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Claude Memory

anthropic.com

61–70 of 326 posts

Re: Claude Memory

#61
post #25

"Before this rollout, we ran extensive safety testing across sensitive wellbeing-related topics and edge cases—including whether memory could reinforce harmful patterns in conversations, lead to over-accommodation, and enable attempts to bypass our safeguards. Through this testing, we identified areas where Claude's responses needed refinement and made targeted adjustments to how memory functions. These iterations he…

It’s a curious wording. It mentions a process of improvement being attempted but not necessarily a result.

because all the safety stuff is bullshit. it's like asking a mirror company to make mirrors that modify the image to prevent the viewer from seeing anything they don't like

good fucking luck. these things are mirrors and they are not controllable. "safety" is bullshit, ESPECIALLY if real superintelligence was invented. Yeah, we're going to have guardrails that outsmart something 100x smarter than us? how's that supposed to work?

if you put in ugliness you'll get ugliness out of them and there's no escaping that.

people who want "safety" for these things are asking for a motor vehicle that isn't dangerous to operate. get real, physical reality is going to get in the way.

Re: Claude Memory

#62
post #57

Anybody else experiencing severe decline in Claude output quality since the introduction of "skills"? Like Claude not being able to generate simple markdown text anymore and instead almost jumping into writing a script to produce a file of type X or Y - and then usually failing at that?

I've noticed this with Gemini recently - I have a task suited for LLMs which I want it to do "manually" (e.g., split this list of inconsistently formatted names into first/given names and last/surnames) and it tries to write a script to do it instead, which fails. If I just wanted to split on the first space I would've done it myself...

Re: Claude Memory

#63
post #57

Anybody else experiencing severe decline in Claude output quality since the introduction of "skills"? Like Claude not being able to generate simple markdown text anymore and instead almost jumping into writing a script to produce a file of type X or Y - and then usually failing at that?

I've noticed this with Gemini recently - I have a task suited for LLMs which I want it to do "manually" (e.g., split this list of inconsistently formatted names into first/given names and last/surnames) and it tries to write a script to do it instead, which fails. If I just wanted to split on the first space I would've done it myself...

For curiosity, does it follow through if you specify in the end: "do not use any tools for this task" ?

Re: Claude Memory

#64
looking forward to trying this!

I’ve been using Gemini-cli which has had a really fun memory implementation for months to help it stay in character. You can teach it core memories or even hand-edit the GEMINI.md file directly.

Re: Claude Memory

#65
post #5

I'm not sure I would want this. Maybe it could work if the chatbot gives me a list of options before each chat, e.g. when I try to debug some ethernet issues: Please check below: [ ] you are using Ubuntu 18 [ ] your router is at 192.168.1.1 [ ] you prefer to use nmcli to configure your network [ ] your main ethernet interface is eth1 etc. Alternatively, it would be nice if I could say: Please remember that I prefer t…

This is pretty much exactly how I use it with Chatgpt. I get to ask very sloppy questions now and it already knows what distros and setups I'm using. "I'm having x problem on my laptop" gets me the exact right troubleshooting steps 99% of the time. Can't count the amount of time it's saved me googling or reading man pages for that 1 thing I forgot.

Re: Claude Memory

#66
Main problem for me is that the quality tails off on chats and you need to start afresh

I worry that the garbage at the end will become part of the memory.

How many of your chats do you end… “that was rubbish/incorrect, i’m starting a new chat!”

Re: Claude Memory

#67
post #57

Anybody else experiencing severe decline in Claude output quality since the introduction of "skills"? Like Claude not being able to generate simple markdown text anymore and instead almost jumping into writing a script to produce a file of type X or Y - and then usually failing at that?

Claude Code became almost unusable a week ago with completely broken terminal flickering all the time and doing pointless things so you end up running out of weekly window for nothing.

I guess OpenAI got it right to go slower with a Rust CLI. It lacks a lot of features but it's solid. And it is much better at automatically figuring out what tools you have to consume less tokens (e.g. ripgrep). A much better experience overall.

Re: Claude Memory

#68

I've been using it for the past month and I really like it compared to ChatGPT memory. Claude memory weaves it's memories of you into chats in a natural way, while ChatGPT feels like a salesman trying to make a sale e.g. "Hi Bob! How's your wife doing? I'd like to talk to you about an investment opportunity..." while Claude is more like "Barcelona is a great travel destination and I think you and wife would really en…

That’s creepy, I will promptly turn that off. Also, Claude doesn’t “think” anything, I wish they’d stop with the anthropomorphizations. They are just as bad as hallucinations.

> I wish they’d stop with the anthropomorphizations

You mean in how Claude interacts with you, right? If so, you can change the system prompt (under "styles") and explain what you want and don't want.

> Claude doesn’t “think” anything

Right. LLMs don't 'think' like people do, but they are doing something. At the very least, it can be called information processing.* Unless one believes in souls, that's a fair description of what humans are doing too. Humans just do it better at present.

Here's how I view the tendency of AI papers to use anthropomorphic language: it is primarily a convenience and shouldn't be taken to correspond to some particular human way of doing something. So when a paper says "LLMs can deceive" that means "LLMs output text in a way that is consistent with the text that a human would use to deceive". The former is easier to say than the latter.

Here is another problem some people have with the sentence "LLMs can deceive"... does the sentence convey intention? This gets complicated and messy quickly. One way of figuring out the answer is to ask: Did the LLM just make a mistake? Or did it 'construct' the mistake as part of some larger goal? This way of talking doesn't have to make a person crazy -- there are ways of translating it into criteria that can be tested experimentally without speculation about consciousness (qualia).

* Yes, an LLM's information processing can be described mathematically. The same could be said of a human brain if we had a sufficiently accurate enough scan. There might be some statistical uncertainty, but let's say for the sake of argument this uncertainty was low, like 0.1%. In this case, should one attribute human thinking to the mathematics we do understand? I think so. Should one attribute human thinking to the tiny fraction of the physics we can't model deterministically? Probably not, seems to me. A few unexpected neural spikes here and there could introduce local non-determinism, sure... but it seems very unlikely they would be qualitatively able to bring about thought if it was not already present.

Re: Claude Memory

#69

I don't use any of these type of LLM tools which basically amount to just a prompt you leave in place. They make it harder to refine my prompts and keep track of what is causing what in the outputs. I write very precise prompts every time. Also, I try not work out a problem over the course of several prompts back and forth. The first response is always the best and I try to one shot it every time. If I don't get what…

Could you share some suggestions or links on how to best craft such very precise prompts?

You sit on the chair, insert a coin and pull the lever.

Re: Claude Memory

#70
post #5

I'm not sure I would want this. Maybe it could work if the chatbot gives me a list of options before each chat, e.g. when I try to debug some ethernet issues: Please check below: [ ] you are using Ubuntu 18 [ ] your router is at 192.168.1.1 [ ] you prefer to use nmcli to configure your network [ ] your main ethernet interface is eth1 etc. Alternatively, it would be nice if I could say: Please remember that I prefer t…

Does Claude have a preference for customizing the system prompt? I did something like this a long time ago for ChatGPT. (“If not otherwise specified, assume TypeScript.”)

Yes.
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