Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

jola.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 650 posts

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#641

Post by port11 »

alxndr wrote: post #632
port11 wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I laughed a good 20 seconds at this, and even typing Clod makes me chuckle. This is great, can you please provide us with more guidance of the sort? I wanna laugh a bit at my LLM.

Thanks, it makes me chuckle too. It also serves as an indicator of how much it's adhering to what I've laid out in the file, sorta like how Van Halen's rider specified a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed — if the band found brown M&Ms, they'd know to tell the crew to double-check everything else the venue is supposed to provide; if Clod starts using 1st-person pronouns, then I'm a little more skeptical of…

Thank you. The rest of the file is much more serious. I’ve now instructed Clod to consider passing TypeScript compilation and linting successes as “suspicious glitches”.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#642

Post by rhet0rica »

bensyverson wrote: post #320
doctoboggan wrote: post #309

I do not mind when I am coding with Claude and it uses all the typical claudisms. I am much more bothered when I am reading a blog post, email, or other form of prose and I see those same claudisms. I guess they are not annoying since I know I am talking to an LLM and expect the typical responses. When I am reading prose online that I previously would have expected a human to write, it can be quite jarring to realize…

Exactly this. For whatever reason, Claude likes to talk about the "shape" of "load-bearing" "seams," but if that's the internal jargon it needs to plan and execute its work, who am I to judge? But if I'm reading what is supposed to be someone's original thoughts, it's a huge bummer to see an obvious AI tell. You might say that "it's not just disappointing—it's disrespectful."

I prefer a more tongue-in-cheek theory than a mere preference for the word's shape. Perhaps "load-bearing" is structurally necessary—if it is ablated, the whole model will collapse!

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#643

Post by Timwi »

embedding-shape wrote: post #576
andsoitis wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reprimand it for lying.

What's the fun in the reprimand when you know the target can't really feel it?

That sounds sadistic, to be honest. I think it's more fun when I know I'm not being unethical.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#644

Post by genxy »

esikich wrote: post #279
reaperducer wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or tech companies could stop staring at their own belly-buttons and realize there's a whole big world outside of Silicon Valley, and training on the writing styles and pattens of their bubble and its hangers-on is perhaps not all that useful outside of 415. Apple used to be guilty of this back when you'd ask Siri what the temperature was, and any number above 79°F was followed by the word "Hot!"

People outside of office workers aren't using Claude/Codex etc. though. It's the only real audience. What's the use case outside of an office? Grocery lists?

Not true, lots of people who don't have office jobs are using AI and coding agents.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#645

Post by calf »

esikich wrote: post #477
calf wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not fair. To most users this would not be an obvious thing to do, unlike software/scientific/analytic uses of LLMs. So it's not a matter of inability but rather awareness and know-how. Then secondly, humans learn to write intuitively and heuristically (for example "paragraphs should align sentence subjects with an identifiable flow of conceptual main characters/actors" is an entire chapter of expert writing ad…

It's absolutely fair unless you believe in magic. "Make it sound like a human and not AI" is never going to get you good results just due to information theory. You're not giving it enough to work with or what the hell that even means.

I never said anything like that, but if you're making a simplistic appeal to information theory then I rest my case.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#646

Post by marbro »

phs318u wrote: post #425
greedo wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a thank you message on Teams to my coworkers on a project, and half of them thought I had used AI to write it. As a professional writer in a previous life, I was astonished. Then they told me that they had never seen me write anything more than a sentence or two so naturally they assumed something relatively polished had to be AI assisted.

Though I haven’t been a professional writer, I’ve been a good writer with an expansive vocabulary since high school where English was my best subject despite being a STEM maven. I hate the fact that what was previously considered an advantageous skill is now a millstone in public use. I hate having to dumb down and self—censor in order to avoid being accused of using (or being) an LLM. Even though my writing has a fe…

It annoys me, too, that people think only chatbots wrote intelligent prose.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#647

Post by Myrmornis »

bunderbunder wrote: post #61
Myrmornis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think it's possible that an LLM's internal machinery could decide that an underused-by-humans word should be used more frequently in output than it sees in input because it maps cleanly onto a frequently needed semantic? I think that's possible

It sounds like you are trying to understand LLM behavior using a mental model that inaccurately personifies the stochastic parrot. A more parsimonious explanation is that this term got more-or-less randomly boosted by the reinforcement learning loop because there was nothing in the training data to discourage its use.

> the stochastic parrot.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49010345

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#648

Post by mattmcknight »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #114
mattmcknight wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you replace it with? "necessary dependency"?

Required, important, irreplaceable, necessary, integral. There are lots of ways to express an idea besides this one trendy construction metaphor

It is really trendy? I don't think important, irreplaceable or integral are semantically equivalent. Required and necessary almost get there.

The point is that if you want to remove it or change it, you need to put something else in place that handles the work it is doing. So it is more that it is serving a required/necessary function, without being any of those other things in and of itself. It's more about "be careful when changing this."

Post reply on HN