Comment by hmokiguess
2 days 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.
2 days 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.
Until 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 [...]"
It'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.
"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.
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The 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.
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> even when the claims aren't based on anything and are possibly wrong.
Are you saying Claude is engaging in Rhetorics because the RL data generated by humans were influenced more by it and persuasion rather than actual logic or reasoning?
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It's actually an effect that happens in the (re-)alignment process due to harmonic properties of the positional encoding in the attention matrix.
(I recommend reading and implementing the Attention is all you need paper. By hand. Otherwise you won't learn anything from it.)
> It'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.
When your training set contains more or less the complete output of every capital-C Consulting firm...
Maybe we need LLMs which have an internal dialogue rather than the current monologue.
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All of these rhetorical devices to make the assertion seem authoritative and correct are derived from academia
This matters. That's the spine of it.
You 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".
the phrase load-bearing caveat makes me irate
Only that one? Not belt-and-suspenders enough
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People 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.
It'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.
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Or in a way, nothing at all.
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I see it at least 3-4 times per week...
Fable has a Chomsky grammar.
Let 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
A 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
s/blast radius/malloc/g
Wait it uses “blast radius” ? In what context?
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How far we’ve fallen from “You’re absolutely right!”
I think comments like this are essentially making fun of an "intelligent" entity (for some definition of "intelligent") for having a personality.
I 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.
Why is that funny. I've had that as part of my professional lexicon for over 20 years
I'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...
The 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-peopl...
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I made the decision to always talk to AI in English, in order to reduce the otherwise inevitable seep-in of AI terminology into my actual speaking and writing patterns. Czech and English are far apart enough that formulations like "load-bearing" don't cross the barrier easily.
adjacent surface seam
you're absolutely right
Fair...
Fair hit
I will steelman the argument