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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> Versus, if it just gave a curt and unfriendly answer, most people (esp. Americans)

I don’t see this as an American thing. It’s an extension of the current Product Management trend to give software quirky and friendly personality.

You can see the trend in more than LLM output. It’s in their desktop app that has “Good Morning” and other prominent greetings. Claude Code has quirky status output like “Bamboozling” and “Noodling”.

It’s a theme throughout their product design choices. I’ve worked with enough trend-following product managers to recognize this trend toward infusing express personality into software to recognize it.

For what it’s worth, the Americans I know don’t find it as cute or lovable as intended. It feels fake and like an attempt to play at emotions.

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> It’s an extension of the current Product Management trend to give software quirky and friendly personality.

Ah, Genuine People Personalities from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

> It’s in their desktop app that has “Good Morning” and other prominent greetings. Claude Code has quirky status output like “Bamboozling” and “Noodling”.

This reminded me of a critique of UNIX that, unlike DOS, ls doesn't output anything when there are no files. DOS's dir command literally tells you there are no files, and this was considered, in this critique, to be more polite and friendly and less confusing than UNIX. Of course, there's the adage "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all", and if you consider "no files found" to not be nice (because it is negative and says "no"), then ls is actually being polite(r) by not printing anything.

Many people interact with computers in a conversational manner and have anthropomorphized them for decades. This is probably influenced by computers being big, foreign, scary things to many people, so making them have a softer, more handholding "personality" makes them more accessible and acceptable. This may be less important these days as computers are more ubiquitous and accessible, but the trend lives on.

I worked in an org with offices in America, India, Europe, and Israel, and it was not uncommon for the American employees to be put off by the directness of the foreign employees. It was often interpreted as rudeness, to the surprise of the speaker. This happened to the Israel employees more than the India or Europe employees, at least in part because the India/Europe employees usually tried to adapt to the behavior expected by the Americans, while the Israel employees largely took pride in their bluntness.

As someone with Israeli family ... they report that Americans are not the only ones who react to them like this.

It most definitely is a American thing - this is why non-native speakers often come out as rude or unfriendly or plain stupid.

We don't appreciate how much there is to language.

That might characterize their approach to human interaction, but I don't think any of us can say who will or won't prefer the sycophantic style of the LLM.

It might be the case that it makes the technology far more approachable. Or it makes them feel far less silly for sharing personal thoughts and opinions with the machine. Or it makes them feel validated.

> We don't appreciate how much there is to language.

This can’t possibly be true, can it? Every language must have its own nuance. non native English speakers might not grasp the nuance of English language, but the same could be said for any one speaking another language.

Language barriers are cultural barriers.

It's as simple as that. Most people do not expect to interact the way that most native English speakers expect.

> For what it’s worth, the Americans I know don’t find it as cute or lovable as intended. It feels fake and like an attempt to play at emotions.

Yes they need to "try a completely different approach"

Most tech companies and the dominant pop cultures are all American, etc.

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