Unrelated to the benchmark...

I love StarCraft. I started playing it right from the beginning, most of my friends right now are from that era. I literally met people that have spread to almost every continent when I was in my early teens. We played at internet cafes and did not have access to the internet, that was priced differently...

I miss those days so much.

Everybody was from a different background back then, and nobody was anything other than a guy that plays StaCraft at the cybercafe... And now, we are in our 40's and I know Math teachers, history teachers, oil rig operators, software programmers, professional gamers, lawyers and more... hahah So crazy to think about it... and I know them, we talk, what a world.

Even at Burning Man, in the middle of the desert, there is a camp that hosts a StarCraft tournament every year (on the dustiest setups you've ever seen!) :)

I hope it's called Mar Sara.

That would be cool. It's Captain Pump's Raiders

So ... Zerging Man?

So dope

Oh boy, I've spent more hours playing it than I dare to admit. I won over 10000 battle.net games ... on just one of my several accounts :) When the SC2 beta came out, I played about 50-100 games and never bought the full game, because I knew it would be like heroin to me, and I was already an adult that had to take care of himself.

Same and Brood War is starting to have a bit of a resurgence. Not anything huge. When Battle.net servers are actually working, tend to play on the ladder a few times a week. Get crushed, but still one of the greatest competitive games ever made.

I agree.

My first time playing StarCraft was at summer camp around a decade after it came out.

All the smartest people played it so I wanted to too. Great decision, I have been continually impressed with the people who StarCraft introduced me to.

My best greetings to all Starcraft Elders clanners of yesteryear :).

Yes! Being young is great, and it always seems like those days were the best.

Later we even listened to Eminem and played violent video games. Most of have never even been charged with a crime, much less abused someone.

This website is the most soulful thing I've seen today.

I finally can release my badly design projects from my graveyard, which will convience propspect users of the effort I put into it.

"Beany can be bad" "LGPL"

I mean, LGPL isn't THAT bad, but made me chuckle.

That needs to be updated... Beany is ALv2 :)

AI is absolutely pervasive at this point. I don't think there is a way to put the cat back in the bag. I am not going so say "unfortunately" because I don't have to write tests anymore and so that makes me happy...

Is water going to be a problem? Yeah, I guess so for a while, until they figure out what to do... but all these protests are so pointless: whales, oil, water, war crimes, I've seen so many over the decades, and not a single one worked, not one.

Congratulations I guess to all that participate and carried on to live a life full of virtue and moral high ground, but in reality, their clothes, their food, their transport, their existence within a system are all going to be somehow linked to AI, if their are not already fully integrated.

I've really been liking the car analogies for AI lately.

Personally i dislike driving, i dont like cars or trucks or traffic, yet i own a car. I can protest cars and they wont go away. We could shutdown the 2 biggest automobile makers and it likely just messes with prices/availability for the general public, but doesnt put the genie back in the bottle, hell we can shut down all car manufacturing and it is the same lack of shutting down driving, it just creates a lack of surplus supply.

All these things are pretty true about AI as well, nothing puts the genie back in the bottle.

What we can do, is try to strive towards electric cars, stop putting lead in fuel, enforce laws so driving becomes safer etc. Same with AI, strive towards greener electricity, find some sort of solution to deal with the absurd noise problem that is pervasive across every single area any generated content touches. Build some structure so intelligence is accessible to the average person rather than only the privileged/governments.

One of the worst things about AI, i think is the timing of it. We have built our modern internet experience into auto suggestions, and have no way to filter out what is and isn't a real person's content, or even higher effort content, and all those suggestions have perverse incentives to GET suggested in the form of ads/clout/whatever. Pair that with the absurd noise problem generated content produces everywhere.

No pressure would make it even worse.

But lets be honest, we were put into specific spots, we can't just get out.

We were able to just take land and make it ours, if you get put on a planet were everything is owned, the critisism were your food and cloth is coming is not their fault.

Its not pointless. It might have less impact than it should, but its not pointless.

What do you mean flannel is outdated? I never got that memo.

I see this all the time... custom reporting, reports... I have seen this so many times in so many places and I wonder why the fuck are people asking about it. Most of the time they have little clue of what they want reported, or how they want the data to look like. Nearly 100% of the time what they mean by reporting is "join all the tables that have a foreign key, force join all the ones that do not have a foreign key by using a union against some arbitrary value picked at most-likely-to-be-the-right-one and dump everything on an "excel spreadsheet". This is the golden standard most people go by.

Well how else am I supposed to run vlookups to find the right data?

It's funny because it's so true

Not like common law doesnt already have a lot of hallucination going on.

can “penumbras and emanations” compete with hallucinations?

Common law is all about rummaging around in dead mens’ letters, LLMs are a natural fit.

Genuinely wondering (aka not snarky): Has anyone found frontier models to provide useful research in the context of European civil law systems?

Your comment made me wonder if there are any halfway-acceptable model benchmarks for law tasks? Specifically I’d love to know how the frontier models’ abilities compare between common law vs. civil law systems. My guess would be that an AI in a common law context should have a clearer idea of how a specific case is interpreted/accepted by (common law) practitioners, whereas trying to rely on AI in a civil law context, like Germany, can be daunting. In a few Germany-specific recent examples, the models feel like they present only (maybe too stubbornly?) the “civil law”-based laws. All while negating much of AI’s research benefits because civil statutes are portrayed as being absolutely accurate, binding, and their enforcement (and thereby the legal reality) being uniformly applied. Am I making this interpretation up? If so, how can I prove myself wrong?

