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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

#151

Post by [deleted] »

threecheese wrote: post #58
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…

In the enterprise, we are already adopting them. “Seam”, I term I’d never heard used before, is now not only our defacto way to describe the boundary between systems/workflows/components, it is encoded into our organizational roles and responsibilities descriptions. I am the proud owner of several seams, and am considering giving them person-names. The empty space between my inventory APIs and their clients might be…

[deleted]

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

#152

Post by SoftTalker »

rsanheim wrote: post #71
threecheese wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the enterprise, we are already adopting them. “Seam”, I term I’d never heard used before, is now not only our defacto way to describe the boundary between systems/workflows/components, it is encoded into our organizational roles and responsibilities descriptions. I am the proud owner of several seams, and am considering giving them person-names. The empty space between my inventory APIs and their clients might be…

"seam" dates back to refactoring & software engineering literature that pre-date LLM use by 20 years -- see Working Effectively With Legacy Code for one example ( https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/working-effectively-wit... ). Its a great book, still use techniques from it everyday. "load-bearing" I have never heard used for programming before Opus, and its incredibly annoying and over-used.

I remember "cleavage" and "cleaves" from that vocabulary. Always made my adolescent brain chuckle.

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

#153

Post by chmod775 »

threecheese wrote: post #58
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…

In the enterprise, we are already adopting them. “Seam”, I term I’d never heard used before, is now not only our defacto way to describe the boundary between systems/workflows/components, it is encoded into our organizational roles and responsibilities descriptions. I am the proud owner of several seams, and am considering giving them person-names. The empty space between my inventory APIs and their clients might be…

"seam" is a cop-out term for when someone (usually AI) lacks the imagination to come up with something more descriptive. It's like saying "middle thing". Just name it by what it does, and if you can't, remove it because it's not doing anything.

"load-bearing" on the other hand is just a weird way to say "required" or "prerequisite" without drawing any attention to the fact that one cannot articulate what something is a prerequisite for, probably because that fact has since been lost from context.

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

#154

Post by kridsdale1 »

jverce wrote: post #147
SalariedSlave wrote: post #121

I've recently seen this mentioned more and more, both on HN and on reddit. It seems these output patterns are getting worse. It's not just Claude, my impression is that all of the current models have this style issue. Their writing can get borderline incomprehensible. Is there some feedback loop or compounding happening with each model generation? Maybe newer models are ingesting too much AI content? If the ratio of…

That's most likely what's happening. SNR will constantly decrease as LLM content is so much quicker and cheaper to generate, which makes it more statistically significant, which will make it more "relevant" for future models. A positive feedback basically.

An audio feedback distortion effect comes to mind.

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

#155

Post by r_lee »

NoDodgeQuestion wrote: post #88
r_lee wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember asking claude in claude code why the "seams" and it instantly in very fine detail said how it's from a book on working with legacy code so they might be RLHFing on these specific approaches and then it becomes the entire model just an anecdote but I found it interesting how it went full on that it's from that book vs just "it's technical jargon"

AI model does not know special insight into how model itself was trained. All it tells you is it's prediction of expected explanation.

yeah but I didn't prompt it in a way where I tried to get such an answer, it gave an entire boilerplate rundown just from like me asking "what's up with the 'seams'?"

I might be wrong, but usually it'd be a lot less deliberate, and at least in my mind it wouldn't be surprising if they were heaving training these on these specific "best practices" books/methodologies and thus picking up lingo from them

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

#156

Post by Labo333 »

black_rabbit_ wrote: post #144
Labo333 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

You did a fantastic job; very to-the-point with effective visualisations. Kudos! One very minor note: if your scroll device reports pixel-perfect deltas rather than discrete scroll-wheel ticks (e.g. logitech mx master, laptop touchpad, etc), the behaviour in the word search box is a bit weird. Arrow keys work fine though.

Thank you!

I did test it with my mac touchpad without issue. Maybe the problem is that I wanted to make discrete scroll-wheel ticks work. I just tried a fix by normalising deltaMode to pixels.

If you could just paste this in your console, I would have a better idea:

    document.querySelector('.wall').addEventListener('wheel', e =>
      console.log(e.deltaMode, e.deltaY.toFixed(2), e.defaultPrevented ? 'PAGE' : 'native'), true)

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

#157

Post by sergey_v »

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…

It's easy to think "it's not talking down, because I don't understand it, and I'm intelligent". But how is less intelligent being supposed to fully understand a more intelligent one, honestly speaking? All I know is that Claude understands Claude perfectly. I have the common session pause/resume setup that sometimes produces completely incomprehensible markdown files, but a new Claude session picks them up perfectly, down to the smallest details. What if what we consider excessive circular gibberish is actually highly precise set of instructions needed to minimize error cases for that unreliable human?

If Claude understands Claude, Claude understands human, and human doesn't understand Claude, that doesn't argue well for "Claude is a caveman".

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

#158

Post by nl »

wavewrangler wrote: post #104

Was talking about the use of shipped recently, and I was mocked for asking such a crazy question, by freshly self-minted engineers, no less. No wonder they thought it was ridiculous...it had been a part of their vocabulary their entire career. All few weeks of it. I wonder what those guys are doing now. This was about a month ago. Do you think what they shipped ever...landed?

"shipped" was a pretty common term before AI though. It does show as 17x more common on github in this dataset but it was used a lot more in product management than in PRs previously.

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

#159

Post by cube00 »

Labo333 wrote: post #11
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!

I know HN prefers we focus on the content and not the design but I have join in to say that word scrolling experience was brilliant.

I was focused on the data initially scrolling through until I suddenly realised, wow, this is really nice!

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

#160

Post by Labo333 »

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…

Thank you all for the feedback!

I added the search bar, increased the data to 1000 PR a day (more than 50M words total) and added a feature to explore the other clusters as well. I hope the page is not getting cluttered.

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