4 ms·

They probably have statistics on it and saw that certain phrases happen over and over so why waste compute on inference.

mycall 6mo ago
The problem with regex is multi-language support and how big the regex will bloat if you to support even 10 languages.
- b112 6mo ago
  Did you just complain about bloat, in anything using npm?
- TeMPOraL 6mo ago
  We're talking about Claude Code. If you're coding and not writing or thinking in English, the agents and people reading that code will have bigger problems than a regexp missing a swear word :).
  - MetalSnake 6mo ago
    I talk to it in non-English. But have rules to have everything in code and documentation in english. Only speaking with me should use my native language. Why would that be a problem?
    - ekropotin 6mo ago
      Because 90% of training data was in English and therefore the model perform best in this language.
      - foldr 6mo ago
        In my experience these models work fine using another language, if it’s a widely spoken one. For example, sometimes I prompt in Spanish, just to practice. It doesn’t seem to affect the quality of code generation.
        adamsb6 6mo ago
        They literally just have to subtract the vector for the source language and add the vector for the target. It’s the original use case for LLMs.
        curioussquirrel 6mo ago
        Thank you. +1. There are obviously differences and things getting lost or slightly misaligned in the latent space, and these do cause degradation in reasoning quality, but the decline is very small in high resource languages.
        ekropotin 6mo ago
        It’s just a subjective observation. It just can’t be a case simply because how ML works. In short, the more diverse and high quality texts with reasoning reach examples were in the training set, the better model performs on a given language. So unless Spanish subset had much more quality-dense examples, to make up for volume, there is no way the quality of reasoning in Spanish is on par with English. I apologise for the rambling explanation, I sure someone with ML expertise here can it explain it better.
        foldr 6mo ago
        The agent may be translating to English behind the scenes. There are all kinds of hacks layered on top of the underlying models. But however exactly it works, it’s clearly not the case that these things only make use of Spanish training data when you prompt them in Spanish. Lets take a language with orders of magnitude less training data, like Nahuatl. The following is what happens if I ask Claude Code in Nahuatl to give me an example of a simple program that I can execute inside a web browser (avoiding any direct keyword prompts like 'Javascript' or 'Hello World'). Interestingly, it responds in Spanish. I doubt that it has any relevant training data in Nahuatl. (Apologies if the Nahuatl is wrong – I just used Google translate.) ¿Uelis techmakas se neskayotl tlen se programa tlen amo ouij tlen ueliskia nijchiuas ipan se navegador web? ----- Entiendo tu pregunta en náhuatl. Aquí un ejemplo sencillo — una calculadora en HTML puro que puedes abrir directo en el navegador, sin servidor: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8"> <title>Calculadora</title> <style> body { font-family: sans-serif; display: flex; justify-content: center; padding: 40px; } .calc { border: 1px solid #ccc; padding: 20px; border-radius: 8px; width: 200px; } input { width: 100%; margin-bottom: 10px; font-size: 1.2em; text-align: right; } button { width: 22%; margin: 2px; padding: 8px; font-size: 1em; cursor: pointer; } .wide { width: 