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How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

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Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#71

Post by Myrmornis »

alistairSH wrote: post #57
Myrmornis wrote: post #35

I like to think that the reason it's so noticable is that Claude has recognized some important semantics that we ourselves lack a good word for or at least under-appreciate. What term is used in English (or other languages) with the same meaning as claude's "load-bearing"? operative? key? critical? decisive? The honest conclusion is that none of those are as good as "load-bearing". And yet the concept being referred…

You're serious? Operative, key, and critical are all more correct to me in this context.

For me, "key", and "critical" merely say it's "important", but don't convey the sense that "out of the mess of connected concepts we're discussing, the one that is actually interacting with the thing we care about, or at least dominating the interactions with the thing we care about, is X".

"operative" is a bit better, but I think of it as referring to grammatical interactions, i.e. interactions at the level of language mechanics rather than semantics.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#73

Post by constantius »

boofus wrote: post #19
pocketarc wrote: post #11

In the olden days, I enjoyed Opus 3 because it was easy to have it sound way more human than GPT. Nowadays, with the focus on agentic use and coding, it seems models have all been RLHF’d to death, it’s so incredibly hard to have them write in a different voice than their default. I put together a skill to review its writing and have it edit its own output (e.g. code comments), which does make a difference, but isn’t…

Good. I don't want LLMs sounding human. I want the ability to shame and discredit anyone passing the job of prose to a machine. There's an art to writing, and hopefully LLMs never truly get it right.

Agreed. The only goal of these skills/tricks/requests for humanising LLM writing is to be able to pass it off as your own, because they know it's shameful and want to avoid the opprobrium.

Some will say it's just for their own quality of life when they're reading LLM output, or "just for docs", but this is an extremely marginal use case.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#74

Post by bigfishrunning »

Myrmornis wrote: post #70
bigfishrunning wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah right, so you like AI and don't care to understand how it works. It doesn't "decide" anything or "need" any semantic. It derives the likelihood of the token, and "bearing" is likely to come after "load".

Sure but the question is why "load" after X?

Because, for some high number of contexts, its likelihood comes out high in the big tree of multiplies that is claude's model. For some sets of 500 words (or whatever), the next word is "load". The classifier that decides which sets of 500 (or whatever) words is a prefix for "load" is returning "true" too often.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#75

Post by bunderbunder »

Myrmornis wrote: post #70
bigfishrunning wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah right, so you like AI and don't care to understand how it works. It doesn't "decide" anything or "need" any semantic. It derives the likelihood of the token, and "bearing" is likely to come after "load".

Sure but the question is why "load" after X?

More-or-less the same principle, but scaled up massively, and with context-dependent probability conditioning maps.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#76

Post by throwawayffffas »

The reason it talks that way is clearly am attempt to hook into your dopamine system.

If what you told it to do is 'load bearing' then its important.

'You are absolutely right', because you are a smart fellow.

'Honest take', because it's being honest with you because it trusts you and you should do the same.

My 'honest take' these are absolutely garbage patterns that have no place in an session interacting with AI.

1. 'Load bearing' is a figure of speech that bears no loads.

2. 'You are absolutely right' it's not the agents job to judge that, it's job is to do what I told it to do.

3. 'Honest take', so everything else was not honest? Absolute honesty should be the default and is implied.

These words add nothing to the task at hand they are a poor attempt to hook you into using this particular model.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#77

Post by Retr0id »

Myrmornis wrote: post #69
Retr0id wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The honest conclusion I think you've been reading too much claude output! "Load bearing" is cromulent verbiage and can be used in many scenarios - so claude does. But variety is important too, and there are more specific alternatives that can be used in most situations. Any word becomes a bad choice if you've used it 10 times in the last chapter.

You don't think me using "honest" there might have been a tiny bit of (on-topic, and therefore appropriate) trolling?

Poe's law

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#78

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

hresvelgr wrote: post #60
Myrmornis wrote: post #35

I like to think that the reason it's so noticable is that Claude has recognized some important semantics that we ourselves lack a good word for or at least under-appreciate. What term is used in English (or other languages) with the same meaning as claude's "load-bearing"? operative? key? critical? decisive? The honest conclusion is that none of those are as good as "load-bearing". And yet the concept being referred…

In the figurative sense it's highly versatile across contexts, but still replaceable. For example: "Her optimism was load-bearing," versus: "Her optimism was enduring." Exactly the same meaning and connotation. It stands to reason that the terms with the most semantic flexibility will have preference across all contexts. So in response to: > maybe we should be learning from Claude rather than complaining. I'd say let…

> Exactly the same meaning and connotation.

No, it does not have the exact same meaning.

The first means that her optimism kept her in some functional state, without it, she would collapse.

The second means that her optimism continues over time, despite obstacles.

The first doesn't emphasise how longstanding her optimism is, the second does. The second doesn't emphasise how important her optimism is, the first does.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#79

Post by ithkuil »

pugio wrote: post #8
pugio wrote: post #6

I wrote a thing about exactly this, but I'm resistant to blogging for undefined reasons so, maybe this will help someone... # AI speech is an Infohazard Apart from all its other possible boons and ills, one danger of AI is just that it is useful, so you use it. A lot. In earlier days I would dive deeply into an author's work and start to think and write like them for a while. It was a heady feeling: slinging sonnets…

References: Information hazard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_hazard Babel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel On the Calculation of Volume: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Calculation_of_Volume The revenge of NLP The tool uses good old-fashioned regex/NLP—no LLMs—and rewrites the visible LLM Markdown without touching files on disk. I made it by analysing 10M+ words of past pi transcripts,…

It's not clear to me whether that tool exists or you hallucinated it into existence with this post

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#80

Post by bbg2401 »

jappgar wrote: post #38

I don't really care if it says load-bearing or belt and suspenders so long as it's using them correctly, which it mostly does. I don't know how programmers, who are so used to staring at the same handful of keywords every day for decades, have suddenly become so discerning. Yes, Claude writes boring and predictable prose. It also writes boring and predictable code. That's good!

I'd contend that Claude's prose is not boring. It's generally overly grandiose waffle with a cliche or two punctuating every other sentence. It's good for tasteless marketing copy, sure. It's inappropriate in most scenarios.
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