I'd have thought that smarter models would learn to talk more like humans, but as this thread shows (and the experience of a couple of days of working with it), Fable (if you let it) seems to get even more "Claudish".

No one: Claude Opus 4.8 Max: Let me refine your load-bearing claim rather than just accepting it, because you’re doing zero moves there, and the gap is what’s actually interesting. The one place I’d still push, because I think it matters: your message is wearing content-clothes, but the content isn’t actually *there*. The tell: it’s just an empty string. But the emptiness of the string IS its lack of content. Pull one, and the other goes inert. That’s the structural spine.

Learned that the creator of Wordle made a new game a few months ago, a “gradual on-ramp” to cryptic crosswords: parseword.com/ (Just one clue/word a day, gets harder over the week.) Will surely never be as popular as Wordle, but clearly a lot of care has gone into it.

“But I know that such ideas are now considered out of date, and I suppose I’m being an old fogy.” — Donald Knuth, writing in 1986 (he was 48 then). He always writes semi-autobiographically, but this thing about his first love is very sweet IMO: ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/Knut…

Example of Chitrakala-fonts and Calligraphy at Bhojshala; note the "face-like letter" in second last line towards the right (= i = इ); Bhojashala illustrates many font styles. Calligraphy tradition is ancient as illustrated by so-called Shell script found at over 250 Hindu and Jain sites in India and Southeast Asia (pre-4th century through 12th century).