47%; } </style> </head> <body> <div class="calc"> <input type="text" id="pantalla" readonly> <div> <button onclick="tecla('7')">7</button> <button onclick="tecla('8')">8</button> <button onclick="tecla('9')">9</button> <button onclick="tecla('/')">÷</button> <button onclick="tecla('4')">4</button> <button onclick="tecla('5')">5</button> <button onclick="tecla('6')">6</button> <button onclick="tecla('*')">×</button> <button onclick="tecla('1')">1</button> <button onclick="tecla('2')">2</button> <button onclick="tecla('3')">3</button> <button onclick="tecla('-')">−</button> <button onclick="tecla('0')">0</button> <button onclick="tecla('.')">.</button> <button onclick="tecla('+')">+</button> <button onclick="limpiar()">C</button> <button class="wide" onclick="calcular()">=</button> <button class="wide" onclick="borrar()">⌫</button> </div> </div> <script> const pantalla = document.getElementById('pantalla'); function tecla(val) { pantalla.value += val; } function calcular() { try { pantalla.value = eval(pantalla.value); } catch { pantalla.value = 'Error'; } } function limpiar() { pantalla.value = ''; } function borrar() { pantalla.value = pantalla.value.slice(0, -1); } </script> </body> </html> Guarda esto como calculadora.html y ábrelo en cualquier navegador — no necesita servidor ni dependencias. Es un buen punto de partida para aprender HTML, CSS y JavaScript.
  - formerly_proven 6mo ago
    In my experience agents tend to (counterintuitively) perform better when the business language is not English / does not match the code's language. I'm assuming the increased attention mitigates the higher "cognitive" load.
  - cryptonector 6mo ago
    Claude handles human languages other than English just fine.
- doublesocket 6mo ago
  Supporting 10 different languages in regex is a drop in the ocean. The regex can be generated programmatically and you can compress regexes easily. We used to have a compressed regex that could match any placename or street name in the UK in a few MB of RAM. It was silly quick.
  - cogman10 6mo ago
    I think it will depend on the language. There are a few non-latin languages where a simple word search likely won't be enough for a regex to properly apply.
    - mycall 6mo ago
      Exactly this. Unicode is a big beast to consider in regex concats.
  - astrocat 6mo ago
    woah. This is a regex use I've never heard of. I'd absolutely love to see a writeup on this approach - how its done and when it's useful.
    - benlivengood 6mo ago
      You can literally | together every street address or other string you want to match in a giant disjunction, and then run a DFA/NFA minimization over that to get it down to a reasonable size. Maybe there are some fast regex simplification algorithms as well, but working directly with the finite automata has decades of research and probably can be more fully optimized.
    - doublesocket 6mo ago
      This was many moons ago, written in perl. From memory we used Regexp::Trie - https://metacpan.org/release/DANKOGAI/Regexp-Trie-0.02/view/lib/Regexp/Trie.pm https://metacpan.org/release/DANKOGAI/Regexp-Trie-0.02/view/... We used it to tokenize search input and combined it with a solr backend. Worked really remarkably well.
- crimsonnoodle58 6mo ago
  They only need to look at one language to get a statistically meaningful picture into common flaws with their model(s) or application. If they want to drill down to flaws that only affect a particular language, then they could add a regex for that as well/instead.
crem 6mo ago
More likely their LLM Agent just produced that regex and they didn't even notice.

