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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

#21

Post by Labo333 »

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 when they don't suffer from an outage ^^). I find it pretty cool to be able to build such apps without a "backend"!

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

#22

Post by Espressosaurus »

Kwpolska wrote: post #16
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/

Why can't they call it a prototype or experiment? Sheesh.

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

#23

Post by black_knight »

Labo333 wrote: post #13
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.

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‽

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

#24

Post by condiment »

dave1999x wrote: post #5
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.

Is it the obnoxious style that causes this?

I think it's the hierarchies of agents summarizing each others' summaries before presenting a final answer to the user. The principal agent has the full context from all its workers, but when it distills this down to a message to the user it summarizes it into a mess of confident jargon that pertains to a conversation the user wasn't a part of and never saw.

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

#26

Post by sosull »

I really love this. It’s comprehensive, it consolidates the data to the point where the argument effectively ‘makes itself’, and the way it’s presented respects the reader’s time. It also makes for an interesting challenge (for me at least) to try to characterise the subject matter of a language problem so narrowly.

No ream of slides. No narrative. Just a lovely big painful conclusion.

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

#29

Post by fouc »

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.

don't forget LLMs are great at translating between languages, and within the same language. depending on the problem it works on, it will often reach for terminology that tend to be more common or familiar within that problem set. which appears inscrutable, but there's many different ways to skin a cat. just remind it to translate it back to the terminology and subject matter you're already an expert in.

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

#30

Post by Labo333 »

sosull wrote: post #26

I really love this. It’s comprehensive, it consolidates the data to the point where the argument effectively ‘makes itself’, and the way it’s presented respects the reader’s time. It also makes for an interesting challenge (for me at least) to try to characterise the subject matter of a language problem so narrowly. No ream of slides. No narrative. Just a lovely big painful conclusion.

Thank you so much! The presentation was really my goal here, more than the model itself.
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