5 ms·
I was pleasantly surprised when I attempted to scroll down and realized everything the author wanted to present fit on-screen. It's almost ironic that this site
by nater5000 1mo ago
I was pleasantly surprised when I attempted to scroll down and realized everything the author wanted to present fit on-screen. It's almost ironic that this site is able to make such an obvious, compelling presentation without being overly verbose or complicated (something which LLMs have a hard time doing). I wouldn't read TOO deeply into what is being presented, but the author has done a good job to not inject their own bias into the presentation which works well.
I suspect, as we continue forward, humans will slowly start to adopt the language of LLMs, or at least certain language quirks that come from interacting with LLMs. Something I've noticed in my own writing is that I now present lists of examples in a consistent way: "... such as <example 1>, <example 2>, etc., ...". I started to notice I was using this pattern quite a bit somewhat recently, but I took a quick look at some of my social media posts and realized it's been occurring for a while. I had realized that I grown accustomed to this kind of language because, especially early on, LLMs would focus too much on the specific examples I'd provide when, really, I was just trying to give them a sense of what I was looking for. I just picked up that providing two examples then adding the "etc." worked to get the LLM to not focus so much on the specific examples and to understand that they need to consider more than what I explicitly presented. Of course, now I write like that in my social media comments, in Slack with my colleagues, etc. :>
I'd be interested to see if anyone can identify trends like this, since I think the human-language component of the adoption of LLMs is probably being somewhat neglected despite probably being surely dramatically affected.
- Labo333 1mo agoAuthor here :) Thank you for the compliment! I did spend a lot of time designing a nice experience on both desktop and mobile. Even the scrollbar to select words was non trivial as I wanted the words to be of different size, yet avoid flickering when scrolling!
- jelkand 1mo agoI just wanted to pop in and say that I found the site delightful. It’s aesthetic, concise, and everything works so quickly and responsively.
- c7b 1mo agoCongratulations! I was going to comment on the scroll field in particular when I saw this. I didn't even realize you had to hand-craft the component, but it's such a nice UI idea in general, the way the scrolling works and how the content above changes.
- Labo333 1mo agoThanks! The real and probably unnecessary pain was having the words in different sizes.
- c7b 1mo agoFrankly, that's the one part I would have done differently. Mixing font sizes rarely looks good, but that's just my personal opinion. If you want to visually indicate intensity, I'd have used color, or rather saturation. Not the text itself, maybe a small pill next to it. But I don't think it's necessary, the order already conveys some sort of ranking, I don't think cardinal information adds much here.
- Labo333 1mo agoI think I agree afterwards, but now I developed emotional attachment to that quirk ^^ Basically when scrolling, the frame around words will have a stable top edge to avoid flickering, and it took me a few iterations to make it work. I tested multiple designs, some of them inspired by word clouds and the size variation stuck afterwards.
- black_rabbit_ 1mo agoYou did a fantastic job; very to-the-point with effective visualisations. Kudos! One very minor note: if your scroll device reports pixel-perfect deltas rather than discrete scroll-wheel ticks (e.g. logitech mx master, laptop touchpad, etc), the behaviour in the word search box is a bit weird. Arrow keys work fine though.
- Labo333 1mo agoThank you! I did test it with my mac touchpad without issue. Maybe the problem is that I wanted to make discrete scroll-wheel ticks work. I just tried a fix by normalising deltaMode to pixels. If you could just paste this in your console, I would have a better idea: document.querySelector('.wall').addEventListener('wheel', e => console.log(e.deltaMode, e.deltaY.toFixed(2), e.defaultPrevented ? 'PAGE' : 'native'), true)
- customguy 1mo agoFWIW I got a bunch of "(-)10.00 native" in the console, "PAGE" never showed up no matter what I tried. Firefox, also a Logitech mouse, no trackpad though.
- imp0cat 1mo agoOn a compatible Logitech device, browsing through the word search box benefits a lot from enabling hyperscroll.
