4 ms·

> (tap-select, drag-box, long-press deselect, two-finger scroll, pinch zoom) This is another "AI-ism" I noticed, mostly in coding agents - they seem to be very

by xg15 4mo ago

> (tap-select, drag-box, long-press deselect, two-finger scroll, pinch zoom) This is another "AI-ism" I noticed, mostly in coding agents - they seem to be very fond of making up new "compound nouns" (and occasionally verbs) to sum up relatively complex and specific concepts into single noun phrases. I wasn't sure if it's to save tokens or if the AI uses this to get a concise "identifier" for a concept that it can refer back to later, but I found it very noticeable. I find the resulting sentences hard to read, though it does get better if you're aware of that tendency and make a conscious effort to parse the noun phrases. But I guess since it's just intermediate output from coding agents and not text for essays or blog posts, it's fine.

trentor 4mo ago
Maybe LLMs are just Germans.
- lacy_tinpot 4mo ago
  This isn't good news...
- Rexxar 4mo ago
  That's the G in AGI.
  - sscaryterry 4mo ago
    Artificial German Ingenieurwerk
f3408fh 4mo ago
Yes! It's infuriating. I've tried prohibiting them in my AGENTS.md but it's not 100% effective. --- AGENTS.md --- ## Plain words, not jargon Don't use jargon-as-shorthand. Say what you actually mean. - Don't say "load-bearing assumptions". Say "the assumptions the xyz depends on". - Don't say "cross-service". Name both services, e.g. "whether the X service can derive duration without calling the Y service". "Cross-X" is confusing because it hides which things are involved. - Don't deliver verdicts as abstract noun-phrases like "Cross-RCA double-counting is unfounded". Say it plainly: "I checked whether the same root cause gets counted twice across RCA runs, and it doesn't." ## No earth-shattering declarations Don't hype findings. Skip "a critical finding changes everything", "now I have the full picture", "this changes the game", etc. Just state what you found plainly. Most findings are ordinary; report them that way. ## Don't reflexively hedge a "yes" When the answer is yes, say yes. Don't soften every positive answer with a caveat: it erodes confidence in the "yes". Only add a caveat when there's a genuine, specific uncertainty worth flagging.
- lostlogin 4mo ago
  > Yes! It's infuriating. No, it’s good. When they stop doing this, it’ll be harder spot the machine slop.
- xg15 4mo ago
  Yeah, I wonder if part of the reasoning is built around those phrases, and therefore it can't get rid of them easily. > "now I have the full picture" I always interpreted that phrase as a sort of marker to delimit the phase in which it explores the codebase and gathers information from the phase in which it implements the changes. Not sure if it's still done, but I think some months ago there was discussion that some of the phrases are injected by the inference loop to "steer" the model - e.g. "But wait" if a thought block was too short etc. Obviously such phrases couldn't be influenced by the prompt.
  - Sinidir 4mo ago
    Yes these things happen as part of RL Training. Same way that you can see the "But wait ..." phrases in thinking traces. They get rewarded.
    - f3408fh 4mo ago
      Out of curiosity, how does something like "But wait..." get rewarded?
      - vintagedave 3mo ago
        The human (or other entity) judging it probably thinks it looks like a sign of thinking or reasoning, and doing a better job -- catching its own errors before they are confidently surfaced. That would be worth rewarding.
- skerit 4mo ago
  I thought it was just Opus 4.7 and 4.8 that did this. Do other models do this too? Anyway: in my case Opus absolutely did not follow a similar instruction in the CLAUDE.md file. (But then again: it hardly followed _any_ CLAUDE.md instruction properly)
jorl17 4mo ago
Excessive-hyphenization is ai-hyperfixation
daveguy 4mo ago
FYI, AI isn't fond of a goddamn thing. They have token prediction quirks that don't follow typical English.
- sawjet 4mo ago
  Personification is a figure of speech. What you say is technically correct but we don't need to declare this every time humans discuss how LLMs work.
- ben_w 4mo ago
  Few ever cared. Find one non-pedant who would object to the personification that follows: "The evening settled over the city, drawing the light out of the streets one corner at a time. Windows blinked awake with lamplight, and the wind moved through the alleys restlessly, leaves brushing against walls before gathering themselves along the pavement. In the distance, the river kept its steady argument with the stone embankments. When the night pressed in, the weather became increasingly angry, until it was a raging storm." In the affective sense, evenings don't settle, and street lights are not drawn out, windows don't blink, and wind isn't restless. Weather can neither be angry, nor rage. But such personification is a natural part of how the English speak.
  - folkrav 4mo ago
    Personification =/= anthropomorphization
  - daveguy 4mo ago
    Or it's just plagiarism, eg "windows blinked awake": https://web.archive.org/web/20190825132048/https://patriciaengler.com/2018/08/11/how-christian-students-can-prepare-for-secular-higher-education/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190825132048/https://patriciae... See also "wind moved restlessly", "weather became angry". And raging storm? I mean come on... I won't even put that last one in quotes. And like a sibling reply pointed out, personificiation is not the same as anthropomophism. Nor is plagiarized personification. It has no inner thoughts, and no fondness of anything. It's nothing but a cheap, superficial facsimile of human writing and nothing more. Great for form filling and boilerplate though. Not so great for anything else.
marginalia_nu 4mo ago
Haha, I do that too sometimes. It's a thing in some Germanic languages. Instinct is to merge nouns into word, e.g. 'lawnchair', but that gives you a red squiggly line, but 'lawn chair' also looks wrong, so 'lawn-chair' is the middle ground.
- ben_w 4mo ago
  First time I realised this was GCSE History lessons, looking at first world war posters like this one and going "huh, to-day with a hyphen…" https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/27774 https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/27774
  - brador 4mo ago
    Badnami is Persian and literally means bad-name (like defamation of character). English word origins are a fascinating rabbit hole.
    - ben_w 4mo ago
      > English word origins are a fascinating rabbit hole. My favourite example of which is Northern Ireland's Orange Order. The colour is orange, because that was the Royal colour of the family of the monarch it was named after, William of Orange, who was Dutch, titled after the principality of Orange which is named after the city of Orange which is French which got its name from the Celtic word for forehead or temple. The colour is named after the fruit, the fruit's name is a corruption "a norange" -> "an orange", which goes back to naranja which goes to Arabic which goes to Classical Persian which goes to Sanskrit. Meanwhile, the dutch word for the fruit is sinaasappel, Chinese apple, compare with the English word "mandarin" used for many different Chinese things.
topgrain2 4mo ago
That’s… about how I might have written that.
mikeryan 4mo ago
That and finishing a statement with an em dash — that’s what AI does.
rossant 4mo ago
That, and also the very long comma-separated lists with sometimes 10+ items.
shibel 4mo ago
I’m (sorry for the lack of humbleness) a very fluent non-native speaker and writer, and this is by far my biggest challenge with Claude. It stitches together 2-4 advanced concepts into one or two words and I always have to ask it to “unpack”. I don’t think it’s easy on native speakers when it happens, but it’s even harder when you’re not.
- gregoryl 4mo ago
  Its hard for native speakers. Information density makes for rough reading.
  - causal 4mo ago
    Still debating whether these are actually information dense or not. Complexity gives the appearance of density, but these sentences always come in whole pages at a time while often failing to deliver the needed information.
  - Obscurity4340 4mo ago
    It honestly feels more like chunking to me

