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Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

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Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#311

Post by 827a »

tsukikage wrote: post #289
827a wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But its not even good satire, because its totally unrepresentative of my and most others' lived experience. Its similar to making a joke about a calculator misadding two numbers because a stray beam of solar radiation flipped a bit.

Have you ever considered that "well, it works on MY machine!" is perhaps not the most helpful response to people voicing frustration at something that is not working as they expect for them?

I don’t know where you picked up the idea that my intention was to be helpful. I’m only mirroring the intentionality behind whoever created this site; they obviously also had no intention of being helpful, as is the case with many discussions concerning AIs limitations.

Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#313

Post by CookieCrisp »

astrobe_ wrote: post #284
supern0va wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I am becoming increasingly convinced that this is actually just a part of how intelligence/cognition works.

But is it really what we want, machines with the same defects as humans? I don't want a pocket calculator that make mistakes "sometimes" so I have to double-check the results, I want a pocket calculator that works (to those who want to argue that pocket calculators don't give the correct result for (1/3)*3: STFU).

No, but it makes sense to me that we’d need to go through this step to get where we want to go

Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#314

Post by plorkyeran »

madibo3156 wrote: post #121
catapart wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

same. none of the available prompts are what I would prompt claude with and I get way better results than this. makes sense to me why the provided prompts result in the simulated outcomes. garbage in, garbage out.

Part skeptic and part zetetic, what prompt would you have used? My impression is that this is an oversimplified demonstration of what can happen when you prompt Claude in a system with many more variables (than two buttons and two colours). If I want the button to turn blue and that's it, what instead do I ask? Even in a complicated system with many levers, what do I request other than the desired end result, hoping…

"Make the Add to Cart button blue" is fine as a first step. When that doesn't have the desired result, I would simply revert the change, start a new session, and do something like "Give the Add to Cart button its own theme separate from the default button theme. Make the color for this new theme blue.". If this gives almost the correct result (e.g. it's not the shade of blue I want) I'd do a followup like "change the Add to Cart theme from #00FF00 to #16b8c4" with no implication that the previous step was wrong. If it's wildly incorrect I'd start over and try to specify in more detail about what exactly should happen.

If I don't understand why changing one button changed them all, I would use an entirely separate session to ask questions about how the site theming works. The fact that the site has a bunch of weird coupling between themes is useful information, and if I don't know how to resolve that I'd ask Claude for ideas about how to safely eliminate the coupling, and once it proposes a reasonable idea tell it to implement that.

The two big things here I'd never do is use emotional languages in prompts, and I'd never tell Claude to revert changes and try again. Once the incorrect change is in the context it's poisoning all of your future results.

Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#315

Post by iLoveOncall »

t-writescode wrote: post #291
iLoveOncall wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole website is two buttons, so that's pretty much accurate.

But it’s *wildly* unhelpful. Would you talk to your coworker like that? “Half the site is blue” or would you laugh and go, “Uh, whoops, now both buttons are blue, just wanted the ‘Add to Cart’ button.” Either that, or your coworker themselves would laugh and tell you about it later. That’s also where this quiz lost me. I wouldn’t respond in either way, I’d say “all buttons look blue now. Can we make it so that just t…

Technically correct is the best kind of correct.

FYI I actually agree, it also surprised me. Anyway everything is deterministic on the website so it's not like that prompt actually has an influence on anything.

Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#317

Post by Lord-Jobo »

astrobe_ wrote: post #284
supern0va wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I am becoming increasingly convinced that this is actually just a part of how intelligence/cognition works.

But is it really what we want, machines with the same defects as humans? I don't want a pocket calculator that make mistakes "sometimes" so I have to double-check the results, I want a pocket calculator that works (to those who want to argue that pocket calculators don't give the correct result for (1/3)*3: STFU).

One of the biggest strengths of a computer is reproducibility. The worst software bugs are inconsistent or non reproducible. The least useful calculators apply rules inconsistently, to your example.

the inconsistency of LLMs is by far one of the biggest gripes I have with them. Closely related to their apparently deep desire to avoid following instructions.

I know these are both a byproduct of noise (which is somewhat tunable) and noise is inherent to these systems in a lode bearing way.

I still hate it. it’s holding the technology back. I don’t honestly see how we can safely or even successfully approach the idealized realm of AI without bypassing this problem, which to my understanding, probably means not using language models at all and trying a totally different approach. But I really don’t know much about machine learning, I’m a super novice compared to a lot on this website.

Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#319

Post by cloverich »

kstenerud wrote: post #34

That's so weird... This doesn't at all match my experience with Claude. I've never seen it behave this way.

because you are now getting coded products written in large by people who do not have technical foundations, so the way they interact with and even prompt the model is different. We all know how to fix this scenario; be more specific, or diagnose the abstraction mix ups and straighten those out.

Ask for change A and get unwanted change B happens all the time with bad programmers and tradgedy of the commons (ie poorly architected, no restraint) codebases.

Most normies dont know about this stuff.

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