| ▲ | fny 6 hours ago |
| While Claude's style is obnoxious, I'm more frustrated by its inscrutable explanations. You need a PhD to understand its explanation of a code snippet. |
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| ▲ | Labo333 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I'm not even sure a PhD helps. It just overuses jargon that has NO meaning. Sometimes, it actually hand waves too much as well while trying to dumb down stuff for you. I am not sure whether it's a consequence of learning to reason from its traces or some RLHF that trips it into using weird terms to sound smarter to the humans who rate it. |
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| ▲ | fny 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | PhD was a joke. My intuition is that Claude is trained to communicate to itself while coding. You see this in how bizarrely granular it is when explanation prior work, you also see this in the comments it leaves behinds. | | |
| ▲ | hedgehog 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's me, it's the reams of sessions I share back with a five star rating that are just Claude Code talking to itself about debugging its own generated code in jargon that has slowly diverged from anything a human would understand. |
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| ▲ | black_knight 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I have a PhD and can confirm. Oftentimes, the stuff which comes out of Claude is just impenetrable because it invents jargon on the fly, and uses verbs in the most atrocious ways. "The fibred side folded its capstone into the existing name, so the kinds are asymmetric." What on earth does it mean to fold a capstone into a name‽ | | |
| ▲ | jimmaswell 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Is that an actual Claude output or hyperbole? It feels like I'm trying to parse an equation in a new math class which makes me want to take a stab at it regardless. So there's a "fibred side".. the most likely candidate seems to be "fibred categories" which I hadn't heard of before, and it's talking about one side of some mapping between two sets such that if f is the primary function and f(x)=y then there exists an inverse function g(y)=x? Was it something that converted some data bidirectionally with a different algorithm on both sides? The capstone of the inverse function would be the most important thing about it maybe? My best guess is "In the process of working on the inverse function, the existing name (of the inverse function itself maybe?) was made to reflect the operation of the inverse function, so now the name does not follow the same naming convention as the name of the primary function (which does not contain its 'capstone')." Its original wording is certainly dense and harder to follow for us, but it's fascinating how the model finds this the best fit for what it's trying to express IMO. Like it arrives at its own ways of overloading words/concepts, and things we would refer to in different ways in different contexts all get compressed to the same more-useful/complete idea. Codex has never said anything nearly so alien as the Claude examples I've seen floating around, interestingly. I wonder if it just has a better training on choosing its words to present to the user or if it inherently arrived at a somewhat different mapping that favors 'plain language' more. | | |
| ▲ | black_knight 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | This was actual Claude output on my screen at the moment I was reading this thread. No hyperbole! As far as I can tell "the capstone" is what Claude usually calls my current goal if it thinks it is a satisfying result. | | |
| ▲ | jimmaswell 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | How close was my guess? | | |
| ▲ | black_knight 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I am not really sure what Claude meant, but you are not too far off, from what I understand. I have several similar folders with variants of a construction, but taking differently structured input. They are named “plain”, “fibred” and “indexed”. So the fibred variant is clear enough. The Claude speak I struggle with is “the capstone” and what name it could be talking about. And what folding means here. I think it just means: “I changed an important result of the construction in the fibred variant, but kept the name. so the fibred variant is now different from the others.” |
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| ▲ | stereolambda 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's interesting that there must be a decision behind that, even if it's just appealing to the RLHF judges for some reason. Maybe there's an intention that if you cannot decipher what the chatbot is saying to you, you will have to ask and burn even more tokens. Naively I would often expect it would talk to me about various niche topics like to a layman, which does occur about some topics an actual normal person would ask. |
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| ▲ | josefresco 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They just addressed this with "Output styles" https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles |
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| ▲ | ziml77 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Sometimes I can't even tell if what it's saying actually makes any sense to someone who understands all the terms its using, or if it's just throwing together words in a way that only make sense to its own model of language. |
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| ▲ | fouc 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| don't forget LLMs are great at translating between languages, and within the same language. depending on the problem it works on, it will often reach for terminology that tend to be more common or familiar within that problem set. which appears inscrutable, but there's many different ways to skin a cat. just remind it to translate it back to the terminology and subject matter you're already an expert in. |
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| ▲ | dave1999x 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Is it the obnoxious style that causes this? |
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| ▲ | condiment 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think it's the hierarchies of agents summarizing each others' summaries before presenting a final answer to the user. The principal agent has the full context from all its workers, but when it distills this down to a message to the user it summarizes it into a mess of confident jargon that pertains to a conversation the user wasn't a part of and never saw. |
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