"Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."
1–10 of 36 posts
Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."
#2Damn, I've been telling the same thing to Claude, good to know I'm not alone. I've also noticed that Opus 5 is much worse in this regard than Fable.
It's as if the model is speaking Mentalese, or in some "bag of concepts" language.
Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."
#3Damn, I've been telling the same thing to Claude, good to know I'm not alone. I've also noticed that Opus 5 is much worse in this regard than Fable. It's as if the model is speaking Mentalese, or in some "bag of concepts" language.
It reminds me of the PoMo jargon generator. See some results here:
Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."
#4They scan too many classical literature.
Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."
#5I've had "tractable beachhead" a bit earlier today. Like in "the tractable beachhead was the coupling between X and Y".
A bit of googling did not help me, I have no idea what this is even supposed to mean.
Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."
#6An interesting solution suggested in the replies (https://x.com/andrew_n_carr/status/2081534245370314816):
The fix for this is to say: only report to me in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English.
Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."
#7Looks like pure hallucinations just in a more poetic sophisticated register?
Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."
#8I've had "tractable beachhead" a bit earlier today. Like in "the tractable beachhead was the coupling between X and Y". A bit of googling did not help me, I have no idea what this is even supposed to mean.
Tractable is solvable, the opposite of intractable, and a beachhead is a landing point for an invasion.
A tractable beachhead is a solvable first chunk of work that sets you up for the rest of the project
Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."
#9They scan too many classical literature.
Do they scan too many classical literature or does classical literature happen to love metaphors and allegories, which are basically weights/patterns?
Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."
#10I've had "tractable beachhead" a bit earlier today. Like in "the tractable beachhead was the coupling between X and Y". A bit of googling did not help me, I have no idea what this is even supposed to mean.
Tractable is solvable, the opposite of intractable, and a beachhead is a landing point for an invasion. A tractable beachhead is a solvable first chunk of work that sets you up for the rest of the project
The art of rhetoric and human communication involves knowing your audience, and when using idioms and metaphors, you choose those which are shared in common to be immediately recognizable and impactful.
When I was 19, I had a psychologist who employed a lot of baseball idioms. "We'll touch base next week..." and although I am not a baseball fan, my father is, and we're all Americans, and so the baseball references were well-understood by his audience of one.
When an LLM starts going off about a "tractable beachhead" that behavior indicates that it's unaware of its audience, and also ignorant of how to put together a human idiom. That's exciting that emergent behavior is coining new idioms that may be applicable to some situation, and also explainable by dudes on Hacker News, but that wasn't the point of the comment.
The point is that the LLM's audience wasn't a veteran of D-Day in WWII, and even with an understanding of what those words mean individually, neither he nor I recognized "tractable beachhead" as a meaningful idiom for speakers of standard English.