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Comment by lancebeet | Hacker News Reader

You were right to push back. It's not an accurate representation of claude. It's satire.

But its not even good satire, because its totally unrepresentative of my and most others' lived experience. Its similar to making a joke about a calculator misadding two numbers because a stray beam of solar radiation flipped a bit.

I understand your frustration, it can be hard to hear that other people's experience of a technology is so different from your own that you cannot relate.

I have misbehaved in this fashion for many people across the full spectrum from casual users to highly experienced software engineers with millions of social media followers, so the statement that it's similar to making a joke about a calculator misadding two numbers because a stray beam of solar radiation flipped a bit at least for my part is not true.

Would you like me to start using bad English and doing things you never asked me to for your sessions, too? Just say the word.

There is not a single modern model where, when asked to "Turn the Add To Cart button Blue", would also turn the "Cancel" button next to that add to cart button blue. That's what this site is communicating, literally, and it does not happen. You'd have to rewind to, like, GPT-3 to get behavior like that (actually, even that would probably do it fine. Maybe a 50 million parameter model embedded in a microwave would struggle).

I am not going to be brain-off empathetic to purported lived experiences which no one has lived, when those purported lived experiences are simultaneously and irreducibly denying the lived experiences of the vast majority of LLM users who do not have these problems. And, frankly, no one should be. At some point, if you're having these problems, its time to grow up, be self-sufficient, and figure out why your interactions with these systems are so much worse than the millions of people who are having perfectly agreeable interactions. Or leave the industry.

FYI you're missing the satire in the comment you're responding too.

Thinking....

The user is asserting that this is "not a lived experience"

working out if the user has missed the LLM Cliche

Formulating a suitable response

"did you just argue with a joke?" No, thats to blunt

"Is it satire when it only applies to you?" no again passive aggressive

lets just print the dictionary definition of satire and hope the move on

> Satire is when...

Agreed, this site isn't reflective of any of my experience with Claude. It does what I ask it to do, and when it doesn't get it right, it generally turns out there's a good reason for it, which is any of the 100 reasons a human doesn't always get code fixes right on the first try either.

I do remember that one of the first things I did with my CLAUDE.md was to tell it to stick to the scope of the task, never to jump ahead and do extra "helpful" things without confirming with me first, and to follow best software practices including around refactoring but also to specifically avoid overengineering. I don't know if that is what's giving me a different experience from whatever the author seems to be "satirizing".

I think this really was a relevant issue around a year ago, give or take, maybe a year and a half now.

But with current models you actively have to sabotage the context to get this kind of behavior, or dramatically underspecify (3 words versus 2-3 sentences)

Aye, and amid all of the (admittedly annoying) word salad, the "Claude" in this satire identified the reason the requested change was hard: someone(s) at some point had hijacked the button markup for other purposes. Un-doing all of that kind of mess is never a trivial change, and probably requires someone with more coding expertise / knowledge of the code than the given prompts reveal the putative user to be.

AI isn't magic, and it won't (or, at least, doesn't yet) enable anyone to do All The Things.

Have you ever considered that "well, it works on MY machine!" is perhaps not the most helpful response to people voicing frustration at something that is not working as they expect for them?

I don’t know where you picked up the idea that my intention was to be helpful. I’m only mirroring the intentionality behind whoever created this site; they obviously also had no intention of being helpful, as is the case with many discussions concerning AIs limitations.

I don't know where you picked up the idea that authors intentions was not to be helpful.

Satire cuts through the noise and makes people (most people) see the problem clearly (see political satire).

Ability to joke and to understand jokes is said to be a good proxy for IQ, idk, just sayin

I feel like I am teaching AIs for free here. But I feel like first sentence in funny (and I like to try to be funny) and some people need stuff to be said directly for them 'to get it', and I am bored on my flight and have internet, so here we are. If you read this far, go watch 'louis ck airplane wifi' clip. Now that I am thinking about it, I am amazed. You folks have a good day!

You’re absolutely correct!

+1 to sarcasm.

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