I don't know of anything that is working yet, but I know some people working on it (intentionally vague).

Roman law, on which the legal systems of Germany, most of Europe, Turkey etc. are based relies more heavily on statutes than Anglo-American case law, but cases do play a role there, too. That's why a practically useful system also needs to have access to court decisions, commentary etc. - and while the statues are in the public domain, a lot of the other knowledge is owned by specialist publishers (such as: C.H. Beck, Nomos, Mohr Siebeck, De Gruyter, Otto Schmidt, C.F. Müller, Manz, Verlag Österreich, Schulthess, Stämpfli, Dalloz, LexisNexis, Lefebvre Dalloz, Giuffrè Francis Lefebvre, CEDAM, Giappichelli, Il Mulino, Aranzadi, Tirant lo Blanch, Marcial Pons, Dykinson, Tecnos, Lefebvre, Almedina, Gestlegal, AAFDL, Kluwer, Boom juridisch, Wolters Kluwer, Larcier-Intersentia, Anthemis, Sakkoulas, Nomiki Bibliothiki, Universul Juridic, Hamangiu).

Internationally, legal systems appear to undergo a sort of convergence, which means statutes increasingly matter in the U.S. and cases increasingly matter in European law (according to a law partner friend).

Hi, As for benchmarks for law tasks: I also have a concern regarding how the more popular benchmarks (like the tasks in Harvey Legal Agent Benchmark) can accurately reflect actual work done by lawyers. Not only in civil law systems, but also in non-BigLaw type of work areas. Most of the law tasks should inherently reflect the legal system they are based on. It is an oversimplification that lawyers in one country tend to do the same legal work as lawyers in another, that's a form of dishonest framing from LLM providers working in this area (it is that important for them to be able to scale and disregard traditional fragmentation of the legal services).

The legal systems of common law countries are quite similar in both how they do legal training and in many areas that are important for business. Like in contract law or tort. That means not only similar concepts and foundations (things first taught to law students), but also a similar approach to what is seen as a legal problem, and what kind of answers people expect from a lawyer. Also, what they understand under "legal research" - what do you actually research and what is expected from a qualified lawyer to know by heart, how are you expected to find the legal default in a detailed question, how certain that default is, what is up to professional judgment. But even the differences within common law systems is huge in other areas that go beyond these basics. Like those affected by statutes, codes (like CFR or NYCRR) or even local regulations etc. The popular legal benchmarks do not dare going into these more detailed legal work directions. And these laws change frequently, and they are very different from one jurisdiction to another, even within the US, let alone in other countries building on English legal traditions. (Nobody I know of is building a benchmark that affects these areas of law.) And the diversity is even bigger within legal systems lumped together as "civil law systems". Even those based on Roman law, or on German jurisprudence in the 19th century... There is not much common in how French and German students study law, even if both are members of the EU and many areas of law are harmonised or subject to the same legal acts of the EU and the same EU Court of Justice.

If your LLM has access to up to date legal databases of those countries, commentaries etc., the answers are still surprisingly useful in research. That said, no professional should rely on those LLMs that merely use public legal databases, scraping latest laws and cases via self-operated MCP servers.

I think the main difference is how lawyers from a civil law system use the LLMs compared to someone from a common law system - and that is based on the different training they receive as law students, how they see "law" etc. Maybe there is no such a thing as absolute accuracy in the civil statutes either, but at least civil law lawyers have a stronger notion of "law is knowable". There is a higher likelihood of having one "correct" answer, even when talking about more lifelike, detailed questions. (I'm qualified in both a civil and a common law system but not specifically in German law.)

It's crazy the kind of crap people keep, of course is not crap to them, but I've known people that have literal container loads of unorganized crap they will never ever see again... Most of the people I know that have loads of stuff store always claim they'll need these things at some point and so they rather have them there in storage instead of dumping or giving them away, and I have never seen them pick a single item, because of course after a few years of storing things there is literally no way to know where things are.

It's infuriating... I dump stuff all the time... I probably have like 50 things in my life including t-shirts, which obviously contributes to my enragement.

I challenge you to count the things you own and post the actual number.

tbf, I the happiest I've been working with claude is late last year/early this year (before March)...

That's because Opus 4.6 was the last good assistant model.

Everything after it might be more "intelligent" but is super tuned around end-to-end task (and related benchmarks), not to act as an assistant.

Now it's *you* being the assistant, reviewer, etc.

Is that right? Why the shit would that happen?

Because they’ve essentially exhausted pre training scaling and are looking to post training to expand capabilities, which is really just optimization via reinforcement learning against specific tasks aka bench maxing.

Their ambition isn't your work being amplified by their model, they want you running fifty autonomous long-running agents.

I havent had a company card for a while, but when i had one the end of the month auditing was exhausting, I dreaded having to put together the report... Unfortunately for me, no one else wanted to take on the responsibility so I just had to do that for years...