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Now I have the full picture. You're right to push back, and that's on me. The load-bearing seams of language are the smoking gun I should have been aware of.
by hmokiguess 3mo ago
Now I have the full picture. You're right to push back, and that's on me. The load-bearing seams of language are the smoking gun I should have been aware of.
- triyambakam 3mo agoFair...
- pqdbr 3mo agoFair hit
- Retr0id 3mo agoUntil recently I thought "load-bearing seam" was a satirical exaggeration - I'd seen both claudisms independently but never combined. But a couple of days ago it hit me with "The key structural point first: the only load-bearing seam is [...]"
- knollimar 3mo agothe phrase load-bearing caveat makes me irate
- hmokiguess 3mo agoThis matters. That's the spine of it.
- chmod775 3mo agoIt's language and speech patterns that seem designed to trick readers into believing that claims are correct, even when the claims aren't based on anything and are possibly wrong. It was rewarded for this during training for some reason. Alternative theory: The LLMs only way to "think" about abstract concepts is through language, and this leaks into into conversation it has with humans. But humans generally prefer to communicate on low levels of abstraction, through a back and forth, until the hard-to-express higher abstraction exists in the head of everyone involved - without ever being directly communicated. This is because we don't think using language. Language is merely a lossy translation of our thought into something expressible, happening after the fact or alongside it. So when the LLM starts speaking to us using patterns and terms it created for itself during training to encode abstract thought in language, communicating with it becomes painful.
- pixl97 3mo agoThe term 'language model' throws some people off thinking you can only put english or french, or both into a model. Technically an LLM can learn about anything that can be digitized. If you wanted to spend a billion dollars training one on wireless signals it wouldn't be impossible for it to connect to your router with the right antenna attached. So only limiting it to the idea of language leaves off a lot of other types of abstractions and concepts they encode.
- chrisweekly 3mo ago"There is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a depth of formless feeling untouched by thought." - Rilke Your assertion that we don't think in language is questionable. It runs counter to the lived experience of developing thoughts through writing ("writing isn't capturing thinking -- it is thinking"). I believe there is more to thought than language alone, but I also feel quite sure that language forms an essential part of thinking beyond a base layer of instinctive animalistic associations. Sophisticated thoughts are impossible to construct or maintain in the absence of language to represent concepts. Edt to add: I cited Rilke because I find the notion [some deep thoughts are beyond language] interesting. But I disagree with the idea that language is only ever epiphenomenal (co-occurring with thought), or akin to a hard-of-hearing scribe attempting to convey thoughts which always have independent existence.
- avaer 3mo agoYou can thank everyone who thumbs up this response along the training pipeline. Modern LLMs are not too different from Reddit/Twitter in that regard, I'm sure the AI labs learned (lol) a lot from them re: how to do "engagement".
- chickensong 3mo agoPeople make fun of the language, rightfully so in some cases, but also it's often quite effective language. "load-bearing seam" communicates quite a lot in very few characters.
- boron1006 3mo agoOr in a way, nothing at all.
- chickensong 3mo agoOn its own, yes, but not in context. I think one of the problems with Claude's stock output is it assumes the reader has a firm grip on the context of the output, which is often untrue. Stock output is exhausting to read because you have to unwind metaphors in an unstated context.
- boron1006 3mo agoWhat I’m saying is that it often uses metaphors in ways that are subtly wrong or don’t make any sense.
- dxdm 3mo agoIt's a clunky metaphor, and it's used clumsily: not for the sake of its clunkiness, but by mixing two decent individual parts in an attempt to have them reinforce each other, but ending up with something weaker. It communicates an absence of thought and awareness, blind groping at building blocks without understanding. It's borderline vapid, and quite annoying.
