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Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

louisabraham.github.io

91–100 of 328 posts

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

#91
post #17

I find Claude language often hard to process and having to wade through these words can be draining. Embarrassingly, I’ve recently caught myself using them in conversations! Do all models have the their own jargon?

I haven't noticed GPT 5.6 having any obvious jargon.

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

#92
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.

It's interesting that there must be a decision behind that, even if it's just appealing to the RLHF judges for some reason. Maybe there's an intention that if you cannot decipher what the chatbot is saying to you, you will have to ask and burn even more tokens.

Naively I would often expect it would talk to me about various niche topics like to a layman, which does occur about some topics an actual normal person would ask.

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

#96

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.

Generally the claude jargon is valid jargon I’ve seen real people use, it just uses jargon so much more often than a human would. And because it has particular jargon it likes, and claude is widely used, you see so much of that particular jargon that you get sick of it.

It’s like having one coworker with a very particular writing style which is mildly annoying, but then it suddenly feels like half the internet was written by that one person and it becomes a lot more annoying.

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

#99
post #76

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).

A spike is an early prototype that you're supposed to throw away after having figured out the real design. I think it was subtly dissing you.

I think you are subtly dissing me :)

I was half-joking, of course I could've just asked Claude, but the linked site shows there has been actual recent spikes in the use of the word 'spike'. The term does match what I was recently doing, but hacking around legacy ERP software, blackboxes and other enterprise abominations isn't that out of the ordinary for me.

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

#100

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 think it's model collapse - excessive feedback and excessive RL.

What RL does is narrow the variety generated by the model by steering the output towards the goal being rewarded. It's a bit like putting blinkers on a horse.

Of course RL is a very crude tool - it affects the entire model, even if you are just trying to make it better at some specific task(s), or trying to imbue a certain kind of personality (OpenAI's recent goblin problem).

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