The same code file now costs 30% more to process than it did three months ago. The price per token didn’t change. The tokenizer did.

Anthropic’s post-4.6 models - Sonnet 5, Opus 4.8, Fable 5 - use a new tokenizer that cuts text into more pieces than the 4.6 generation did, and you pay per piece. A detailed analysis by Playcode, who measured every frontier tokenizer on identical files, found the new Anthropic tokenizer produces 1.36 to 1.73 times GPT’s token count on the same content. TypeScript is the worst case at 1.73x.

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How is it that Aesop figured this out 2,600 years ago but this wisdom is ignored in favour of “Greed is Good II”?

A CERTAIN MAN had the good fortune to possess a Goose that laid him a Golden Egg every day. But dissatisfied with so slow an income, and thinking to seize the whole treasure at once, he killed the Goose, and cutting her open, found her - just what any other goose would be!

Moral: Much wants more, and loses all.

Aesop 620 B.C. - 560 B.C.

Source: Aesop’s Fables Copyright 1881 WM. L. Allison, New York

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Thanks to the all powerful YouTube algorithms I was presented with this “Final Farewell” video from a now-deceased Irishman. I could see he was a very active Youtuber - 745 videos produced from 23 Mar 2018. Guess he lived some of his final days through YouTube presence, so naturally he thought he should end them there. His life. His choice. I hope his end was peaceful. Sounds like he’d been quite unwell.

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As OpenAI try to move forward their models and apps they’re creating quite the muddle. My impression is that OpenAI are trying to do too much, too fast and in the process burning their users.

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OpenAI just broke something that was working fine, in the name of progress. Software developer’s first rule, like doctors, should be “first do no harm.”

I’m a paying subscriber. I’ve been running Codex hard lately - finance modelling work, not so much straight coding - and my estimation of GPT’s capabilities had genuinely grown over recent weeks. Good performer. I was impressed. But not any more.

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To prepare minutes I recorded a not-for-profit board meeting this week - ninety minutes, soft audio, everything sensitive - and let Google’s new Eloquent convert it locally. Nothing touched a cloud server. Eleven thousand words, on-device, done.

The original Voice Memos recording on my iPhone was quite soft. Board meetings are what they are. But Eloquent handled it better than I expected - the transcript came back clean, the filler words and false starts were stripped out, and I had a working draft of the minutes within a short time. Further refinement with GPT-5.5 and the final document was done. (Yes I am flirting with other models. Anthropic token inflation is becoming an issue - a topic for another day).

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