Though interestingly, the observed difference in assessment suggests (though does not prove) that sampled AITA posters are not one of these models. I guess it’s possible they have a very different prompt though…

They go around barking orders at people who haven’t done anything wrong because they look “suspicious,” escalate what could otherwise be calm encounters by showing up to everything armed to the gills, make it clear they can’t wait to use force against persons and property, demonstrate a consistent us-vs-them mentality that looks the other way for clear cases of corruption, commit brazen armed robberies under euphemisms like “civil asset forfeiture,” bypass policymakers wherever possible and lie to them when they can’t, and then wonder why some people don’t like them very much.

What I hate about it is that I listen to that and hear not so much actual brazen idiocy, as yet another example of flaws in an obviously defective process being exploited to deflect accountability. The meta for depositions at this point is such that the ideal witness is a lot like someone who has just experienced severe head trauma. They can sound insane, idiotic, clueless, lazy, forgetful, obtuse, anything in the world except liable.

Its almost like the worst people among us have discovered that in high-trust societies if you have no morals you can engage in any behavior you wish.

And they are succeeding.

Challenge it and they escalate.

What’s the solution?

Well, the solution to the paradox of tolerance is to utterly void the social contract with those violating it as they have already seen fit to void it themselves. So the response is to immediately see their escalation and escalate beyond all reasonable measures. The wrath of a good man is not to be tempted and the fury of a patient man is to be avoided at all costs. Both wrath and fury are the appropriate response to one side of a social contract breaking said contract.

These folks will push until the dam breaks. When it does, all will be washed away by wrath and fury.

The way I think about it is that no system can survive unchecked bad-faith internal actors.

The problem is that wrath and fury of ordinary men will be countered by fascists with more power. And it can go to the very top. The entire system is designed to keep the chain of command, it doesn't give a shit about what you think your "social contract" is. Go figure how many criminals Trump has pardoned.

But America isn't a high-trust society. Roughly half of Americans proudly assert that their government must be small, gridlocked, and incompetent, and that's by design, because if the government becomes too efficient it will infringe upon Americans' freedom.

So instead Americans keep electing people who say "The government can't do anything right! Elect me and I'll prove it to you!"

Not exactly a mark of a high-trust society, whatever that means.

I am not greatly relieved by this post of Anthropic's. That said, they seem to have lines and are willing to stand by them; I don't see where OpenAI has done that. So, for now and from my point of view, the point goes to Anthropic.

Moving my subscription is not terribly consequential, but since the products are so similar and easy to substitute with one another for my uses, it seems best to participate in what in aggregate is a signal that is being noticed and commented on and interpreted to mean that a significant number of people who buy AI access do care about this.

I’m skeptical because while I can totally believe that the deal presently contains restrictive language, I can totally believe that OpenAI will abandon its ethical principles to create wealth for the people who control it. Sort of like how they used to be a non-profit that was, allegedly, about creating an Open AI, and now they’re sabotaging the entire world’s supply of RAM to discourage competition to their closed, paid model.

I was aware of your bill and had some activity related to it. Kudos to you and EOE for doing great work! Sorry your bill got fucked. :(

I was seethed by what happened to it, and sadly unsurprised by the attitude LE took. I want restraint, but I felt like so many concessions had already been made to get it into work session. E2EE was important, but we're still left with two ends that are deeply untrustworthy, and a bunch of regulations about data governance that I don't trust the state to be able to meaningfully oversee... especially among a patchwork of LEAs across the state. When lapses inevitably happen, I think they're going to mostly undetected, and those that are will be quietly swept under the rug without consequence to anyone.

My money: Minecraft, Breath of the Wild and Undertale are going to feature prominently.

What really gets me is the commenter at the end of the GH issue lecturing a maintainer on policy in their own tracker.

I've been messing with it the past couple days. I put it in a VM, on an untrusted subnet I keep around for agentic stuff. I see promise, but I'm not especially impressed right now.

1) Installation on a clean Ubuntu 24.04 system was messy. I eventually had codex do it for me.

2) It has a bunch of skills that come packaged with it. The ones I've tried do not work all that well.

