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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

#151

Post by queenkjuul »

hnav wrote: post #108
danielvaughn wrote: post #93

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.

it’s not a psychological phenomenon. If a human engineer constantly used pompous language to deliver unvetted information (the number of claude slop root-cause analyses i’ve read where “the smoking gun” is a red herring) we’d rightly consider them a moron

"Here's why this version is bulletproof" right before it fails in exactly the same way as the previous bulletproof implementation...

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#152

Post by iamjackg »

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,…

I'd love to see that tool.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#153

Post by Sharlin »

kesor wrote: post #116
kristjansson wrote: post #96

Among all the claude-isms, i understand the hate for load-bearing the least. It was definitely part of tech argot prior to the LLM revolution.

Maybe in the circles you circled in ... where I am from, I never had anyone saying "belt-and-suspenders" or "load-bearing" or "boil the ocean" or "swing for the fences" when talking about engineering topics. The only one who I heard say "circle-back to you" was Psaki.

Well, "load-bearing" is specifically an engineering term :D Actual engineering, not software "engineering".

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#154

Post by devin »

Telemakhos wrote: post #145
jihadjihad wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another one is "surface", like in "across all product surfaces". I've been in the field for 15 years and have never heard that particular usage before.

It's pretty common to read "attack surface" in security.

Yeah, I imagine this is a big part of it.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#155

Post by causal »

jihadjihad wrote: post #144

What is arguably worse is hearing these phrases from humans who have been inculcated with the notion that their usage is idiomatic and appropriate. And we thought "robust", "circle back", and "to leverage" were grating...

Yeah I sometimes see people on here getting defensive when you call out AI slop, saying maybe it's just a human who writes like Claude, and I really don't care- slop is slop.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#158

Post by synalx »

jihadjihad wrote: post #134
kperry wrote: post #98

"substrate" - I don't know what training they did with Opus 4.7 --> Fable/Mythos 5, but dang does it like the word substrate. Drives me insane. I had never heard anyone use this word prior in real technical writing or speaking.

Another one is "surface", like in "across all product surfaces". I've been in the field for 15 years and have never heard that particular usage before.

Mine is obsessed with "planes". Data plane, control plane, management plane. Everything is a plane :)

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#159

Post by BurningFrog »

Retr0id wrote: post #26
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…

> What, if anything, do people do for writing? I use a keyboard, personally.

Haven't done it, but letting an AI polish a manual first draft might be the best of both worlds?

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#160

Post by thewebguyd »

Octoth0rpe wrote: post #136
netniuq wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"ledger" for me – used extremely rarely pre-LLM and Claude just loves it

It's a pretty common word if you've worked in anything that vaguely resembles an accountancy system. Also, anything crypto related will often use that word (the distributed ledger, etc)

That's the case for most of these LLM tropes or word choices. They are all common lexicon in their respective fields, but the LLM doesn't make that distinction and uses them everywhere making them standout.

No one would bat an eye about "ledger" appearing at a high frequency in content about accounting, but it starts to look odd if "ledger" is showing up in other contexts.

"Load bearing" is from engineering; "Substrate" is primarily from biology & biochem, etc.

I don't know if this is true, but part of me suspects the labs want to make the models appear smarter so they reinforce this word choice in the weights, assigning some words a higher intelligence weight or something. "I will show you a list of options" vs. "I will surface a ledger of your options" and it prefers the later to sound smart to the human reader.

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