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Comment by gowld | Hacker News Reader

Are you saying that needless sentences don't count as needless words?

As GPT would say, "You've hit upon a crucial point underlying the entire situtation!"

I think that's a great sentence to include... you know, provided it's actually true.

I mean, it's usually wrong in its rhetoric, and the writing isn't "good", but it's technically well constructed and it's well constructed in a way that "Hemingway" doesn't reject.

Like, if I ask GPT5 to convert 75f to celsius, it will say "OK, here's the tight answer. No fluff. Just the actual result you need to know." and then in a new graf say "It's 23.8c." (or whatever).

It already bugs me when ChatGPT describes how it is going to answer before answering, but it's 10x more annoying when I'm asking for a concise response without filler etc.

As an aside, I've noticed the self-description happens even more often when extended thinking mode is being used. My unverified intuition is that it references my custom instructions and memory more than once during the thinking process, as it then seems more primed than usual to mimic vocabulary from any saved text like that.

Right, it is currently incapable of providing a straight answer without clearing it's throat selling the answer. It reminds me of those recipe blogs that just can't get to the fucking recipe. It's bad writing! But it's not bad technically, in a style-guide kind of way.

Sometimes I wonder if the throat-clearing is an indispensable part of getting to the "good bits" that follow. Like, do those extra tokens give it more "room to think" even if they're basically meaningless in themselves?

Isn’t that the point of the hidden chain of thought tokens, rather than the visible cruft?

I think the fluff, the emojis, the sycophancy is all symptomatic of the training process and human feedback.

I thought PP was saying that the "Thinking" text is only used for one turn, and the response text is the compressed thinking that survives into future turns.

The output tokens are the only information that is carried forward through each inference pass, so "more room to think" is incompatible with "basically meaningless". Perhaps one could imagine it somehow stenographically encoding information in its precise choice of meaningless throat clearing, but there are only so many variations on that theme - word choice is heavily constrained, so it doesn't feel like you could store a whole lot of information there without it starting to read froopiliciously.

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