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I once asked Claude to replace “byte-identical” with a simpler word, such as “duplicate.” He refused and said “duplicate” does not mean the same thing as “byte-
by souvlakee 1mo ago
I once asked Claude to replace “byte-identical” with a simpler word, such as “duplicate.” He refused and said “duplicate” does not mean the same thing as “byte-identical” so it should not be changed. He was very nerdy about it, so maybe that is the right way of his evolution.
- zahlman 1mo agoI think Claude has a point here (and I would expect LLMs to excel at surfacing this kind of nuance). "Byte-identical" connotes a) that the thing consists of bytes (in particular, that it isn't a physical object); b) that it was deliberately reproduced; c) that it was most likely not reproduced by copying (unless that's explicitly indicated). "Duplicate" connotes a) that the thing is redundant or otherwise unwanted; b) is either an incidental or accidental result, or a deliberate copy.
- QuercusMax 1mo agoI think (c) isn't right. Byte-identical sounds to me like it's almost certainly a copy.
- chrisjj 1mo ago> "duplicate” does not mean the same thing Oh no. Claude slurped meta Stack Overflow!
- marginalia_nu 1mo agoI think the biggest claudism is adjectiveing nouns. "Foo is byte-identical to bar" is weird. "Foo has an identical byte representation to bar" is I think closer to what most humans would write. AI in general, both visual and textual models, has this horror vaccui where it likes to cram in as much stuff as possible everywhere. This seems to show up both in redundant sentences that pad a text with irrelevant information, and sentences overflowing with information.