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Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

louisabraham.github.io

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Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

#11

Post by Labo333 »

nater5000 wrote: post #4

I was pleasantly surprised when I attempted to scroll down and realized everything the author wanted to present fit on-screen. It's almost ironic that this site is able to make such an obvious, compelling presentation without being overly verbose or complicated (something which LLMs have a hard time doing). I wouldn't read TOO deeply into what is being presented, but the author has done a good job to not inject their…

Author here :)

Thank you for the compliment! I did spend a lot of time designing a nice experience on both desktop and mobile. Even the scrollbar to select words was non trivial as I wanted the words to be of different size, yet avoid flickering when scrolling!

Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

#13

Post by Labo333 »

fny wrote: post #3

While Claude's style is obnoxious, I'm more frustrated by its inscrutable explanations. You need a PhD to understand its explanation of a code snippet.

I'm not even sure a PhD helps. It just overuses jargon that has NO meaning. Sometimes, it actually hand waves too much as well while trying to dumb down stuff for you.

I am not sure whether it's a consequence of learning to reason from its traces or some RLHF that trips it into using weird terms to sound smarter to the humans who rate it.

Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

#15

Post by Labo333 »

MaxwellM wrote: post #10

Really spectacular analysis – thank you for sharing, fun to scroll and easy to understand. Is it possible to expand this analysis beyond words to other Claude ticks? Contrastive framings, sentence length, caveating, for instance.

Author here, thank you so much! I really tried to make it nice to use, beyond the (quite original) modelling.

A prototype I did tried to detect some grammatical constructions, eg "it's not ..., it's ...", but I am not sure how to systematize that.

Also just a disclaimer: I am NOT tracking Claude tics, I am merely finding that a particular cluster of vocabulary increases. Tracking Claude requires labelled data IMO. I tried using model release dates in a structural model to constraint the clusters but the result was not compelling, so I ended up simplifying the model a lot!

Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

#16

Post by Kwpolska »

confusedbucket wrote: post #6

That confirms the recent spike of Claude calling everything I was recently working on a 'spike'. I still don't know what that term is supposed to represent (apparently).

In some software development methodologies, "spike" is a task whose goal is figuring something out instead of delivering shippable code. https://agiledictionary.com/209/spike/

Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

#18

Post by Labo333 »

khatkhati wrote: post #9
simlevesque wrote: post #7

I wish there was a search bar for the terms, I wanna see for "gate".

Chrome's `find` finds it for me ;)

I have been using it as well, but I think adding a search bar will heighten the experience. I'm trying out some designs right now :)
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