I like how they highlighted Opus 5 as the best for “Agentic Coding” even though the number is slightly lower than Fable. Close enough for marketing, I guess!
But better cost for the same performance. According to AA, Opus 5 _medium_ is as smart as Opus 4.8 _max_, at 1/3 the cost and twice the speed. And if you need a better response, you can turn it up to 11.
Opus 5 also downgrades. it's now Fable -> Opus 5 ; Opus 5 -> Opus 4.8.
Unclear why they want to nerf their own products with sometimes right classifiers. I guess the government ban might've been real and not coordinated marketing?
I don't understand why people believe this conspiracy theory of "oh the government ban was just marketing". That claim feels so incredibly ridiculous to me. It cost Anthropic a ton of money and reputation, and worst of all: it absolutely killed their competitive advantage. They were 1-2 months ahead of OpenAI, but trump conveniently gave OpenAI the time they needed to catch up and push 5.6 out the door without having to lose their subscriber base to the competitor.
Hopefully it's not like old Opus, where it was actually more expensive than Fable cause it thought for half an hour, got it wrong, and then thought until you ran out of credits trying to come up with a correction, while Fable just went for it and did it in one go, getting it right the first time without thinking more than a few seconds.
Got an endless list of stuff done with Fable, Opus 4.8 was like a flailing braindead idiot in comparison. Maybe this one is a bit better if it's distilled.
Recent releases have said something to the effect (paraphrasing here):
"Use <less expensive or older model> for everyday tasks and <other non-critical stuff>. Use <more expensive or recent model> for complex coding tasks, refactoring large code bases, etc.".
Then, the next model/release emerges and the previous "best for complex" gets demoted to "everyday".
Obviously, it's all relative. But, it does beg the question: was the previous model really good for complex coding tasks or no? I mean, how is it now suddenly only good for the "easy" stuff?
I'm sure the marketeers would love for the public's assessment of complex versus easy to conveniently shift per their release cycles; or for the public to simply forget their prior marketing.
I think you're being overly cynical here. First, I don't see any claim that is the world's best model for agentic coding. Second, it is absolutely the best model in terms of coding performance vs. dollar, and it's raw performance seems very close to the frontier.
How are you supporting the claim that GPT 5.6 is "far more token efficient" than Opus 5? Tokens equal, output is cheaper for Opus 5 ($25/1M) than GPT-5.6-Sol ($30/1M), and it seems to outperform slightly on agentic coding benchmarks.
It would still be the best model per dollar if the score was 2% lower instead of 0.1% lower. Would it be ok to still give it the highlight color then?
How big of a lie is too big? Especially when no lie needed to be told at all: many including myself would have noticed the tiny 0.1% deficit and been suitably impressed by the Opus 5 result.
I’ll admit this is a small deception by today’s standards. I’m one of those who believes in truth for truth’s sake.
Using the most expensive model for all of your agentic coding work hasn’t been good practice for a long time. Not unless you have infinite money to spend.
Fable is typically used for key planning, architecting, and review tasks.
I think this is a case where you don’t understand the use case, not that the marketing department is making mistakes.
this feels like the perfect example of an LLM producing a long text document. And end users just using an LLM to summarize it without actually reading it
I have a suggestion, a major part of 3D modelling that many can struggle with is actually UV mapping. It can take a bit of time to do to get it right and if it could be done decently with one click with better results than with Blender or paid applications like Rizom. They'd probably be a decent market out there.
I always advise people to at least have a backup spot to send people to even if they don't maintain their own website, and I take my own advice. I expected something like this, so I've been dropping every album into an item in my Ko-fi shop: https://ko-fi.com/s/7e9f22c63b
Ko-fi is 25GB for free and 200GB for paid accounts, so most things will fit. I'll probably cross-post it to Patreon's new shop feature in the near future just to be safe.
That's a bit disappointing. As a user I just want Bandcamp to be owned by someone who gets it and leaves it alone. As far as I could tell, Epic barely touched Bandcamp. I'm unfamiliar with Songtradr but they have more incentive to integrate the core product into their services as they're in the industry and a smaller company (more need to make the acquisition work for them.) I hope it goes well.
I'm somewhat hopeful about the synergies here. Giving musicians an easy path to monetize their catalog, as well as market their availability to be commissioned by brands, is a good thing... especially when artists are being dually hammered by Spotify's deci-cents-per-stream industry baseline and live music promoters' anticompetitive behavior.
That said, there are ways Songtradr could abuse their new position of trust. I hope they're smart enough not to do that, but I also hope that an archival project for free downloads on long-inactive Bandcamp accounts is underway...
Interesting. I didn’t know about the union aspect and regardless, not retaining staff is a great way to stop understanding what’s important to preserve.
Agreed, and the other articles there also make excellent reading. The avationist blog does add content, though, notably a photo taken from the ground by a Chinese blogger of the same event.
Choosing a favourite guitarist is like trying to decide between a favourite wine. So many choices but to me he has always been one of my favourites.
It hard to explain why exactly I, as a guitarist enjoy listening to his music. His heartfelt singing was warming but truthfully it the lady in his life. "Lucille". That's the name of his guitar. With her, he had this amazing tone. Its unbelievable. The way he made Lucille sing. This voice he gave her or she gave him just makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up every time I listen to the pair of them.
People talk about legacy and he has an amazing one. It's true he has Inspired so many.
But don't be sad today, be happy for the man and the extraordinary life and legacy we celebrate which will continue to live on through his music.
PS I recommend the albums Deuces Wild and Riding with the King for your listening today.
His tone is what gets me too. I saw an interview with him on YouTube a few days ago with something that actually really surprised me. When he's on tour outside the US he doesn't bring an amplifier. He plays whatever the venue provides (usually, but not always, a Fender Twin Reverb). He also said he doesn't spend time setting it up. He controls the tone entirely from the guitar.
