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Comment by gblargg | Hacker News Reader

I'm apparently not good at spotting it. I was put off by the overly dramatic presentation. It gets tiring that the author apparently finds this more exciting than I do, and writes like it's enthralling. I just assumed it was an excess of enthusiasm or the first experience with this kind of thing. If it's AI, I'm way behind the game noticing it.

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There are lots of indicators in this text, and this breathless presentation is very much how modern LLMs present things.

Claude also loves to describe things as being "real", particularly saying "X is real".

In this case,

> The reallocations were real, but they were never the bottleneck.

There was never any indication or setup in the text that they weren't real, but it's how it justifies wasted effort, it insists that some phenomenon it corrected but failed to solve the problem "was real".

Another giveaway are nonsensical analogies:

> The predictor is like a barista who starts making your usual order the moment you walk in. If you are a regular, this is fantastic: the coffee is ready when you reach the counter. If you order something random every day, the barista keeps pouring drinks into the sink.

If you order "something random every day", then you don't have a usual order for them to be making, it's an analogy that doesn't work.

And of course, the smoking gun is:

> The smoking gun

It probably won't be a good indicator forever as it has been noticed so much, but it's a particular favourite of the current generation of anthropic models.

"The smoking gun" is right there in the text ;) (but also things like "Same million floats. Same threshold. Same function."). Don't know if other models have that same specific style, but it looks very 'claude-y'.

I wouldn't be surprised though if (especially) non-native speakers unconsciously start adopting the Claude writing style when they stare all day long at Claude generated text at work.

I would assume non-native speakers talk to Claude in their own language. Now I'm curious if Claude's weird quirks of speech are unique in each language or if they carry over!

This isn't a necessarily true assumption. I my social circles of non native English speakers, most of us use English to talk with models.

I switch languages randomly.

What do Claude's tics look like in your other language? Do they carry over or does each language get its own weird rhetorical flourishes?

Hard to say for me... I use it for programming, but want it to not talk too much. So I've not many experiences with letting it write long texts...

I'm German but still do all my computing in English (partly out of habbit, but also because Germanized technical text is usually painful to work with because it's full of anglizisms (is that actually an English word?)).

One nice thing about English is you can just make up words with plausible etymological roots in Latin/French or Old English and often people will know what you mean. In this case though it would probably be spelled "Anglicism".

German language: hold my beer ;)

Hey, this beer glass is cold, lemme get my Handschuh.

Not sure if it was added later, but there's an even more obvious sign: the top of the blog post literally says that an LLM was used to write it.

> Don't know if other models have that same specific style

An awful lot of the open-weight models also talk in the Claude-y style. Not sure if an artefact of distilling anthropic models, or just a preponderance of slop in the training set...

> I was put off by the overly dramatic presentation. It gets tiring that the author apparently finds this more exciting than I do, and writes like it's enthralling.

That's one of the main tells that AI wrote this. All the stylistic tics that people usually point out combine to make the writing seem more important than it is.

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