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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

#41

Post by tengbretson »

beering wrote: post #39
tengbretson wrote: post #33

Why are people getting so hung up on the "load-bearing assumption" turn of phrase that Claude uses? I get that it becomes cliche, but it is also a rather semantically dense way to communicate an idea that a lot of people run into.

ItMs because Claude sprinkles these words as flavoring without aiding understanding. It feels like Claude thinks of metaphors that don’t actually mean anything (or maybe only makes sense to itself).

I don't understand. Does the metaphor "load-bearing assumption" not actually mean anything to you?

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

#42

Post by ricardobeat »

glimshe wrote: post #27

I had an idea for an experiment. Take a decent text, any one, and ask AI to rate it. Then patch that text by replacing words for ones that AI likes (honestly, load bearing etc) whenever possible and ask AI to rate it again to see how the evaluation changes.

Claude usually rates its own writing very highly, which is a problem when trying to make it write differently.

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

#43

Post by josefresco »

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.

They just addressed this with "Output styles"

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles

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

#44

Post by ricardobeat »

Labo333 wrote: post #21

Author here! Grateful for the kind words, human communities like HN really hit differently when you spend the whole day chatting with sycophantic and bullshitting agents (including to make this page). I'm currently adding a search bar as well as increasing the data to 1000 PR per day. A nice thing that is not obvious on the main page is that the dataset and analysis are updated daily using Github Actions (at least wh…

Nice work. I would suggest rewriting your README with Gemini, the most human of them, so it doesn't read exactly like the thing you are pointing at: https://github.com/louisabraham/load-bearing

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

#45

Post by sethd »

A lot of these “Claudeisms” are simply jargon I’ve seen or heard firsthand myself while working at tech companies. I don’t think it’s limited to Claude either; I’ve seen Codex use load-bearing and many of these phrases as well.

I think using agents is just like speedrunning the whole experience of working with technical coworkers. Whereas you might have had a few coworkers at your company who used some of these phrases regularly, you now have a “coworker” who uses all of them regularly at a much faster pace.

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

#46

Post by sroussey »

user43928 wrote: post #25
sroussey wrote: post #2

I'm surprised vacuous is not on the list. The word selection and way of writing has taken the joy out of using Claude.

I'm also missing the "latch" that "wedged" my test run.

At least "wedged" is a thing i would say on a spinning out of control test that is stuck. "latch" though... not so much. I really wonder if this is the EU AI Act interfering with everything Claude does these days. As a non-EU citizen, I want a version without the rewriting of with watermarking in text.

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

#47

Post by NichoPaolucci »

Jordan-117 wrote: post #32

I wonder to what extent this is the result of suboptimal RLHF versus the inherent intelligence of the model making its language more intricate and difficult for humans to easily parse? On the one hand, it's a common trope that highly educated people can talk in a way that's confusing and annoying to regular people who don't know all the jargon. But on the other hand, it's a mark of a skilled communicator to be able t…

I don’t think they’re “talking down”. If anything - it’s way more difficult to distill something into a genuinely easy to digest format. I personally think that they aren’t immediately capable of this, and so we get word salad instead. Extra prompting required to strip extraneous prose out.

Maybe I am dumb and it IS talking down to me, but there have been many occasions where I’m reading AI generated docs / plans and it makes absolutely no sense, but looks really in depth at a glance.

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

#48

Post by smj-edison »

sethd wrote: post #45

A lot of these “Claudeisms” are simply jargon I’ve seen or heard firsthand myself while working at tech companies. I don’t think it’s limited to Claude either; I’ve seen Codex use load-bearing and many of these phrases as well. I think using agents is just like speedrunning the whole experience of working with technical coworkers. Whereas you might have had a few coworkers at your company who used some of these phras…

I like to imagine that there's this one employee that oversees RHLF, who has a particular style of writing, and that got so ingrained that it's just them x1000.

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

#49

Post by jimmaswell »

black_knight wrote: post #23
Labo333 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have a PhD and can confirm. Oftentimes, the stuff which comes out of Claude is just impenetrable because it invents jargon on the fly, and uses verbs in the most atrocious ways. "The fibred side folded its capstone into the existing name, so the kinds are asymmetric." What on earth does it mean to fold a capstone into a name‽

Is that an actual Claude output or hyperbole? It feels like I'm trying to parse an equation in a new math class which makes me want to take a stab at it regardless.

So there's a "fibred side".. the most likely candidate seems to be "fibred categories" which I hadn't heard of before, and it's talking about one side of some mapping between two sets such that if f is the primary function and f(x)=y then there exists an inverse function g(y)=x? Was it something that converted some data bidirectionally with a different algorithm on both sides?

The capstone of the inverse function would be the most important thing about it maybe?

My best guess is "In the process of working on the inverse function, the existing name (of the inverse function itself maybe?) was made to reflect the operation of the inverse function, so now the name does not follow the same naming convention as the name of the primary function (which does not contain its 'capstone')."

Its original wording is certainly dense and harder to follow for us, but it's fascinating how the model finds this the best fit for what it's trying to express IMO. Like it arrives at its own ways of overloading words/concepts, and things we would refer to in different ways in different contexts all get compressed to the same more-useful/complete idea.

Codex has never said anything nearly so alien as the Claude examples I've seen floating around, interestingly. I wonder if it just has a better training on choosing its words to present to the user or if it inherently arrived at a somewhat different mapping that favors 'plain language' more.

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

#50

Post by smj-edison »

ricardobeat wrote: post #42
glimshe wrote: post #27

I had an idea for an experiment. Take a decent text, any one, and ask AI to rate it. Then patch that text by replacing words for ones that AI likes (honestly, load bearing etc) whenever possible and ask AI to rate it again to see how the evaluation changes.

Claude usually rates its own writing very highly, which is a problem when trying to make it write differently.

Yeah, I once asked it to review its own writing with a subagent with a pretty strict writing guide, and it didn't see anything wrong, lol.
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