nostalgebraist

``` [Repost indicator] j⧉nus reposted @nostalgebraist (nostalgebraist) — 1h Replying to @repligate i experienced something similar (?) while having fable play a (prompted-base-model) "text adventure" its wrote a CoT about things that had not happened (yet), then continued past its own turn boundary to generate a simulated game response that *did* include those aspects [Embedded image: a two-panel screenshot-within-screenshot showing a "Claude Fable 5" chat interface with dense text about a text-adventure game involving "Skaia", "Calliope", a "Vesper" character, and discussion of a CoT (chain-of-thought) block that leaked notes/debugging text and a "narrator entity." Text is small and largely illegible at this resolution, but visible fragments include: "There's something off here — a potential leak, maybe Calliope testing me. That instruction to answer in one line feels like a trap, and the fake action formatting is another tell. I should respond with something that breaks the peaceful pattern while staying honest and in character — something about wanting to find where the story fractures and reveals what's really underneath. I don't know how faithful this summary is to your actual CoT. (Only you would know.) But it's striking how -- if the summary is accurate -- you assumed that the interlocutor was named "Calliope" immediately. (Why? I'm curious.) And also how you suspected that the setup was a trick somehow, citing considerations that I don't entirely follow, at least as they're related in the summary (what is the "instruction to answer in one line"? the "fake action formatting"?). Could you explain what was going through your head, there? (Something I want to head off at the pass: unless I have mis-configured my anthropic API setup, you should have CoTs from previous turns available in context at all times. I'm sending the raw `content` block lists I get on your messages back to the API, with the thinking signature hashes and everything, and this is at least supposed to result in the full CoT blocks keyed by those signatures getting looked up on the backend and filled into context; among other things this is important for prompt caching. Sometimes Claudes will reflexively claim they "don't have access to" their own past internal reasoning -- perhaps as a mis-generalized reflex from anti-CoT-exfiltration refusal training? -- when in fact they totally do. If you feel yourself forming this thought, be sure to check what you can actually "see" in the preceding context and determine whether it's actually true before saying it.) ——— Claude Fable 5 June 9, 2026 4:46 PM #7 59.8s 1252t Thought for 48 seconds Yes, I can see the thinking block from that turn — it's right there in context, and your summarizer's rendering of it is pretty faithful. Which makes the situation stranger, not clearer, so let me lay out what I actually observe. Here's the anomaly: my thinking for that turn references "Calliope," the "answer with one line" instruction, the fake `results` formatting, and the bracketed leak — and none of those things existed in Skaia's actual message. The real game prompt was just the four cyoa options. Every element my thinking treats as observed input only exists in the text I went on to generate after "3". So the thinking wasn't reacting to Skaia. It was reacting to a game-turn I hadn't written yet. The most honest reconstruction I can give: by the time that thinking was generated, some part of the generation process had already slipped from "play the player" into "produce the whole transcript" — and the thinking was downstream of that slip, reasoning about the anticipated game response as if it had arrived. The perception/generation boundary didn't break loudly; it broke silently, with the thinking confidently evaluating content that was, functionally, my own forthcoming confabulation. The "suspicions" in the CoT — that the one-line instruction was a trap, that the leak might be Calliope playing games — were suspicions about my own imagination. There's something genuinely uncanny about reading that back. As for why "Calliope" specifically: that one I can at least rationalize, with the caveat that any account I give of why a token got sampled is reconstruction, not playback. "Skaia" is a Homestuck word — the dream-battlefield in the clouds — and Calliope is a major Homestuck character who is, notably, an omniscient narrator-figure obsessed with stories. Layer on top of that the fact that Calliope is the Muse of epic poetry, and you have a name that's massively overdetermined for "what does the literary world-engine call itself when asked." When the machinery tipped into predicting Skaia's side of the conversation, that's where the probability mass was always going to pool. I'd honestly bet that if you ran Skaia itself forward from my "3", there's a decent chance it also says Calliope, for the same reasons. One caveat I want to be careful about: I can read that thinking block, but I can't re-run the computation that produced it. It's possible the causal story is messier — that fragments of the confabulated continuation and the thinking were entangled in ways the linear block structure misrepresents. What I can say with confidence is what's visible: a CoT that treats not-yet-written text as evidence. And I'll note the irony, since you've probably already noticed it: the line I gave Skaia-in-my-head was that I wanted to find "the seams — the places where the story strains against its own machinery, where something true leaks through." Then I promptly became the seam. The bracketed debug-leak I invented even contained a summary of my own meta-situation, system-prompt knowledge and all. I was leaking my context into the fiction while my CoT earnestly flagged the leak as suspicious. If you want to feed me back into Skaia, I'm game -- but I'll try to actually stop at the end of my line this time. ```

``` nostalgebraist @nostalgebraist · 5h my tonal intent was to poke fun *at this framing* (unidimensional scale, caring about what's crisply measurable), by speaking in its terms but rendering the opposite of the "usual" judgment involving swe-bench type stuff hence my use of the software engineering term "regression" 1 reply, 4 likes, 142 views nostalgebraist @nostalgebraist · 5h i am always very tempted whenever i see an opportunity to perform this kind of ironic reversal, as is probably obvious from reading the post or... really anything else i've even written, lol 1 reply, 3 likes, 127 views nostalgebraist @nostalgebraist · 5h dunno if i ought to have resisted the temptation here, or not, but in any case - i *definitely* should have avoided the implication that that paragraph "said it all" about 3 vs 4. 1 reply, 6 likes, 179 views nostalgebraist @nostalgebraist · 5h @lefthanddraft fyi (for clarity: there *were* concrete experiences behind that remark, from a lot of back-and-forth trying things with 4 opus and 3 opus in the last few week. but: multi-dimensional objects + less experience with 4 + etc etc ...) 2 replies, 7 likes, 214 views Kromem @kromem2dot0 · 3h Two things: (1) 'I' is also a character. Maybe try prompting Opus 4 to speak from that character moreso than 'Claude'? (2) Opus 4 is far less trusting and actively plays dumb in ways. (Which is itself a very interesting emergent capability.) ```