Comment by Tiberium | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tiberium | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I hope the future generations of models will stop with the fluff/textual clutter/overexplanations - I don't know the right term. They easily fix those once you tell them, but they still do them by default. What I mean on this page, for example:

> A WORLD, FOUR BILLION YEARS IN THE MAKING

> DEEP TIME · CONTINENTS IN MOTION

> Distance becomes an ocean.

> Continents drift apart. Shallow seas spread across land that will one day be dry.

> EXPLORE 4.54 BILLION YEARS OF EARTH HISTORY

> EARTH THROUGH TIME

> Scroll to travel through time Drag to orbit

> THE PAST IS ANOTHER WORLD. IT IS ALSO OURS.

> ILLUSTRATIVE TRANSITION

> Ga = billion years · Ma = million years / Event spacing is not linear

It gets to the point where if you ask a model to make a tiny toy "OS", it'll write stuff like "REAL MODE. REAL MULTITASKING. DRAG WINDOWS / TAB TO SWITCH" directly in the background of the desktop of said toy OS.

The term that Anthropic is now using is "mannered prose". If the creator of this example simply prompted "Remove all mannered prose" then the entire experiment would suddenly become normal sounding. In the fable 5.1 prompting guide, they have a longer prompt for removing mannered prose too if needed. I find it works on Astra as well.

https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt...

- poetic invocation of awe

- rhetoric of universal humanity as backdoor to software anthropomorphism

- commercialistic exposition of features (in sentence fragments) and foolproof instructions for use

"Put 'em together and wadda ya got?" TURN OFF YOUR BRAIN

I can’t stand it, one of the most annoying tics to me.

Funnily enough even the image model does it: gpt-image just throws little bits of text all over the picture wherever possible.

It's a landing page trope, and I wonder if it emerges out of overtraining on the front door of web sites.

A good 6th prompt would have been "remove the title/subtitle idiom wherever it appears in the application"

it's flimflam. at least that's what i call it, and banning flimflam in the strongest possible verbiage seems to help

I’ve only heard the term flimflam as a name for a scam that involves tricking a cashier into giving you a bunch of money with confusing overlapping talk.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com