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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

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There's no possible experience of the world there. No input other than a bunch of imperfect labels we created for stuff.

The brain too sits locked inside a bone box and only gets a bundle of unlabeled nerves connecting it to the outside. How can the brain could possibly experience anything, it only sees patters and patterns of patterns never the real thing?

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#353

I 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…

I didn't use Claude for a long time, but my coworkers did, so I got infected through a side channel: I ended up reading their vibed docs, noticed "load-bearing", kind of liked it, and started using it in conversation, until I got feedback that I was "talking like Claude", so now I avoid the phrase entirely. The intersection of language and social norms is interesting.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#354

I 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…

It's going to be more difficult to distinguish as humans are now using those terms.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#355
post #332
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I’m having a convo with someone and they drop in “honestly” I immediately discount everything else they’ve said, and what follows. Sometimes people use it reflexively and doesn’t carry the same meaning (for me).

Yes. Its a red flag that indicates everything else you’ve said is not honest by implication.

I'd push back on the idea that "honestly" implies previous statements to be dishonest. Particularly in corporate contexts it implies that the previous statements were sanitised - either they were moderated in tone to match corporate communication standards, or they were partial redacted due to disclosure concerns.

Once the "honestly" is deployed, you have passed into my circle of trust, and are now privy to the pure, unvarnished version of events, not the glossy version management expects to be projected towards outsiders.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#356

I 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…

Exactly this. For whatever reason, Claude likes to talk about the "shape" of "load-bearing" "seams," but if that's the internal jargon it needs to plan and execute its work, who am I to judge? But if I'm reading what is supposed to be someone's original thoughts, it's a huge bummer to see an obvious AI tell. You might say that "it's not just disappointing—it's disrespectful."

Hot take -- I'm glad that LLMs still tend to have recognizable communication patterns, because they're often the only clue I have to filter AI content.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#357

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…

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.

> Real people think in concepts and experiences instead of words.

I learned about this opinion recently. It's interesting to me, because I very much think through words. I have an internal monologue that is running most of the time, and I often talk to myself, just start writing, or even record myself and transcribe to work through ideas, proposals, risks, etc. My understand is that some people don't have an internal monologue, and think purely in concept form. I was never like that.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#359

I 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…

I didn't use Claude for a long time, but my coworkers did, so I got infected through a side channel: I ended up reading their vibed docs, noticed "load-bearing", kind of liked it, and started using it in conversation, until I got feedback that I was "talking like Claude", so now I avoid the phrase entirely. The intersection of language and social norms is interesting.

Yes, I had a related experience of reading a book and observing what I thought were claude-isms, only to realize it was written in 2019. Some of the common tells are actually good writing practices, but I guess they are best in smaller doses.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#360
post #158

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.

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

Mine loves "slices". Everything is a slice.
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