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> It didn't work, and why it didn't work turned out to be more interesting than the policy would have been. Spoken like a true Claude. Snarking aside, I am gl
by eru 1mo ago
> It didn't work, and why it didn't work turned out to be more interesting than the policy would have been.
Spoken like a true Claude.
Snarking aside, I am glad that our AI agents make it cheap enough to do these experiments and publish these write-ups that people finally bother to publish null findings. Very useful!
- phoghed 1mo agoThat line doesn’t strike me as overtly AI written, overall yes though
- cryptonector 1mo agoThe whole thing is clearly written by Claude.
- phoghed 1mo agoYes I covered that after the comma if you didn’t make it that far. This sentence quoted just doesn’t seem like the AI smoking gun to choose given the rest of the content.
- eru 1mo agoIt was just the first example that stuck out to me. I didn't do an exhaustive check to look for the worst offender.
- phoghed 1mo agoSorry I assumed you read the whole thing, forgot where I was for a moment
- cryptonector 1mo agoYeah, we have a habit of not bothering to read LLM-generated prose.
- phoghed 1mo agoYeah that's definitely the source of the didn't RTFA epidemic, surely.
- r_lee 1mo agoI'm guessing he means overall the kind of circling and concluding that Claude does, like "the actual truth is more interesting than it seems" or "the real smoking gun is not the x, it's the y that was under our noses all this time" type of writing.
- dgacmu 1mo ago"That's not a result, that's a broken harness, and it's worth publishing because I expect it to be common." That's Claude. But I agree and am also glad the author, uh, clauded this up. :)
- wongarsu 1mo agoMore examples from this article: "A block with resident children isn't evictable. So the baseline is LRU over radix leaves, which is what SGLang and vLLM actually implement. Beating naive flat LRU would be a strawman." "The two numbers measure different things in different regimes, and I initially framed this as a contradiction. It isn't." "That's not a result, that's a broken harness, and it's worth publishing because I expect it to be common"
- jubilanti 1mo agoBut it is specifically one of Claude's ticks
- moomin 1mo agoIt is. And the reason for that is* surprising: the base knowledge corpus is clickbait internet articles. *not at all
- philipallstar 1mo agoIt is more surprising than that: it's because the humans in the loop like it.
- twoodfin 1mo agoThe LLMs are going to turn us into stochastic parrots.
- vkou 1mo agoIf you're being given an A-B choice between cinnamon-flavored shit and lutfisk-flavored shit, you might convince the experimenter that cinnamon-flavored shit ranks highly in user preferences.
- lukeschlather 1mo agoI would expect a preference for lutefisk flavored shit, the problem is then you then deduce from that that people prefer lutefisk flavor over cinnamon, rather than that you should stop feeding people shit (and also stop feeding them lutefisk.)
- twoodfin 1mo agoI suspect it’s more like Claude etc. optimizing for a tone that gets the green checkmark from RLHF reviewers, probably over and over in many contexts where style is otherwise an incidental concern.
- wgjordan 1mo agoIt's using a couple textbook [1] LLM tropes, 'negative parallelism' with a 'here's the kicker' tone. [1] https://gist.github.com/ossa-ma/f3baa9d25154c33095e22272c631f5a1 https://gist.github.com/ossa-ma/f3baa9d25154c33095e22272c631...
- AnimalMuppet 1mo agoI've seen Douglas Adams use almost exactly this in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. A professor (IIRC) is talking to a former student. Quoting from memory "Did you ever actually finish any papers?" "No. But the reasons why not were always absolutely fascinating." So, yeah, for me personally it's not an AI tell. I've seen it in the wild before AI.
- jchw 1mo agoYeah, but that doesn't sound like AI at all. Not even close.
- dougabug 1mo agoLLMs glom onto pre-existing tropes, idioms, and verbal constructs.
- MarkusQ 1mo agoAnd then subtly misuse them. LLMs write like some people cook, adding bespoke artisanal Belgian sea salt, truffle oil and weirdly specific cheese without any thought given to how the result will taste.
- phoghed 1mo ago> And then subtly misuse them. For example?
- porridgeraisin 1mo agohttps://x.com/badlogicgames/status/2098868942685012405 https://x.com/badlogicgames/status/2098868942685012405
- fluidcruft 1mo agoThis phrasing is a very specific "Hello, this is Claude"
- rrobukef 1mo agoWhile AI was clearly used to generate and structure a first draft, I say it has been extensively rewritten by the author. In my experience, AI tends to avoid the first person, instead writing from a passive observer or even using sentences without verbs. The length of the sentences is also more natural. AI had trouble with bind-words in an argument. It just states separate facts and assumes because they are stated in order you have a reasoning. I'm not seeing that here. Of course, idioms are preserved, and not everything is rewritten. I quite ok with this style, it isn't grating. I expect this will be a style we'll see more of in science.
- eru 1mo ago> In my experience, AI tends to avoid the first person, instead writing from a passive observer or even using sentences without verbs. Not my experience with Claude at all. Which AIs are you talking about?
- lukeschlather 1mo agoThe idea of publishing null findings is very attractive, but the problem here is that they didn't record what the actual problem they're trying to solve is. It seems a bit like someone prompted Claude to try and make tool calls more efficient and Claude responded with a detailed writeup on why LRU can't be beat for making a KV cache. Which might be interesting, if that were the question I had asked.