One honestly caveat:
How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
301–310 of 650 posts
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Claude's "honest" is an interesting example because we can trace it to a specific document that it was trained on extensively: the "Constitution" is identified to Claude in its training as the core of what it is, and it uses the word "honest" or a derivative 57 times, including having a whole section on it. > Honesty is a core aspect of our vision for Claude’s ethical character. Indeed, while we want Claude’s honesty…
"Genuine" appears 50 times too. I think you're onto something.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 x10,000,000,000 generated tokens per day so any bias sticks out like a sore thumb. I am more pessimistic than that. Soon enough even people will start talking like LLMs. After listening to 5000 words per day, especially growing…
> "You're absolutely right to question me, father — in fact, I did eat all the cookies. But it's not a load-bearing issue — my honest take is simple: we go to the store and buy more." FTFY
Thanks! I clearly need more LLM training ;-)
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#304LLMs are far from great writers. They struggle to form long coherent sentences and lean on punctuation like emdash and semicolon to ensure grammatical correctness when splicing together short phrases. This makes me wonder if the reason why agents love weird punctuation is because the labs run the base models through a RL training step that forces them to correct their grammar; but instead of rewriting short spliced s…
I mean yes, but the vast majority of people aren’t even good writers. Claude writes better than most of my coworkers and we’re all highly educated. Most of us could probably beat it if we really tried, but then we could also prompt it to be a better writer too and none of us are beating that. I think the short pithy phrases that are so common are all post training stuff that the labs add because most people don’t want long sentences.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#305Among 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.
"That's fair."
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
I asked it to remove "honest" from a draft once. "Why say honest? We're talking to our coworkers. We would always be honest." I'm going to look for prompts or skills that can train it in technical writing but I'm warning the AI enthusiasts in my company that its first drafts of code and prose are low-quality, you have to hold it to a high standard yourself. I actually took a single technical writing class in college…
The road to hell was paved with adverbs.
The road to hell was paved lovingly, foolishly, naïvely, arrogantly, optimistically... load-bearingly?
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#307Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#308Is this a belt-and-suspenders solution?
This is the worst one for me. I can maybe think of what it means, but I never heard it before, and could easily be imagining a meaning. Some of the other Claude-isms (quickly googling, especially 'gate' and 'canonical') I feel the issue is they sound right, but aren't specific enough to why we are doing something.
I heard "belt and suspenders" at least 20 years ago (meaning multiple solutions to a problem with backup in case one fails), and maybe would be longer if I were older. You could blame Claude for overusing it or importing it to other cultures maybe, but it's not in the category of invented phrases or ones that only barely mean something in the specific context Claude used them.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#309I do not mind when I am coding with Claude and it uses all the typical claudisms. I am much more bothered when I am reading a blog post, email, or other form of prose and I see those same claudisms.
I guess they are not annoying since I know I am talking to an LLM and expect the typical responses. When I am reading prose online that I previously would have expected a human to write, it can be quite jarring to realize its an LLM.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#310I've recently noticed an increase in "bite". "This will only bite if..." It also loves "stress-testing", "matrix", "anchor" and "flagging".