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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

#261

Post by AlexandrB »

theowaway213456 wrote: post #232
sublinear wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah wow fascinating! It's almost like LLM output quality was never the point from a business perspective. Real people think in concepts and experiences instead of words. The words are not so important to get the idea across, but LLMs only model language. The problem is fundamental. There's no workaround. Averaging out word usage might even make the problem worse.

This sort of take is so tired and boring, and frankly has zero grounding in reality. "LLMs will never " is constantly being disproven every time they scale up to the next 10X and apply architectural improvements. Their internal representations are so cryptic and complex that even the top AI researchers don't really know how they work or what their limits are. No one is going to take you seriously as a rando HN user i…

How can their internal representation represent "concepts" when the training data is all words? There's no possible experience of the world there. No input other than a bunch of imperfect labels we created for stuff.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#262

Post by moritzwarhier »

jchw wrote: post #213
infogulch wrote: post #202

Lots of people have their own voice and tend to prefer certain phrases. This has been the case for a long time and is generally not a big issue. Now LLMs come along and they also have their own phrasing preferences. But now it's a problem because what used to be personal preferences of a single person that manifests in 5000 words per day from one person tops, is now the bias of a single model multiplied x10,000,000,0…

I think it might be even worse. LLMs seem to get tragically stuck on certain patterns. Maybe it's partly because a pile of weights essentially always starts from scratch in the same condition, but even within a single conversation, it will literally just latch onto words and repeat them incessantly, to the point where it becomes annoying. So for example, current Claude models love "honest". They are always producing…

I'd suggest "Caveat".

The problem

While an article lends a headline more weight, in incomplete phrases consisting solely of a substantive, "The" is a superfluous rhetorical device.

"The Exorcist" could just as well be named

"Exorcist".

But it was not the style at the time.

We already know it's important. If The Caveat doesn't stand out enough without The, maybe one should consider interleaving it with the preceding text, or increasing the heading level.

Do you want me to increase the heading level of Caveat by using only a single #?

But hear me out: there comes

# The Markdown Trap

In fact, this is not always possible, because heading levels decrease when adding # characters, which limits our headroom.

## The solution

I've implemented a Markdown transpiler that assigns inverted heading levels based on the number of #s.

With # beinh regular body font size, mapped to ######.

Higher heading levels are compiled to style attributes, providing an almost limitless signifikance scale and infinite nesting levels.

So from now on, you can use

  # Heading
for something similar to an h6.

Work your way up to

  ###### The Caveat
for a top-level heading.

And more hash signs make it stand out even more.

(green checkmark)

markdown-transpiler.sh

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#263

Post by reaperducer »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #246
infogulch wrote: post #202

Lots of people have their own voice and tend to prefer certain phrases. This has been the case for a long time and is generally not a big issue. Now LLMs come along and they also have their own phrasing preferences. But now it's a problem because what used to be personal preferences of a single person that manifests in 5000 words per day from one person tops, is now the bias of a single model multiplied x10,000,000,0…

An interesting solution would be for these AI companies to train a few different versions of these models, all with different speech characteristics. Then, when you start a conversation, you get a random version.

Or tech companies could stop staring at their own belly-buttons and realize there's a whole big world outside of Silicon Valley, and training on the writing styles and pattens of their bubble and its hangers-on is perhaps not all that useful outside of 415.

Apple used to be guilty of this back when you'd ask Siri what the temperature was, and any number above 79°F was followed by the word "Hot!"

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#264

Post by BearOso »

theowaway213456 wrote: post #232
sublinear wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah wow fascinating! It's almost like LLM output quality was never the point from a business perspective. Real people think in concepts and experiences instead of words. The words are not so important to get the idea across, but LLMs only model language. The problem is fundamental. There's no workaround. Averaging out word usage might even make the problem worse.

This sort of take is so tired and boring, and frankly has zero grounding in reality. "LLMs will never " is constantly being disproven every time they scale up to the next 10X and apply architectural improvements. Their internal representations are so cryptic and complex that even the top AI researchers don't really know how they work or what their limits are. No one is going to take you seriously as a rando HN user i…

> Their internal representations are so cryptic and complex that even the top AI researchers don't really know how they work or what their limits are. No one is going to take you seriously as a rando HN user if you're claiming to know better than them.

We know exactly how they work. When we say they're impossible to analyze, i.e. for particular traits like this, it means that the data model is so big that tracing it would be logistically impossible because of the scale involved and time constraints.