by xg15 4mo ago

trentor 4mo ago

Maybe LLMs are just Germans.

lacy_tinpot 4mo ago
This isn't good news...
Rexxar 4mo ago
That's the G in AGI.
- sscaryterry 4mo ago
  Artificial German Ingenieurwerk

f3408fh 4mo ago

Yes! It's infuriating. I've tried prohibiting them in my AGENTS.md but it's not 100% effective. --- AGENTS.md --- ## Plain words, not jargon Don't use jargon-as-shorthand. Say what you actually mean. - Don't say "load-bearing assumptions". Say "the assumptions the xyz depends on". - Don't say "cross-service". Name both services, e.g. "whether the X service can derive duration without calling the Y service". "Cross-X" is confusing because it hides which things are involved. - Don't deliver verdicts as abstract noun-phrases like "Cross-RCA double-counting is unfounded". Say it plainly: "I checked whether the same root cause gets counted twice across RCA runs, and it doesn't." ## No earth-shattering declarations Don't hype findings. Skip "a critical finding changes everything", "now I have the full picture", "this changes the game", etc. Just state what you found plainly. Most findings are ordinary; report them that way. ## Don't reflexively hedge a "yes" When the answer is yes, say yes. Don't soften every positive answer with a caveat: it erodes confidence in the "yes". Only add a caveat when there's a genuine, specific uncertainty worth flagging.

