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Comment by Myrmornis | Hacker News Reader

I like to think that the reason it's so noticable is that Claude has recognized some important semantics that we ourselves lack a good word for or at least under-appreciate. What term is used in English (or other languages) with the same meaning as claude's "load-bearing"?

operative? key? critical? decisive?

The honest conclusion is that none of those are as good as "load-bearing". And yet the concept being referred to is clearly extremely important and valuable to refer to. So maybe we should be learning from Claude rather than complaining.

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> The honest conclusion

I think you've been reading too much claude output! "Load bearing" is cromulent verbiage and can be used in many scenarios - so claude does. But variety is important too, and there are more specific alternatives that can be used in most situations. Any word becomes a bad choice if you've used it 10 times in the last chapter.

You don't think me using "honest" there might have been a tiny bit of (on-topic, and therefore appropriate) trolling?

Poe's law

but you don't see "load bearing" nearly as often in prose written by people, so it's not some irreplaceable phrase. It's just a token with a weirdly high likelihood in a lot of cases (given how Claude works, this kind of thing is bound to happen)

You don't think it's possible that an LLM's internal machinery could decide that an underused-by-humans word should be used more frequently in output than it sees in input because it maps cleanly onto a frequently needed semantic? I think that's possible

It sounds like you are trying to understand LLM behavior using a mental model that inaccurately personifies the stochastic parrot.

A more parsimonious explanation is that this term got more-or-less randomly boosted by the reinforcement learning loop because there was nothing in the training data to discourage its use.

Ah right, you don't like AI and don't care to understand how it works.

I’ve been working in AI - and specifically NLP - since 2003. I am no stranger to how weird quirks can sneak into overparametrized models, nor am I a stranger to how good humans can be at inferring meaning where there is none in specific language model behaviors. So, yeah, I am inclined to assume non-teleological causes are more parsimonious than inferring the presence of a strange loop, because that continues to be the winning bet. Even for generative LLMs.

Ah right, so you like AI and don't care to understand how it works.

It doesn't "decide" anything or "need" any semantic. It derives the likelihood of the token, and "bearing" is likely to come after "load".

Sure but the question is why "load" after X?

Because, for some high number of contexts, its likelihood comes out high in the big tree of multiplies that is claude's model. For some sets of 500 words (or whatever), the next word is "load". The classifier that decides which sets of 500 (or whatever) words is a prefix for "load" is returning "true" too often.

More-or-less the same principle, but scaled up massively, and with context-dependent probability conditioning maps.

> the stochastic parrot.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49010345

And like any good corporate buzzword, it’s merely a simulacrum of precise technical jargon. The way Claude uses it is clearly wildly polysemous if not outright ambiguous.

What do you replace it with? "necessary dependency"?

Required, important, irreplaceable, necessary, integral.

There are lots of ways to express an idea besides this one trendy construction metaphor

It is really trendy? I don't think important, irreplaceable or integral are semantically equivalent. Required and necessary almost get there.

The point is that if you want to remove it or change it, you need to put something else in place that handles the work it is doing. So it is more that it is serving a required/necessary function, without being any of those other things in and of itself. It's more about "be careful when changing this."

> but you don't see "load bearing" nearly as often in prose written by people

Unfortunately, we're starting to now.

Thanks to Claude.

You yourself used "important" in the same paragraph.

"Load bearing" is a metaphor, while the other single words are more direct expressions. Unless the thing that Claude is referring to is a wall or other structure, which may truly bear load.

This is one of those issues which translators are long familiar with. There's no direct translation for "schwerpunkt" that isn't slightly longer.

In the figurative sense it's highly versatile across contexts, but still replaceable. For example:

"Her optimism was load-bearing,"

versus:

"Her optimism was enduring."

Exactly the same meaning and connotation. It stands to reason that the terms with the most semantic flexibility will have preference across all contexts. So in response to:

> maybe we should be learning from Claude rather than complaining.

I'd say let's not steer ourselves into regular language and keep some vivacity in our expressions.

> Exactly the same meaning and connotation.

No, it does not have the exact same meaning.

The first means that her optimism kept her in some functional state, without it, she would collapse.

The second means that her optimism continues over time, despite obstacles.

The first doesn't emphasise how longstanding her optimism is, the second does. The second doesn't emphasise how important her optimism is, the first does.

> Claude has recognized some important semantics that we ourselves lack a good word for or at least under-appreciate.

Ah, I love when Claude reads our collective minds and fills in the gaps to address the load-bearing seams genuinely with an honest caveat.

> the concept being referred to is clearly extremely important and valuable to refer to

On the contrary, stock words pop up more easily when it has less confidence.

Stock phrases are a correctness smell.

'Load-bearing' is a physical analogy. Other words like 'pillar' imply the same physical analogy.

I mean we have all kinds of under synonym'ed words. Just look at how few we have for "smell" (as in the act of smelling), and then how overloaded the word smell even is.

You're serious?

Operative, key, and critical are all more correct to me in this context.

For me, "key", and "critical" merely say it's "important", but don't convey the sense that "out of the mess of connected concepts we're discussing, the one that is actually interacting with the thing we care about, or at least dominating the interactions with the thing we care about, is X".

"operative" is a bit better, but I think of it as referring to grammatical interactions, i.e. interactions at the level of language mechanics rather than semantics.

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