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"Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."

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Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."

#31
post #18

Ah that's just because the new training set also includes "The King in Yellow".

Imagine someone sneaking in The King in Yellow into the training sets used by all projects training models somehow, breaking all future models irreparably -- and then the engineers trying to find this poison pill in the dataset and going mad one by one as they find it and aren't able avoid reading into act 2.

…should make for an interesting SCP story :)

Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."

#32
post #6

An 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

Or, as the Wikipedia Simplified Technical English Wikipedia mentions, use Plain English or Plain Language as non-aerospace alternatives:

> The US government's Plain English lacks the strict vocabulary restrictions of the aerospace standard, but represents an attempt at a more general writing standard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_English

> Modern corporations and academic organizations hire technical writers already trained to follow a simplified form of English that the layman reader can easily understand, known as plain language (PL).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_language

And so we've looped back around OP’s “plain English” phrasing.

Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."

#33

I'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.

It's a shame that LLMs took off at the exact same time humanity entered it post-literate phase.

Re: "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."

#35

I'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.

There's a scene in the movie Clifford, starring martin short. "I just need you to talk to me like a real human boy! You can't do it, can you???"

"...the load bearing seam is the self referential spin. Superstition compounds throughout your entire pipeline."

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