- Labo333 1mo agoG502 user here! I also put a draggable scrollbar for the less lucky :)
- imp0cat 1mo ago> Some believe what separates men from animals is our ability to reason. Others say it’s language or romantic love, or opposable thumbs. Living here in this lost world, I’ve come to believe it is more than our biology. What truly makes us human is our ability to hyperscroll! > Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World
- cube00 1mo agoI know HN prefers we focus on the content and not the design but I have join in to say that word scrolling experience was brilliant. I was focused on the data initially scrolling through until I suddenly realised, wow, this is really nice!
- matheusmoreira 1mo agoMobile experience is great! Thanks for thinking of us!
- jkhdigital 1mo ago“non-trivial” is one of those words that seems like it should be a Claude-ism but is actually just the single best word for a concept that comes up extremely often in research and engineering discussions.
- shermantanktop 1mo ago“Orthogonal” is similar. It’s been commonplace for decades in my world but seems Claude-ish.
- threecheese 1mo agoIn the enterprise, we are already adopting them. “Seam”, I term I’d never heard used before, is now not only our defacto way to describe the boundary between systems/workflows/components, it is encoded into our organizational roles and responsibilities descriptions. I am the proud owner of several seams, and am considering giving them person-names. The empty space between my inventory APIs and their clients might be “Karen”. I can’t say that Claude invented this; the same type of terminology cycling happens every few quarters based on what leadership is reading/being told by Gartner.
- QuercusMax 1mo agoI believe the term "seam" came from Michael Feathers' "Working Effectively with Legacy Code": “a seam is a place where you can alter behavior in your program without editing in that place”. https://martinfowler.com/bliki/LegacySeam.html https://martinfowler.com/bliki/LegacySeam.html Claude is using it a bit liberally, but not totally incorrectly.
- Sharlin 1mo agoI've associated it with the concept of "carving nature at the seams", except that I just realized that in the standard phrasing it's actually "at the joints", not "seams".
- threecheese 1mo agoI love that you know this, thank you!
- QuercusMax 1mo agoI read that book right at the beginning of my career over 20 years ago, when I was the new guy who had actually studied software engineering among all my entirely self-taught older colleagues. Lots of big messes to clean up in that codebase!
- rsanheim 1mo ago"seam" dates back to refactoring & software engineering literature that pre-date LLM use by 20 years -- see Working Effectively With Legacy Code for one example (https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/working-effectively-with/0131177052/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/working-effectively-wit...). Its a great book, still use techniques from it everyday. "load-bearing" I have never heard used for programming before Opus, and its incredibly annoying and over-used.
- bogdanoff_2 1mo agoSaying "the language of LLMs", while technically correct, is not exactly precise. It should really be the language of "AI agents", or "chatbots". OG LLMs would just mimic the style of its context based off of (pre)training from text on the Internet. The kind of quirks you see came from crowd-sourced human-in-the-loop fine-tuning, with not very good work conditions or level of qualification (so resulting in "what non-writers thought good writing looked like", before people had developed the flair to detect these patterns) as well as feedback loops during agentic reinforcement learning and RLVR.
- cpeterso 1mo agoI've found myself rewriting my own words to avoid Claudisms (because they can be cringe and I don't want people to think I'm copy/pasting Claude output at them).
- datsci_est_2015 1mo ago100%. Literally just started writing a sentence in my previous comment and realized I was using a “It’s not X, it’s Y” (not verbatim) rhetorical structure and cringed internally.
- viccis 1mo ago>I suspect, as we continue forward, humans will slowly start to adopt the language of LLMs I'm already seeing it. A coworker said something like "<person> added the color to the ticket here" meaning that someone added details to a ticket. I've started seeing Opus 5 talk about "hermetic testing" when it just means "unit testing", so I hope that doesn't catch on...
- dare944 1mo agoThe idiom "added color to" as an expression of adding detail or nuance to something goes back much further than the AI era. I've certainly used it at various times in my career spanning 4 decades now.
- testdelacc1 1mo agoAll of these phrases existed. Claude didn’t come up with them. The question is whether people are using them a lot more now due to Claude’s influence.
