You know, I kind of hate that having a large vocabulary is rapidly becoming a marker of being a robot
Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude
291–300 of 326 posts
Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude
#292You know, I kind of hate that having a large vocabulary is rapidly becoming a marker of being a robot
That isn't the marker of AI.
Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude
#293I was pleasantly surprised when I attempted to scroll down and realized everything the author wanted to present fit on-screen. It's almost ironic that this site is able to make such an obvious, compelling presentation without being overly verbose or complicated (something which LLMs have a hard time doing). I wouldn't read TOO deeply into what is being presented, but the author has done a good job to not inject their…
Author here :) Thank you for the compliment! I did spend a lot of time designing a nice experience on both desktop and mobile. Even the scrollbar to select words was non trivial as I wanted the words to be of different size, yet avoid flickering when scrolling!
“non-trivial” is one of those words that seems like it should be a Claude-ism but is actually just the single best word for a concept that comes up extremely often in research and engineering discussions.
Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "It s no " instead of "It doesn't " The meaning is often different in these constructs. Consider: “Claude answers no questions” vs “Claude doesn’t answer questions”. The first could be a bot or a politician avoiding the substance, the second could be a broken UI or a politician cancelling the QA of a press conference.
That's true, but Claude's use of it resolves no ambiguity.
Interesting use of Claude’s construct! Your phrasing might also suggest that it resolves something else, which is left ambiguous, whereas your other construct would be less likely to suggest that idea (unless you explicitly appended a contrastive clause for emphasis).
The bots are subtle. From your example in your GP comment (and in part depending on the surrounding context) I would expect that an empty list would be less likely the subject of: “the list contains no string”, than in “the list doesn’t contain strings”.
I might be over interpreting the intentionality of Claude in using this construct, however, these models were pretrained by reading so much more than any human, they learn to handle language differently than most humans.
Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
In some software development methodologies, "spike" is a task whose goal is figuring something out instead of delivering shippable code. https://agiledictionary.com/209/spike/
Why can't they call it a prototype or experiment? Sheesh.
"Spike" comes from Extreme Programming where it means specifically code written without TDD. Code that wasn't written against a pre-existing test is by definition broken, and should not go into production. So you create a simple "spike solution" to explore the problem space, so called because it cross-cuts concerns like a spike going through wood or something, I dunno.
Spikes are explicitly time-boxed to keep the team focused on the red-green-refactor churn which is the software engineering process in XP.
Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude
#296I'm shocked "shape" isn't near the top
"Shape" appears to come from JavaScript development wherein an object's "shape" is its structure: the set of properties and methods it is expected to have.
Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
You did a fantastic job; very to-the-point with effective visualisations. Kudos! One very minor note: if your scroll device reports pixel-perfect deltas rather than discrete scroll-wheel ticks (e.g. logitech mx master, laptop touchpad, etc), the behaviour in the word search box is a bit weird. Arrow keys work fine though.
On a compatible Logitech device, browsing through the word search box benefits a lot from enabling hyperscroll.
For those who didn't know (like me 5 min ago):
Hyperscroll - special mode turned on with a button next to scroll that turns off scroll friction and let's you scroll into infinity (wheel keeps turning after you lift your finger).
Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like to imagine that there's this one employee that oversees RHLF, who has a particular style of writing, and that got so ingrained that it's just them x1000.
I remember asking claude in claude code why the "seams" and it instantly in very fine detail said how it's from a book on working with legacy code so they might be RLHFing on these specific approaches and then it becomes the entire model just an anecdote but I found it interesting how it went full on that it's from that book vs just "it's technical jargon"
I've read that book and it's one of the very core concepts that relates to introducing tests in legacy code ("finding a seam").
Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude
#299I'm shocked "shape" isn't near the top
It's always been pretty common in programming discussions.
Here's a blog post I wrote in 2021 that uses the term shape to describe an algorithm:
https://www.marginalia.nu/log/40-wasted-resources/
And again in 2023, I use it twice in the same blog post both for data and code, and it definitely had no AI input:
Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude
#300I was pleasantly surprised when I attempted to scroll down and realized everything the author wanted to present fit on-screen. It's almost ironic that this site is able to make such an obvious, compelling presentation without being overly verbose or complicated (something which LLMs have a hard time doing). I wouldn't read TOO deeply into what is being presented, but the author has done a good job to not inject their…
> I suspect, as we continue forward, humans will slowly start to adopt the language of LLMs, or at least certain language quirks that come from interacting with LLMs. What's somewhat interesting to me is that "load-bearing" was already a common thing to say in certain communities, like lesswrong.com. Whether it breaks out from that subculture with Claude as the vector, or disappears from there because nobody wants to…
"Few" says Duck.ai
> "The name Elvis was not among the top 1,000 US baby names in 2010, the first year it had not made the list since 1954, the US government said." - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13302517
Most recent famous Elvis on Wikipedia is Kosovan footballer Elvis Letaj, born 2003 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_(name)#People_with_the_n...