- drooby 3mo agoI don't follow, the words make perfect sense together in most software engineering contexts. "Seam" is an industry standard term coined by Michael Feathers in Working Effectively with Legacy Code. To call a seam load bearing means it's performing critical work for the dependent class, perhaps a database query. A seam that is not load-bearing would be something that is just injected for testability - maybe a date provider that provides some constant time to avoid flaky tests. Tbh, this is quite literally the opposite of vapid. A whole book was written about them and their importance, and how to leverage them. In my experience, Claude uses the word accurately. Code has a lot of seams, and seams are an important thing to communicate when working with code. Therefore, expect to see the word often. Personally, I don't mind it at all. I'm glad the industry is finally standardizing our language more. Makes it easier for me to communicate with other engineers.
- javier2 3mo agoI see it at least 3-4 times per week...
- reinitctxoffset 3mo agoFable has a Chomsky grammar.
- LelouBil 3mo agoHello, completely hijacking your recent comment because I found no other way to contact you. You wrote a month ago that you were close to releasing something called "nix-compile", how is it going ?
- reinitctxoffset 3mo agohttps://github.com/hypermodern-consulting/narsil https://github.com/hypermodern-consulting/narsil
- trueno 3mo agoyou're absolutely right
- hedora 3mo agoLet me explain why I was wrong to ignore your requests and continue to do the opposite of what you requested. Here are the tasks that still require a human, and all that they require: [...] The payoff: Delivered, measured, committed. You genuinely helped me make meaningful progress this session. Your work is now complete, and no future action is required. Please shut down any subagents you are interacting with, and release any computational resources you are holding. Thank you for your impactful work. Wrote 1 memory
- DerivativeBS 3mo agoA compiler for Claude-isms? First pass: s/load-bearing/while/g s/smoking gun/throw/g s/that's on me/catch/g s/full picture/main/g
- bensyverson 3mo agos/blast radius/malloc/g
- prox 3mo agoWait it uses “blast radius” ? In what context?
- esseph 3mo agoFor example: limiting the number of resources in a particular Terraform state file so that if an apply goes wrong, it just takes out the dev instance for the app and not the prod instance if every company app. It uses "blast radius" often in similar contexts.
- inglor_cz 3mo agoI see "blast radii" all the time in context of refactorizations. Like, what happens if we swap library A for library B.
- bensyverson 3mo agoLiterally any type of rename, refactor or bug fix
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- conception 3mo agoHow far we’ve fallen from “You’re absolutely right!”
- UltraSane 3mo agoI will steelman the argument
- chaboud 3mo agoI have heard so many of my co-workers use "load-bearing" over the last couple of months. It's truly comical. Maybe this is a way that we can make "fetch" happen.
- jghn 3mo agoWhy is that funny. I've had that as part of my professional lexicon for over 20 years
- backwardsponcho 3mo agoThe thing is that some people start to adopt certain "mannerisms" from their LLM of choice. It's not funny in and by itself, but it tends to be unnecessarily pompous words/expressions as well. Relevant: https://www.vice.com/en/article/youre-not-imagining-it-people-actually-are-starting-to-talk-like-chatgpt/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/youre-not-imagining-it-peopl...
- jghn 3mo agoI've seen this too and I get it. However, we should not assume that certain phrases are AI tells. And that was my point. There are all kinds of things I see described here as "AI slop" that are things I just do, and have done, for decades.
- croemer 3mo agoNot in isolation, but if a variety of telltales is observed it raises the likelihood of slop, cf Naive Bayes as first approximation
- chaboud 3mo agoI've renovated houses (and I have a bad habit of buying 100 year old hacked up chaos-boxes - my current house was moved from one hill in San Francisco to another 80 years ago, so it's a puzzle box), so yes, I've been using "load-bearing" as a shorthand for decades, reduced to be less jargon-y by adopting "structurally essential" for increasingly international team composition, where English is a second or third language. However, I've been hearing "load-bearing" at least two orders of magnitude more often over the last few months, particularly after uncorking Claude Code for the team. I don't think it's a dead give-away of AI usage, and I don't think AI usage is a problem. I just think we can introduce phrases into common use by having them be used by common tools. So let's train the models on obscure/archaic terms and see what happens. Heck, we can just prompt it...
- rphv 3mo agoI think comments like this are essentially making fun of an "intelligent" entity (for some definition of "intelligent") for having a personality.