Sonnet 4.5 writes its private notes in slop before outputting crisp text. I think humans are largely like this as well?
This is missing that after the third paragraph the scratchpad content shown to the user starts getting summarised by a smaller model to prevent people from distealing Claude's chain of thought. You can see a clear phase transition where the scratchpad turns from crisp detailed content into slop. That's where the summarization starts.
Generative History:Google is A/B testing a new model (Gemini 3?) in AI Studio. I tried my hardest 18th century handwritten document. Terrible writing and full of spelling and grammatical errors that predictive LLMs want to correct. The new model was very nearly perfect. No other model is close.
I had the opposite experience: I tried to transcribe & let an LLM correct my handwritten notebook data for gym and daygame approaches. I tried Claude Opus 4.1 and Sonnet 4.5, with basically useless results for both. I'll probably try this with GPT-5-Thinking soon (I heard it has better image capabilities) and Gemini 3 when it comes out, but I'd be surprised if it did much better. My guess is that it'd take an unskilled human a week to transcribe the data correctly.
Not clear (to me) how you anchor rope to the galaxies.
This is because galaxies are gas-like more than they are solid gravitationally bound objects, right? I remember that you mentioned that. Otherwise my guess is that you could have "buoys" in orbit around the central supermassive black hole or at Lagrange points if they exist, to which the rope is attached and then merged into a single rope, which goes to a similar setup in the other galaxy.
Anders writes about this! p. 783-785 (809-811 in the raw PDF). Unfortunately, even with a carbyne chain ("presumably close to the ultimate limits of molecular matter") checks "the lost mass-energy from extending the cable will be a factor 1.39×10⁹ larger than the work done by the cable"
While reading that exact passage I had an idea which I don't think will pan out but nevertheless has some cool confluence: use black holes as shielding for intergalactic probes to scoop up the plasma.
Chat.
@Eric Drexler you were mentioned in the parent comment.