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.
You need a PhD to understand its explanation of a code snippet.
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.
"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‽
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.
As far as I can tell "the capstone" is what Claude usually calls my current goal if it thinks it is a satisfying result.
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.”
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.
alwayshasbeen.jpg
1. Adds a small prompt to each turn with the agent[1]. 2. Is like a band-aid on a bullet wound, properly solving it would mean retraining the model and they probably are already working on it.
Does anyone have an output style nailed down that actually works? If so, please share!
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.
I’ve noticed that Sol is pretty good most of the time, but with long contexts it’ll start to devolve into Claudish.