- dare944 1mo agoI think it would be fine if more people used "add color to". I think it's a great turn of phrase. "Load bearing", not so much. Ick.
- phatfish 1mo agoYes, it is fun to play with different turns of phrase, even in a stale work environment. I do it to combat the banality, but not so much to sound pretentious hopefully ;) The problem is once a fun phrase is, uh, coloured by "Claude" or some other LLM, it just turns to AI slop.
- viccis 1mo ago"Load-bearing" is fine to me. I've heard it regularly pre-Claude. It has a specific meaning that conveys in one stock phrase. "Adds color to" says nothing that "Adds detail to" doesn't already say, and the latter is more straightforward English that is quickly readable and understandable by even relatively weak English speakers. I get wanting to use big words or metaphorical phrasing; I'm guilty of saying "ameliorate" too much. I'm ok if it adds meaning. But when it's just a more colorful word (note that this use of "color" doesn't match the one I originally brought up, which is also a huge problem) and doesn't add any utility or detail, then it's best to avoid it, imo
- starbugs 1mo ago> I suspect, as we continue forward, humans will slowly start to adopt the language of LLMs, or at least certain language quirks that come from interacting with LLMs. Or we'll do the opposite and even deliberately use some words that an LLM would never use to identify whose content is worth reading?
- altmanaltman 1mo ago> I suspect, as we continue forward, humans will slowly start to adopt the language of LLMs, or at least certain language quirks that come from interacting with LLMs. Something I've noticed in my own writing is that I now present lists of examples in a consistent way: "... such as <example 1>, <example 2>, etc., ...". Why would you consider using lists an "LLM" language thing? I really don't understand this concept. Like even this project, the top words I can see are: 1. load-bearing 2. plainly 3. quietly 4. refusal 5. survived How are they LLM words? I used them all the time before ChatGPT was a thing. Like if your claim is you use "etc." more because you talk to an LLM, I think you're just discovering human language, no? Like it's not a unique LLM thing that magically dropped and is now going to make people do it. It's a legit thing that most human writers have used for a long time -> which is why LLMs copy it. It's not backward. A better claim than "people will start writing like LLMs" could be that people will become more literate in expressing themselves. But that literacy is not alien or AI to us, it is basic human language only used properly.
- ddj231 1mo agothe issue with some of these quirks is that not that they are not part of the English language but rather the llms usage is unnatural. Also when you have that redundancy proliferated to millions of users it gets tiresome fast, and becomes a tell-tale sign for AI generation. It’s like an AI signature on some written content. Because many people do not want to consume AI generated content this becomes a sign of what to avoid. Granted picking apart single words outside of context doesn’t give the full picture. (well except “load bearing” which is turning into a meme at this point)
- altmanaltman 1mo agoYes I understand that but I refuse to believe this idea that it influences how people talk. As you said, the typical AI-style of writing is very easily recognised and is not really great for everyday communications. Also it makes no sense you will start writing like an AI because you spend time communicating with it. There is also no benefit in typing like an AI to an AI. So i think its a good cover up for "i used ai to write this comment" but claim "i write like AI now lol because i talk to AI so my ai comment is actually human comment" which seems to happen a lot here lately as pushback against ai generated text becomes common
- gwd 1mo ago> I suspect, as we continue forward, humans will slowly start to adopt the language of LLMs, or at least certain language quirks that come from interacting with LLMs. What's somewhat interesting to me is that "load-bearing" was already a common thing to say in certain communities, like lesswrong.com. Whether it breaks out from that subculture with Claude as the vector, or disappears from there because nobody wants to sound like Claude, we'll have to see. How many children are called "Elvis" these days?
- jodrellblank 1mo ago"Few" says Duck.ai > "The name Elvis was not among the top 1,000 US baby names in 2010, the first year it had not made the list since 1954, the US government said." - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13302517 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13302517 Most recent famous Elvis on Wikipedia is Kosovan footballer Elvis Letaj, born 2003 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_(name)#People_with_the_name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_(name)#People_with_the_n...