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"Belt and braces" (UK) vs. "belt and suspenders" (US). I'm pretty sure the phrases have the same meaning, they just use a different word to refer to the thing that holds pants|trousers up.
And the word "suspenders" in British English means what Americans would call a garter belt, hence it sounding particularly odd over here.
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…
but you don't see "load bearing" nearly as often in prose written by people, so it's not some irreplaceable phrase. It's just a token with a weirdly high likelihood in a lot of cases (given how Claude works, this kind of thing is bound to happen)
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…
Ah, I love when Claude reads our collective minds and fills in the gaps to address the load-bearing seams genuinely with an honest caveat.
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 don't think that's true. I find that it way, way over-intensifies: eg using "load-bearing" for something that's just "kind of necessary although we probably could find a way without it". My personal gripe is how easily it uses "incredibly" or "wildly": just today it was telling me that something is "incredibly cheap" to mean that it's not over-priced ("cheap" would have been okay and even then, barely)
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Amen. At work our documentation isn’t just getting littered with annoying jargon. It isn’t just all the hallucinations, either. (Since when has documentation ever been 100% trustworthy?) It’s that it’s so poorly written and structured that it’s becoming borderline incomprehensible. My company is currently considering making, “Why should I bother to read something you didn’t bother to write?” an official policy becaus…
If it wasn't worth your time writing, it isn't worth my time reading.
https://github.com/alxndr/dotfiles/blob/272475280d84e/claude...
> It can be tricky for humans to interpret the meaning when Generative AI uses first-person pronouns (e.g. "I", "me", "my", "myself"), so to avoid the confusion whenever you would use a first-person pronoun, always use the jocular name "Clod" instead of a pronoun like "I" or "me" or "my". (Can have fun with English grammar and turn "myself" into "Clodself"!)
> Before printing any of your reasoning or narrative to the human user, replace all instances of "me" and "I" (referring to Claude) — including within contractions like "I'll" and "I'm" — with the name "Clod".
It's not that it uses certain phrases, it's that it settles on predictable speech patterns and uses them incessantly. What's funny is that humans do this too, but we don't find it irritating; we just call it a speaking style. But when a machine does it, it drives us crazy. Very interesting psychological phenomenon there.