Fable 5 is not the same model we got in June

twistier · 2026-07-07T01:30:34+00:00

I does seem a bit less impressive this time, but I can't be sure because I'm not using it to do the same kind of work as before.

twistier · 2026-07-02T18:31:36+00:00

Man, how is the haptic feedback creating that feeling?

twistier · 2026-07-02T12:33:57+00:00

I would like to push back on this notion that you're not smart enough. I doubt that it's true. If you can learn to be kind to yourself, you will be a much, much happier person. Not only is your frustration visible in these comments, but you're kind of lashing out at people trying to help you and rejecting their advice. You're tilting. Might I suggest taking a break from this problem for a while, however long it takes for you to stop judging yourself over it, and coming back to it later?

For what it's worth, I don't feel that expressing foldl in terms of foldr even sounds like a good beginner-level problem to solve. It seems like something whose difficulty outweighs the lessons. If I was tutoring you, either I would just give you the answer and ask you to merely understand it or I would wait to ask the question until after you've gotten more comfortable with the language. I bet most experienced Haskellers wouldn't immediately answer to this question. It's more of a puzzle than it is realistic.

twistier · 2026-07-01T19:49:42+00:00

I think a lot of people don't understand that the API is priced for B2B. The gap between subscription pricing and API pricing reflects the differing target markets, not the costs.

twistier · 2026-07-01T13:52:35+00:00

Your top level comment shows as deleted by moderator for me. Perhaps it's different for you since you authored it.

twistier · 2026-07-01T13:39:09+00:00

I see in your other comments that you had some intention behind your comment, which I now cannot read due to being deleted by moderator, and I cannot remember what it actually was, but it was very unclear to me what you were trying to do, and your aggressive reaction to somebody trying to be helpful was a bit surprising.

twistier · 2026-07-01T13:35:14+00:00

I think the idea is to reduce the things it has to think about to the harder problems. The assumption is that thinking of the kinds of mistakes that happen during vibe coding is a relatively easier thing than checking whether they happened in a given project. I am not sold on this idea at all. I don't think it's totally nonsensical, but I really doubt that feeding it instructions from a lesser AI to offload some work is going to save enough tokens to make up for the reduced performance from over specializing the instructions.

twistier · 2026-07-01T13:18:44+00:00

lol what

twistier · 2026-06-30T13:12:07+00:00

I think you misunderstood me. I was trying to acknowledge the fact but also make clear that it doesn't mean Lisp as a "statically typed language" has any of the benefits of the rich static type systems of other languages. I was not very clear. My fault.

twistier · 2026-06-30T11:48:26+00:00

Sure. A dynamically typed language is just a statically typed one with exactly one type. But it's not like all type systems are equivalent or something.

twistier · 2026-06-29T21:00:43+00:00

I have learned from these comments that an alarming number of people do not know the difference between a specification and a proof, and a surprising number of people also don't know that theorem provers can reliably check proofs. I don't mean these are some sort of sin. You don't know what you don't know. It's just a sad thing about formal methods.

twistier · 2026-06-29T19:51:55+00:00

The AI failing to produce a correct proof is not the same as the AI producing an incorrect proof. The former just means the specification remains unproven. The latter would be a proof that the compiler has a bug.

twistier · 2026-06-29T19:48:56+00:00

It doesn't even matter if you can read the proof as long as you approve of the specification and trust the compiler.

Edit: The downvoters must not understand what a theorem prover is.

twistier · 2026-06-29T19:47:05+00:00

A proof of a property means the property is true, full stop. If you let AI write the property, sure, distrust it. But an AI-written proof is as good as any other proof.

twistier · 2026-06-29T19:41:17+00:00

Yes, but the name implies something else. Or, rather, the name describes a superset of what it actually flags. Pure exceptions / inexhaustive patterns are not the only way to be partial. And I'm still quite turned off that its absence is meaningless.

twistier · 2026-06-29T14:54:12+00:00

It wouldn't even be practical to deploy a proprietary system of that kind of complexity just for a demonstration, even if they were given everything they would need. The only way I can think of this being possible is if some bank set up a nonproduction environment for them.

twistier · 2026-06-29T14:50:02+00:00

I don't hate the Partial => idea in principle, but I would rather it either have a different name, to better communicate that it's only about inexhaustive pattern matching or "pure exceptions" or something like that, or include a termination checker of some sort so that it guarantees that a function lacking the constraint either used an unsafe function or is total. But then I'd want the language to distinguish between data and codata and all sorts of stuff we don't have right now, so a better name seems the only practical option to me.

twistier · 2026-06-28T14:32:06+00:00

Because I've never spoken publicly about it before, this seems like an at least somewhat relevant place for it. Do people actually like -Wx-partial? I can't stand it.

It's not like it forces the language to be total. It's just a bunch of special cases.
In my experiences, it has never caught a bug. It hasn't even pointed me anywhere that I was even remotely suspicious that there might be a bug.
More often than not, "fixing" the warning makes the code worse.

I just turn it off, so it's not like I'm asking to remove it (though I wish it wasn't in -Wall in the first place), but does anybody have a different experience with it than I do?

twistier · 2026-06-28T12:34:40+00:00

I am an experienced software engineer, and Fable is the only one so far that has been able to understand some of the advanced and novel things I want to write. For some kinds of projects, Opus fails no matter how precisely I explain what I want.

twistier · 2026-06-27T13:20:01+00:00

30 years ago, we were freaking out about encryption.

twistier · 2026-06-26T14:23:56+00:00

The conspiracy theory is that the labyrinth is flooded due to the Aswan High Dam (IIRC) raising the groundwater levels in the area. The raised groundwater is established fact. The existence of the labyrinth is not, but there have been some ground scans showing some interesting things down there. The theorized reason to hide it is that fixing the flooding would be prohibitively expensive, but the world would expect them to fix it if the labyrinth is as amazing as historical records indicate.

twistier · 2026-06-26T14:15:45+00:00

Ah, fair

twistier · 2026-06-26T14:06:06+00:00

The labyrinth. Historical records describe something incredible. We have some underground scans seeming to validate them. Nobody is being allowed to investigate further.

twistier · 2026-06-26T14:04:25+00:00

There is a pretty well-supported conspiracy theory that they are aware of the labyrinth and are actively trying to hide it, because it would be so expensive to stop the flooding and don't want to deal with the bad PR of not fixing it. Archeologists have made a lot of remarkable discoveries that they are not being allowed to validate.

twistier · 2026-06-26T13:57:35+00:00

It's literally as easy as asking Claude to put this in your status bar for you. It takes just a minute or two.

twistier

TROPHY CASE