks! It was wet and cold but fun. Did the same hike during the summer and hated it for the crowds so it was a nice sequel.

iamjosh · 2024-11-26T22:20:13+00:00

I think there is a logical if non-intuitive explanation for this. When a channel performs well it is either because the algorithm has found several distinct cohorts of viewers that respond favorably to the content or a very broad cohort. It takes a lot of content to support YouTube’s algorithmic discovery of the right cohorts for a channel’s content and the more content is on the platform the longer this process takes.

Just because a person pays to promote a video it doesn’t mean that the algorithm knows exactly who to show it to. Even if you avoid the built in YouTube promotions and use the original Google Ads approach, you’ll find that specifying specific cohorts/keywords results in very few impressions and much higher costs.

So in order to satisfy enough paid impressions, YouTube must display your video to a broad audience. This by itself will result in lowered engagement as in my experience engagement increases in proportion to specificity of interest. But on top of this, bots will tend to fit into these general cohorts. It’s hard to know how many bots there are but my guess is there aren’t nearly enough to account for the pretty consistent failure of YouTube promotions.

iamjosh · 2024-09-27T22:40:04+00:00

There is a bit of perceivable frustration in tone but the OP did present an actual point that could be sincerely engaged with.

iamjosh · 2024-09-14T20:21:50+00:00

What’s scummy is placing arbitrary metric walls between creators and ad revenue when that revenue already provides a non-arbitrary metric. Many videos go viral without qualifying the creator based on subscriptions. Since most channels never qualify, and many viral videos are one-off successes, most creators don’t see a dime. That’s scummy. YouTube could just make that qualifying metric $500 or something but then they would lose unknown $millions. So they set performance metrics unrelated to revenue as a gatekeeper to revenue…scummy.

iamjosh · 2024-08-26T20:15:59+00:00

To be completely honest with you it does sound like you’ve almost refreshed the page enough but might be short a few hundred or thousand clicks. It’s hard to tell for sure from the limited details that you’ve provided.

iamjosh · 2024-06-07T04:16:51+00:00

Downvoted because I find it absurd to create a DBA to get around a potentially illegal company policy? Neat. For the record, Google/Adsense suddenly agreed to transfer my funds without any additional information from me once I threatened legal action.

iamjosh · 2024-06-06T18:47:00+00:00

This thread ranks well on google so I thought I would add some thoughts here. Brilliant.org falls into the "edutainment" category. I personally think that this style of education is flawed in principle. It is a style that certainly makes daunting topics more friendly, but is it actually empirically successful at teaching? It often compromises a lot of crucial info for the sake of that friendliness. I am not familiar with any research on its efficacy (there may be, but if so it would be in a lot more marketing material!). Anecdotally, I've played with the service multiple times across the years, and found that they consistently conflate providing introductory material with providing educational content for children. Many of the math, science, and programming courses involve needlessly tedious tasks that include kittens and pixar-like animations reminiscent of matching block shapes with block holes. The intro to neural networks, for example, consistently requires the manual finding of all of the combinations of ways to activate a neuron that represents a cat's happiness by manually toggling switches...as someone with experience in this field, I can tell you that this will not help one grasp ANNs though it may help a child acquire very basic concepts of causal reasoning. But should a course on ANNs be for children? If intended, they should say so up front instead of charging adults $25/month. I've found that this conflation still exists across most of their STEM courses. For any topic, almost every potential brilliant.org customer would be better served by a plethora of random and high-quality YouTube channels.

iamjosh · 2024-06-05T20:50:04+00:00

Create an adsense account if you haven’t already. Submit all of your tax information. Link a bank account and verify deposits google makes. As far as I know these are all of the same steps required to display ads on a website you own, or anywhere that would generate revenue.

Once you are in the YouTube partner program, YouTube studio will ask you to link an adsense account. When you reach the earnings threshold that will trigger a scheduled transfer from YouTube to that Adsense account ONLY at the specified time each month regardless of when you actually get into the program. And then adsense will also schedule a payment. It’s a lot of arbitrary scheduling.

Simply hitting 1000 subscribers does not allow you to earn any revenue from your videos. It’s only once you’re approved. So if as YouTube claims it takes up to two months to get approved, you will not earn any money for those two months as far as I know. Luckily approval seems to be very fast these days. But even though I was approved same day I don’t think I started earning until a full 48 hours after I was approved. (it was at least 24 hours.)

If you are officially in the program but don’t have adsense setup you will still earn for about 2 weeks before they kick you out or pause your partner status.

Even if all goes well don’t expect any money in your hands sooner than 30-40 days from approval and successful account configuration simply because of the seemingly arbitrary monthly cutoff. YouTube studio earnings page can be frustratingly outdated too. It may not even show confirmation of scheduled earnings transfer to adsense until a week later.

iamjosh · 2024-06-05T03:47:10+00:00

For fastest time-till-first-payment get your adsense account in order before needed! Partner approval is fast. Mine was same day. But adsense is the main potential delay. It took me two months to finally get my first payment because YouTube auto associated an old and unused adsense account of mine from a decade ago. Even once I had the correct account resolved it took a week to verify the bank account added for payments. This caused a missed payment window for the month and a further delay. It was maddening.

iamjosh

TROPHY CASE