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Not Becoming a Cyborg

nolanlawson.com

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When I have conversations with uncritical agentic coding maximalists, they will use "load-bearing" in daily speech.

I don't cringe when I know it went through their head, because they didn't literally copy-paste it.

It's just a side-effect of immersion. It's exactly a tic, and I don't frown when people tic.

Economists say "all things equal" (which they're never outside of economic models).

My vanity compels me to not use Claude's linguistic identity. It gets sooo boring.

And in spite of reading hours of Claude every day, I don't sound anything like Claude.

Maybe I'm not as impressionable as Nolan. Maybe I'm less aware of my own words.

I was cultivating a "make an effort when you write" mental space, and this area only got stronger in my brain with Claude.

I suppose it's a fight to preserve my own linguistic identity. Or maybe I have enough monologue to keep the pressure out always.

Also, unrelated, I already had one of Nolan's blog posts open in my most recent tab. It should prove a thing or two about authentic human voice.

One way to detect mathematicians is that we say "[...], in particular, [...]". I guess it's our version of the economist thing!

I know when they say "such that ..."

"in most cases"

Mathematicians and computer scientists will also say

  "for all" / "there exists" instead of "every" / "there's at least one"
  "let" as an imperative for establishing facts
  "fix" for choosing a value
  "given" instead of "if"
  "modulo" instead of "except for"
  "if, and only if," when the occasion warrants it
  "implies" instead of "means"
  "trivial" without intending to be mean
  "yes" when asked an "or" question
  "transitively"
  "by symmetry"
  "it follows"
  "canonical"

It's a lovely, concise language.

You can say a lot with few words when you have rich definitions.

You're still the product of your environment. You'd not be using words like 'uncritical', 'agentic', 'maximalist', 'cringe', 'cultivating' etc were you not.

You're just as branded as an LLM user by your admission that you read hours of its output daily as any potential use of 'load-bearing'.

'Cringe' for instance, rose to popularity once, became cringe itself, fell to obscurity, and was only relatively recently restored to frequent use. 'load-bearing', 'circle back', and 'let's be honest' were all also once heavily used in particular communities and are therefore heavily represented in any algorithm supplied with this data that is trained to sound professional and authoritative.

These words and phrases are simply suffering the same oversaturation point that all the greats (groovy, radicle, spiffy, cool) do at some point. At some point, some population that is not native to the word (say adults for 'fire' or junior devs for 'circle back') start to use them and the original culture begins to see that the term has been diluted and is therefore disfavored for some new or re-used construction.

My point is that the phenomenon of choosing ones words as a reflection of one's environment is not a new thing. It's really nothing to do with the machine generation component. As when the masses refuse eloquence as a snub against the bourgeoisie it's not really about the money itself so much as signalling a particular identity. This is just the latest hotness to signal distance from.

> Cringe' for instance, rose to popularity once, became cringe itself, fell to obscurity, and was only relatively recently restored to frequent use

When were those changes supposed to happen? Cause saying cringe was never cringy in my neck of woods. And the word was in use the whole time.

> load-bearing', 'circle back', and 'let's be honest' were all also once heavily used in particular communities and are therefore heavily represented in any algorithm supplied with this data that is trained to sound professional and authoritative.

They dont sound professional nor authoritative. And never did. Load bearing was rarely use, circle back is just empty business jargon. Lets be honest is neither professional not authoritative. Never was. That is what people say when they are about to say something negative or ironic.

> My point is that the phenomenon of choosing ones words as a reflection of one's environment is not a new thing.

And that choice oftentimes used to flag you with negative implications ... precisedly because it made it clear which circles you are in.

The premise of Nolan's position is Claude's language tic should not rub off on him, vs it's ok for Tolstoy's to do so.

I disagree. I think words are powerful, and when a word will be understood exactly as it's stated, then the value of the word is present. So while he might bemoan "load-bearing" (so would many of it's readers), that word in the right place will exactly communicate what he'd like. That enough reason to "earn it's keep" in prose.

The fact Anthropic, OpenAI and Google think they can fingerprint model output with no fidelity loss tells me otherwise.

As does caveman.

Why? We can also fingerprint human authors with high degrees of certainty if given large enough samples.

We've been doing so since at least before the media excitement over Robert Galbraith being outed via software analysis as J.K. Rowling.

it's not that load-bearing isn't doing the, well, load-bearing semantic work but it's both the lack of variability and lack of nuance hat makes it sound cheap. word choice is powerful - and in the same way, it can be nuanced

for eg. consider the synonyms for 'load-bearing'. if you want construction motifs: keystone, linchpin, cornerstone, foundational, structural. if you want earthy: bedrock, root. if you want ten-dollar words: axiomatic, sine qua non. if you just want to-the-point: vital, key, tenet, crucial

each of those words contain nuance. vital is used a lot in medicine (vital signs) so health, the heart, etc are evoked. pair it with specific usage like "this point is vital, the argument would die without it" and it rings different than "this point is load-bearing, the argument would be refuted without it"

you'd need to exist as a purely logical, probabilistic semantic parsing machine with no innate feeling or cultural attunement to prefer the lack of color and nuance. language as fully utilitarian with no artfulness is dreadful - if all I had to read all day was a self-important tech manual, I too would be frustrated and want for better craft in output prose

I didn't say I'd prefer it. I said that's the only word that presented itself to the author, it provided value, and there's no reason to feel bad about it.

> I have a degree in linguistics, so I understand the power of immersion.

This seems to be the thrust of the whole post. I just don't think immersion has the same influence on mature people with a stable worldview. Why would you have to fight back? Who is so easily suggestible?

I can only speak for myself, but I don't even give human experts the benefit of the doubt on anything. Humans are wrong all the time, and LLMs even more so. Starting from a place of distrust has always been a part of my learning process. I only have so much time and effort in a day. When I'm tired or bored I naturally just... shamelessly ignore everything and everyone until I choose to re-engage (if ever). This isn't even defensiveness. It's just easier.

> I spent years in big-tech corporate culture, where every phrase is hedged and every expression flattened into a kind of mush designed to be as inoffensive as possible.

This is a good example of what I mean. As stated, this was earlier in the career. You may not have realized it at the time, but ever giving a shit about offending some people means you automatically lost the game. They assume you're just as stupid as everyone else and will shut up and submit to being intimidated. The people getting in the way of work deserve to have their feathers ruffled. Nobody else likes them either. The worst they can do is fire you. So what? If you only ever "shoot to stop", otherwise speak in simple terms and get shit done on behalf of the team and the bigger picture, they never will.

When you're right, you're right. When you're wrong, you start asking more probing questions. If "immersion" is affecting your way of thinking, it's because you're getting lazy and not asking questions.

Reminds me more of the Tetris effect than just immersion. LLMs feel more like games with rulesets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect

you are what you eat

how truly neat

what I read are words of wheat

what I write is more like meat

> you are what you eat

"Du bist was du isst" as Rammstein said in an extremely literal song.

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