They scan too many classical literature.
Or have too few programmers read classical literature?
"Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."
11–20 of 36 posts
Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."
#12Tangentially, Opus-5 is the first model to understand my (bad) jokes: "Site refuses non-curl user agents (joke 266 status)." [0]
Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 we…
> That's exciting that emergent behavior is coining new idioms that may be applicable to some situation
I dunno, it feels pretty similar to an elementary student blindly swapping words with a thesaurus to increase the sophistication of their writing (which I readily admit I was guilty of doing once). It sounds more intelligent but lacks substance.
Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."
#14I'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
Thanks. This is the first time I encounter the word "beachhead", and googling a bit made me indeed saw something related to an invasion. But I was so annoyed by the claudeisms that I closed the tab and just asked it to rephrase instead of trying to make another step towards its vocabulary.
Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."
#15I've had to make the same request multiple times recently. Has anyone noticed it getting worse with the more recent models? It reminds me of when someone is trying to convince you of their intelligence by replacing simple and straightforward explanations with words pulled out of a thesaurus, so maybe that's the objective of these more recent iterations. Throwback to grade school.
Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."
#16Damn, 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.
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Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."
#17An 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. More info about it here: Simplified Technical English - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Technical_English
Nice. It sounds like doing a few passes on industrial product documentation with this might be beneficial.
Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."
#18Ah that's just because the new training set also includes "The King in Yellow".
Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."
#19thanks this isn’t just an individual experience… I was starting to think i’d become too dumb for opus
Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."
#20An 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. More info about it here: Simplified Technical English - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Technical_English
I looked into it a bit more, and while it does look helpful in the first glance, it actually isn't a good fit for code. It's very aviation-terminology-focused.
A better guide would be something like Google Developer Style Guide