mycall 6mo ago

The problem with regex is multi-language support and how big the regex will bloat if you to support even 10 languages.

b112 6mo ago
Did you just complain about bloat, in anything using npm?
TeMPOraL 6mo ago
We're talking about Claude Code. If you're coding and not writing or thinking in English, the agents and people reading that code will have bigger problems than a regexp missing a swear word :).
- MetalSnake 6mo ago
  I talk to it in non-English. But have rules to have everything in code and documentation in english. Only speaking with me should use my native language. Why would that be a problem?
  - ekropotin 6mo ago
    Because 90% of training data was in English and therefore the model perform best in this language.
    - foldr 6mo ago
      In my experience these models work fine using another language, if it’s a widely spoken one. For example, sometimes I prompt in Spanish, just to practice. It doesn’t seem to affect the quality of code generation.
      - adamsb6 6mo ago
        They literally just have to subtract the vector for the source language and add the vector for the target. It’s the original use case for LLMs.
        curioussquirrel 6mo ago
        Thank you. +1. There are obviously differences and things getting lost or slightly misaligned in the latent space, and these do cause degradation in reasoning quality, but the decline is very small in high resource languages.
      - ekropotin 6mo ago
        It’s just a subjective observation. It just can’t be a case simply because how ML works. In short, the more diverse and high quality texts with reasoning reach examples were in the training set, the better model performs on a given language. So unless Spanish subset had much more quality-dense examples, to make up for volume, there is no way the quality of reasoning in Spanish is on par with English. I apologise for the rambling explanation, I sure someone with ML expertise here can it explain it better.
        foldr 6mo ago
        The agent may be translating to English behind the scenes. There are all kinds of hacks layered on top of the underlying models. But however exactly it works, it’s clearly not the case that these things only make use of Spanish training data when you prompt them in Spanish. Lets take a language with orders of magnitude less training data, like Nahuatl. The following is what happens if I ask Claude Code in Nahuatl to give me an example of a simple program that I can execute inside a web browser (avoiding any direct keyword prompts like 'Javascript' or 'Hello World'). Interestingly, it responds in Spanish. I doubt that it has any relevant training data in Nahuatl. (Apologies if the Nahuatl is wrong – I just used Google translate.) ¿Uelis techmakas se neskayotl tlen se programa tlen amo ouij tlen ueliskia nijchiuas ipan se navegador web? ----- Entiendo tu pregunta en náhuatl. Aquí un ejemplo sencillo — una calculadora en HTML puro que puedes abrir directo en el navegador, sin servidor: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8"> <title>Calculadora</title> <style> body { font-family: sans-serif; display: flex; justify-content: center; padding: 40px; } .calc { border: 1px solid #ccc; padding: 20px; border-radius: 8px; width: 200px; } input { width: 100%; margin-bottom: 10px; font-size: 1.2em; text-align: right; } button { width: 22%; margin: 2px; padding: 8px; font-size: 1em; cursor: pointer; } .wide { width: 47%; } </style> </head> <body> <div class="calc"> <input type="text" id="pantalla" readonly> <div> <button onclick="tecla('7')">7</button> <button onclick="tecla('8')">8</button> <button onclick="tecla('9')">9</button> <button onclick="tecla('/')">÷</button> <button onclick="tecla('4')">4</button> <button onclick="tecla('5')">5</button> <button onclick="tecla('6')">6</button> <button onclick="tecla('*')">×</button> <button onclick="tecla('1')">1</button> <button onclick="tecla('2')">2</button> <button onclick="tecla('3')">3</button> <button onclick="tecla('-')">−</button> <button onclick="tecla('0')">0</button> <button onclick="tecla('.')">.</button> <button onclick="tecla('+')">+</button> <button onclick="limpiar()">C</button> <button class="wide" onclick="calcular()">=</button> <button class="wide" onclick="borrar()">⌫</button> </div> </div> <script> const pantalla = document.getElementById('pantalla'); function tecla(val) { pantalla.value += val; } function calcular() { try { pantalla.value = eval(pantalla.value); } catch { pantalla.value = 'Error'; } } function limpiar() { pantalla.value = ''; } function borrar() { pantalla.value = pantalla.value.slice(0, -1); } </script> </body> </html> Guarda esto como calculadora.html y ábrelo en cualquier navegador — no necesita servidor ni dependencias. Es un buen punto de partida para aprender HTML, CSS y JavaScript.
- formerly_proven 6mo ago
  In my experience agents tend to (counterintuitively) perform better when the business language is not English / does not match the code's language. I'm assuming the increased attention mitigates the higher "cognitive" load.
- cryptonector 6mo ago
  Claude handles human languages other than English just fine.
doublesocket 6mo ago
Supporting 10 different languages in regex is a drop in the ocean. The regex can be generated programmatically and you can compress regexes easily. We used to have a compressed regex that could match any placename or street name in the UK in a few MB of RAM. It was silly quick.
- cogman10 6mo ago
  I think it will depend on the language. There are a few non-latin languages where a simple word search likely won't be enough for a regex to properly apply.
  - mycall 6mo ago
    Exactly this. Unicode is a big beast to consider in regex concats.
- astrocat 6mo ago
  woah. This is a regex use I've never heard of. I'd absolutely love to see a writeup on this approach - how its done and when it's useful.
  - benlivengood 6mo ago
    You can literally | together every street address or other string you want to match in a giant disjunction, and then run a DFA/NFA minimization over that to get it down to a reasonable size. Maybe there are some fast regex simplification algorithms as well, but working directly with the finite automata has decades of research and probably can be more fully optimized.
  - doublesocket 6mo ago
    This was many moons ago, written in perl. From memory we used Regexp::Trie - https://metacpan.org/release/DANKOGAI/Regexp-Trie-0.02/view/lib/Regexp/Trie.pm https://metacpan.org/release/DANKOGAI/Regexp-Trie-0.02/view/... We used it to tokenize search input and combined it with a solr backend. Worked really remarkably well.
crimsonnoodle58 6mo ago
They only need to look at one language to get a statistically meaningful picture into common flaws with their model(s) or application. If they want to drill down to flaws that only affect a particular language, then they could add a regex for that as well/instead.

crem 6mo ago

More likely their LLM Agent just produced that regex and they didn't even notice.