3) It murdered my codex quota trying to chase down a bug that resulted from all the renames -- this project has renamed itself twice this week, and every time it does, I assume the refactoring work is LLM-driven. It still winds up looking for CLAWDBOT_* envvars when they're actually being set as OPENCLAW_*, or looking in ~/moltbot/ when actually the files are still in ~/clawdbot.

4) Background agents are cool but sometimes it really doesn't use them when it should, despite me strongly encouraging it to do so. When the main agent works on something, your chat is blocked, so you have no idea what's going on or if it died.

5) And sometimes it DOES die, because you hit a ratelimit or quota limit, or because the software is actually pretty janky.

6) The control panel is a mess. The CLI has a zillion confusing options. It feels like the design and implementation are riddled with vibetumors.

7) It actively lies to me about clearing its context window. This gets expensive fast when dealing with high-end models. (Expensive by my standards anyway. I keep seeing these people saying they're spending $1000s a month on LLM tokens :O)

8) I am NOT impressed with Kimi-K2.5 on this thing. It keeps hanging on tool use -- it hallucinates commands and gets syntax wrong very frequently, and this causes the process to outright hang.

9) I'm also not impressed with doing research on it. It gets confused easily, and it can't really stick to a coherent organizational strategy over iterations.

10) also, it gets stuck and just hangs sometimes. If I ask it what it's doing, it really thinks it is doing something -- but I look at the API console and see it isn't making any LLM requests.

I'm having it do some stuff for me right now. In principle, I like that I can have a chat window where I can tell an AI to do pretty unstructured tasks. I like the idea of it maintaining context over multiple sessions and adapting to some of my expectations and habits. I guess mostly, I'm looking at it like:

1) the chat metaphor gave me a convenient interface to do big-picture interactions with an LLM from anywhere; 2) the terminal agents gave the LLMs rich local tool and data use, so I could turn them loose on projects; 3) this feels like it's giving me a chat metaphor, in a real chat app, with the ability for it to asynchronously check on stuff, and use local stuff.

I think that's pretty neat and the way this should go. I think this project is WAY too move-fast-and-break-things. It seems like it started as a lark, got unexpected fame, attracted a lot of the wrong kinds of attention, and I think it'll be tough for it to turn into something mature. More likely, I think this is a good icebreaker for an important conversation about what the primetime version of this looks like.

I have set it up in a docker container that only has two host volumes mounted with the Obsidian vaults where I keep notes for two TTRPG campaigns, so a very low-stakes situation. I have set it up with a Discord bot so my players can chat about campaign and rules stuff (I already had player-facing notes for every session in the Obsidian vault in chronological order, plus a bunch of Markdown files with rules).

If the agent goes rogue and nukes my Obsidian vaults I have them backed up to Github private repos anyway which the agent cannot touch because I am not crazy to give it my SSH credentials.

I initially tried using Kimi-2.5 through OpenRouter and had the same experience you had with pretty bad tool use, not sure if this is a provider issue since it is a pretty new model. I switched to Gemini 3 through the Google AI Pro account I have for personal use and it was a lot smoother after that.

I have some experience with coding agents using Cursor for work and Antigravity for personal stuff, and the OpenClaw harness definitely seems worse, but for my low-stakes use-case I managed to paper it over with some edits to the AGENTS.md file.

But even in this very crude state it was already interesting to see one of my players giving the agent some info about his character, including an avatar image, and have the agent create a folder in my Obsidian vault to store this and update its memory file to be able to remember it for future interactions.

Scott Adams shaped my sense of humor and perspective on a lot of things. Even in later years, when I disagreed with him immensely on a lot of things, I found that there was a thread of insight in what he said regarding how people experience reality and the power of words and images. Ultimately I tuned out, but before I did I followed his line of inspiration (which he was very public about, often naming books and authors) for a lot of that and was not disappointed. I was grateful that the insight was again sincere, and learning them didn’t take me to the places I did not want to go — the places he himself seemed to sincerely enjoy.

It’s not hard for a lot of us to criticize who he became. He certainly had no shortage of criticism for others. I looked up to Scott a lot as a kid, and as an adult found him to be a man like any other, with limits and flaws… not merely in spite of his accomplishments, but often because of them. There’s a lesson there that I wish to carry too.