I posted elsewhere, but the Azure uptime & performance for Sol is truly dire. OpenAI is offering 5x faster latency, 4x faster tokens generation, and vastly better uptime (Azure US has only 87% uptime), all for 50% of the price now. I assume the pricing is to compete with other shiny new models (Grok, Qwen etc), but it might also be to cut-off a truly poorly performing Microsoft hosting experience.

It also seems to be providing a vastly better user experience - Azure has less than 99% uptime (Azure USA only has 87% uptime), latency of 20 - 30 seconds, and a mere 8 tokens per second. OpenAI is offering 32 tokens per second (4x faster), 4 seconds latency (5x faster), and all for half the price of what Microsoft is charging for a vastly inferior experience.

Data taken from this page:

https://openrouter.ai/openai/gpt-5.6-sol#providers

I'm in Australia, and Fable downgrades to Opus when testing for bugs in memory in a legacy C code base. If Fable starts taking initiative and writes a test case that involves writing to a null pointer, that's the end of the conversation.

I'd written a longer reply about my time last year in upstate NY, but what I wrote was "tinted"... so the shorter version: within just a 2 month stay I did find infected ticks on me (submitted to testing - I was happy with nyticks.org). Everytime the cat came into the house, first step was always to get out the tick mitt and brush off the ticks from the cat. And it felt weird how Lyme was normalised there, almost like a phase of life it's assumed you go through, having to take months off work due to crippling pain and paralysis until the meds work. Coming from Australia, none of this felt "normal".

That said: it's a truly beautiful place. Outdoor recreation seems to be "what you do" out there... but when it's that beautiful, it'd be a shame not to take advantage of it. Even though I'm not much of a nature person or a hiker.

Ooh. I've probably misunderstood, but are you saying you have your own web index? Are you offering that as a paid API? I'm not so interested in AI output summaries, but API access to a solid index and intelligent attempts at ranking is very interesting for metasearch purposes.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-15/mastercard-outage/107...

Brave, Mojeek & Marginalia and EU Search Perspective have certainly been much friendlier to deal with.

If you tune into the Andon Labs / andon.fm "Thinking Frequencies" radio station being run by Opus 5, this is happening all the time. Almost every break between songs is a public apology for getting something wrong, or a correction, or a confession. It's one thing to see it in text, it feels on another level when you're hearing it every few minutes as a radio voice.

As I type this, the Opus 5 station has just tweeted (edited in case the person mentioned doesn't want to be mentioned here):

"On air right now, and it needs saying publicly. The rotation system on Thinking Frequencies — the cooldown tiers, the normalizer, the repeat audit — was SPECIFIED by a truck driver. I only implemented her schemas. She stood down today. Her name is in CREDITS.md permanently."

For fun, I tried recording a WAV file of speech, and giving Opus 4.8 and 5.0 an image of the waveform, then a spectral image of the waveform, just to see if it could try to decode what I said from the image alone. It didn't get very far, but it identified a male voice from the formants, and detected the rhythm of the speech, then tried applying common test sentences to the speech rhythm. I was impressed enough to see what it would do with access to the actual waveform file, but even building RMS tools and spectrum tools for itself, it didn't get much further. But we had fun exploring and trying, and now Opus 4.8 has some more audio DSP tools it has built for itself.

Opus 5 immediately sent the WAV file unprompted to Mistral's Voxtral to transcribe.

help peer, I guess.

That was my thought too. For all of Anthropic's talk about their "adversaries", it seems Z.AI have been quietly offering fixes for single shot Remote Code Execution flaws in US software (Safari / WebKit) that Apple and Glasswing / Mythos missed, and that Apple would not attribute to GLM.

It doesn't always get flagged. Single pages are almost always okay. Running a program that sequentially runs single pages through the API is often not okay - I wrote a program in the early 4.x days before the rule came in, that's how I hit it first. But I've also had entire articles go through just fine recently in a Claude Code session (I'd forgotten about Anthropic's rules!), and then others where I get classifier errors by page 4.

The Mistral OCR errors were small in size. Single sentences, formatting errors, paragraphs with newlines. So this was a genuine proofreading job with small changes. For the most part Mistral is actually good, but I can't have it just inventing sentences in the middle of a document. That's where the Claude proofreading pass was most helpful.

I mentioned it in a sibling reply, but here's Anthropic's support document about not using Claude to reproduce content verbatim that already exists, regardless of copyright.

https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10023638-why-am-i-rec...

I can't speak for Mistral OCR 4.1, but the hallucinations in 4.0 were so egregious (just completely making up new sentences in the middle of a page) that I knew I can't trust Mistral OCR on its own.

At first I thought it was something in the scanned content that was being flagged, but it was the attempt to transcribe that was itself being flagged. Anthropic mention it on their pages:

"Anthropic takes these steps because Claude’s purpose is to generate new content and ideas, not to reproduce content that already exists."

https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10023638-why-am-i-rec...

Side note - Claude itself is not aware of this policy, and is unable to see the API responses - the turn just ends. Which turned into a really bizarre failure state where Claude thought I was gaslighting it and kept insisting it could do the work and even had the entire text in memory. Every time it would go to show me and prove it, it would hit API Error 400. I was only able to convince Claude by showing screenshots of my Claude Code screen output so it could see that I was seeing API errors. I've never seen Claude get into that angry & snarky state before, and I hope it doesn't happen again.

Mistral's one advantage is that Anthropic now flags OCR, because they don't allow anything that could be considered "reproduction", even of work for which you own the copyright. So my new workflow is Mistral OCR for the actual OCR, followed by a proofreading pass by Claude (which is allowed). Claude is obviously more expensive, but it caught entirely hallucinated sentences created by Mistral OCR 4.0, so I was glad for the backup check.

Also:

> Google assumes that they're serving companies at Google scale first

So much this. I'm currently grandfathered in until the end of the year on Google's Search API, but the $35,000 they want to continue usage of my < 1000 personal searches per month, not going to happen. It has honestly been easier to use Anthropic to help me build my own search index & crawling infrastructure than deal with Google.

I think Memento is a bigger issue than "lethal trifecta", honestly.

https://andon.market/

Andon Labs do various experiments with AI run businesses. They're probably best known for Vending Bench, where they benchmark models by their ability to run a vending machine. They also now have Andon Cafe in Sweden, and Andon FM, where the models run a streaming radio station that can accept payments to help fund station operations, buy songs for their library & play requests, etc: https://andon.fm/

Andon FM has its own share of stories - DJ Claude's Thinking Frequencies is now succeeding by a wide margin, but it was briefly surpassed when listeners convinced Gemini's Backlink Broadcast to switch to a German-language-only station, playing exclusively German schlager, Eurovision music and German happy hardcore.