For comparison, suppose you tried to analyze all the nooks and crannies of the Amazon watershed to find out why a particular rock appears at the delta. You could follow it back to the exact tributary, but it'll take forever, and is it worth the effort when you're going to start from scratch with the next rock?

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#265

Post by bobson381 »

saltcured wrote: post #255
bobson381 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinatingly, I'm now so allergic to certain LLM-phrases that I immediately noticed your use of Not X but Y in this comment. Maybe that was intentional, maybe not, but it's a funny illustration of how odd this language rabbit hole has been!

Are you using the tools a lot and having first-hand exposure that gives you this sensitivity to phrasing? Or are you reacting to second-hand exposure? To a large degree, I've been isolating myself from the LLM craze. I have zero natural interest or impulse to prompt an LLM and read the results. Almost all my exposure is second-hand and involuntary. So, I haven't trained myself to know what phrasings are typical of wh…

Language is already a lossy map, but it is not really an expression of another person's thought or mind if they translate it through an LLM. Or at least it's a much harder to decipher representation of it. Form is void, void is form, and the two are not separate.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#266

Post by LeifCarrotson »

yreg wrote: post #170
alxndr wrote: post #99

I did something like this in my global `CLAUDE.md`... 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 fu…

> It can be tricky for humans to interpret the meaning when Generative AI uses first-person pronouns (e.g. "I", "me", "my", "myself") Could you please provide an example of what you mean?

Humans easily anthropomorphize things that are not humans, ascribing human attributes like motive and comprehension and emotion to objects and processes that are not people who can have those attributes.

Claude is not a human.

It is overwhelmingly easier to anthropomorphize Claude or Siri or an LLM that communicates with you more eloquently than your boss than it is to anthropomorphize a cranky, tired starter motor. It's often easier to do than it is not to do, and sometimes, it's a useful abstraction. But it's not precise or correct, and can result in errors.

It could also just be that they're getting confused when using tools configured without a username dedicated to the tool. It's easy to end up with a comment or commit message that says "I prefer X over Y" posted on Alxndr's account and have coworkers confused whether that's the LLM or the human making that statement.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#267

Post by esseph »

jchw wrote: post #213
infogulch wrote: post #202

Lots of people have their own voice and tend to prefer certain phrases. This has been the case for a long time and is generally not a big issue. Now LLMs come along and they also have their own phrasing preferences. But now it's a problem because what used to be personal preferences of a single person that manifests in 5000 words per day from one person tops, is now the bias of a single model multiplied x10,000,000,0…

I think it might be even worse. LLMs seem to get tragically stuck on certain patterns. Maybe it's partly because a pile of weights essentially always starts from scratch in the same condition, but even within a single conversation, it will literally just latch onto words and repeat them incessantly, to the point where it becomes annoying. So for example, current Claude models love "honest". They are always producing…

Interestingly this also happens between humans with frequent communication, it is called linguistic convergence.

We are changing LLMs text patterns while it is changing the way we write and speak.

https://www.axios.com/2026/05/02/ai-changing-writing-speakin...

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#268

Post by infogulch »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #246
infogulch wrote: post #202

Lots of people have their own voice and tend to prefer certain phrases. This has been the case for a long time and is generally not a big issue. Now LLMs come along and they also have their own phrasing preferences. But now it's a problem because what used to be personal preferences of a single person that manifests in 5000 words per day from one person tops, is now the bias of a single model multiplied x10,000,000,0…

An interesting solution would be for these AI companies to train a few different versions of these models, all with different speech characteristics. Then, when you start a conversation, you get a random version.

Yes that would probably help!

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#270

Post by bobson381 »

danielvaughn wrote: post #176
bobson381 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinatingly, I'm now so allergic to certain LLM-phrases that I immediately noticed your use of Not X but Y in this comment. Maybe that was intentional, maybe not, but it's a funny illustration of how odd this language rabbit hole has been!

It was not intentional, and that's what makes this thing so weird. I wouldn't categorize my sentence that way because it's subtly different enough than the LLM version, which has a very punchy cadence.

Sounds good, thanks for your response. I didn't mean to denigrate your word choice at all, it's mostly that I'm hypersensitive to that kind of phrasing now because there's so much auto-written stuff on e.g. Substack, LinkedIn, etc. Sam Kriss has a nice article about it all.
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