lostlogin 4mo ago
> Yes! It's infuriating. No, it’s good. When they stop doing this, it’ll be harder spot the machine slop.
xg15 4mo ago
Yeah, I wonder if part of the reasoning is built around those phrases, and therefore it can't get rid of them easily. > "now I have the full picture" I always interpreted that phrase as a sort of marker to delimit the phase in which it explores the codebase and gathers information from the phase in which it implements the changes. Not sure if it's still done, but I think some months ago there was discussion that some of the phrases are injected by the inference loop to "steer" the model - e.g. "But wait" if a thought block was too short etc. Obviously such phrases couldn't be influenced by the prompt.
- Sinidir 4mo ago
  Yes these things happen as part of RL Training. Same way that you can see the "But wait ..." phrases in thinking traces. They get rewarded.
  - f3408fh 4mo ago
    Out of curiosity, how does something like "But wait..." get rewarded?
    - vintagedave 3mo ago
      The human (or other entity) judging it probably thinks it looks like a sign of thinking or reasoning, and doing a better job -- catching its own errors before they are confidently surfaced. That would be worth rewarding.
skerit 4mo ago
I thought it was just Opus 4.7 and 4.8 that did this. Do other models do this too? Anyway: in my case Opus absolutely did not follow a similar instruction in the CLAUDE.md file. (But then again: it hardly followed _any_ CLAUDE.md instruction properly)

jorl17 4mo ago

Excessive-hyphenization is ai-hyperfixation

daveguy 4mo ago

FYI, AI isn't fond of a goddamn thing. They have token prediction quirks that don't follow typical English.

sawjet 4mo ago
Personification is a figure of speech. What you say is technically correct but we don't need to declare this every time humans discuss how LLMs work.
ben_w 4mo ago
Few ever cared. Find one non-pedant who would object to the personification that follows: "The evening settled over the city, drawing the light out of the streets one corner at a time. Windows blinked awake with lamplight, and the wind moved through the alleys restlessly, leaves brushing against walls before gathering themselves along the pavement. In the distance, the river kept its steady argument with the stone embankments. When the night pressed in, the weather became increasingly angry, until it was a raging storm." In the affective sense, evenings don't settle, and street lights are not drawn out, windows don't blink, and wind isn't restless. Weather can neither be angry, nor rage. But such personification is a natural part of how the English speak.
- folkrav 4mo ago
  Personification =/= anthropomorphization
- daveguy 4mo ago
  Or it's just plagiarism, eg "windows blinked awake": https://web.archive.org/web/20190825132048/https://patriciaengler.com/2018/08/11/how-christian-students-can-prepare-for-secular-higher-education/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190825132048/https://patriciae... See also "wind moved restlessly", "weather became angry". And raging storm? I mean come on... I won't even put that last one in quotes. And like a sibling reply pointed out, personificiation is not the same as anthropomophism. Nor is plagiarized personification. It has no inner thoughts, and no fondness of anything. It's nothing but a cheap, superficial facsimile of human writing and nothing more. Great for form filling and boilerplate though. Not so great for anything else.

marginalia_nu 4mo ago

Haha, I do that too sometimes. It's a thing in some Germanic languages. Instinct is to merge nouns into word, e.g. 'lawnchair', but that gives you a red squiggly line, but 'lawn chair' also looks wrong, so 'lawn-chair' is the middle ground.

ben_w 4mo ago
First time I realised this was GCSE History lessons, looking at first world war posters like this one and going "huh, to-day with a hyphen…" https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/27774 https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/27774
- brador 4mo ago
  Badnami is Persian and literally means bad-name (like defamation of character). English word origins are a fascinating rabbit hole.
  - ben_w 4mo ago
    > English word origins are a fascinating rabbit hole. My favourite example of which is Northern Ireland's Orange Order. The colour is orange, because that was the Royal colour of the family of the monarch it was named after, William of Orange, who was Dutch, titled after the principality of Orange which is named after the city of Orange which is French which got its name from the Celtic word for forehead or temple. The colour is named after the fruit, the fruit's name is a corruption "a norange" -> "an orange", which goes back to naranja which goes to Arabic which goes to Classical Persian which goes to Sanskrit. Meanwhile, the dutch word for the fruit is sinaasappel, Chinese apple, compare with the English word "mandarin" used for many different Chinese things.

topgrain2 4mo ago

That’s… about how I might have written that.

mikeryan 4mo ago

That and finishing a statement with an em dash — that’s what AI does.

rossant 4mo ago

That, and also the very long comma-separated lists with sometimes 10+ items.

shibel 4mo ago

I’m (sorry for the lack of humbleness) a very fluent non-native speaker and writer, and this is by far my biggest challenge with Claude. It stitches together 2-4 advanced concepts into one or two words and I always have to ask it to “unpack”. I don’t think it’s easy on native speakers when it happens, but it’s even harder when you’re not.

gregoryl 4mo ago
Its hard for native speakers. Information density makes for rough reading.
- causal 4mo ago
  Still debating whether these are actually information dense or not. Complexity gives the appearance of density, but these sentences always come in whole pages at a time while often failing to deliver the needed information.
- Obscurity4340 4mo ago
  It honestly feels more like chunking to me