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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

#241

Post by Maxion »

ben30 wrote: post #204

Interesting response from Claude, when I attempted to reduce the "load-bearing" in its responses: I added to my global prompt: - Orwell's first rule: never use a metaphor you're used to seeing in print. "Load-bearing", "the crux", "first-class citizen" signal insight instead of showing it. Name the specific mechanism when I asked what it thought of the change, its reply was: The Orwell bullet fights my own system pro…

So all it'd take for anthropic to fix this is to just adjust their system prompt? lmao

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

#242

Post by altmanaltman »

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…

> I suspect, as we continue forward, humans will slowly start to adopt the language of LLMs, or at least certain language quirks that come from interacting with LLMs. Something I've noticed in my own writing is that I now present lists of examples in a consistent way: "... such as , , etc., ...".

Why would you consider using lists an "LLM" language thing? I really don't understand this concept. Like even this project, the top words I can see are:

1. load-bearing 2. plainly 3. quietly 4. refusal 5. survived

How are they LLM words? I used them all the time before ChatGPT was a thing.

Like if your claim is you use "etc." more because you talk to an LLM, I think you're just discovering human language, no? Like it's not a unique LLM thing that magically dropped and is now going to make people do it. It's a legit thing that most human writers have used for a long time -> which is why LLMs copy it. It's not backward.

A better claim than "people will start writing like LLMs" could be that people will become more literate in expressing themselves. But that literacy is not alien or AI to us, it is basic human language only used properly.

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

#243

Post by loglog »

As of now, there are only 2 natural language clusters in the partition: Claudish and Spanish/French. From a first glance, the other clusters seem centered on technologies (lots of command line flags and abbreviations among the "most representative" words). If the goal is to investigate English language usage trends, it might be better to cluster based only on English words.

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

#244

Post by gwd »

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…

> I suspect, as we continue forward, humans will slowly start to adopt the language of LLMs, or at least certain language quirks that come from interacting with LLMs.

What's somewhat interesting to me is that "load-bearing" was already a common thing to say in certain communities, like lesswrong.com. Whether it breaks out from that subculture with Claude as the vector, or disappears from there because nobody wants to sound like Claude, we'll have to see. How many children are called "Elvis" these days?

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

#245

Post by phatfish »

dare944 wrote: post #191
testdelacc1 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of these phrases existed. Claude didn’t come up with them. The question is whether people are using them a lot more now due to Claude’s influence.

I think it would be fine if more people used "add color to". I think it's a great turn of phrase. "Load bearing", not so much. Ick.

Yes, it is fun to play with different turns of phrase, even in a stale work environment. I do it to combat the banality, but not so much to sound pretentious hopefully ;)

The problem is once a fun phrase is, uh, coloured by "Claude" or some other LLM, it just turns to AI slop.

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

#246

Post by chrisjj »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #154
jverce wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mad cow disease comes to my mind.

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

#247

Post by Maxion »

RugnirViking wrote: post #224
wavewrangler wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, I am referring to software and shipping as a developer who has finished, more or less, their app. Not that I am against its use, I just never really heard that word being used before, and now I hear it all the time. Thus, what the real issue I have with it is, is because my brain has associated its use with a torrent of crap, ie. AI slop. I hear the word used, and I already have bad feeling about it. And…

imo its a change in definition. Previously to "ship" was a one-time thing that you did for big, highly verified and checked stuff. Physically shipping your software to your user tends to be done after its a product. Nobody was "shipping" a PR, or a jira ticket previously

Yep, for those of us who were doing "agile waterfall" PMs often talked about shipping versions too.

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

#248

Post by Maxion »

r_lee wrote: post #155
NoDodgeQuestion wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Those books are definitely in the training set if the model can mention them, but why exactly these terms are so commonly used is not necessarily because the book is in the training material. The model does not itself know how its trained.

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

#249

Post by chrisjj »

souvlakee wrote: post #133

I once asked Claude to replace “byte-identical” with a simpler word, such as “duplicate.” He refused and said “duplicate” does not mean the same thing as “byte-identical” so it should not be changed. He was very nerdy about it, so maybe that is the right way of his evolution.

> "duplicate” does not mean the same thing

Oh no. Claude slurped meta Stack Overflow!

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

#250

Post by prmph »

Yeah, Claude's writing is weird nowadays, and it uses words that are weird and non-standard in context, and its sentence structure is sometimes weird as well.

Working with it on my code, it's now frequently making weird word choices such as:

- "name(s)" as a verb (instead of "specify/specifies", etc), e.g., "...the function names the argument"

- "carries" instead of "contains"

- "verdict" instead of "result"

- "judge", instead of "validate"

Very weird. Also, in writing comments and docs, it is terse in ways that make the writing difficult to parse, like omitting mentioning what a noun refers to, e.g. abc does not accept..." instead of "The abc function does not accept..."

I've resorted to banning from using certain words, and keep asking it to rewrite its text more clearly.

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