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qalmakka

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Why does it matter if it's easy to recognise? I prefer to know when I'm reading AI writing.

It's just overused and cliche now

I think you meant to say:

It's not just overused — it's a cliche now.

That's the GPT style writing, there are subtle differences between it and Claude if you know where to look.

I always do my best to emulate AI writing - just to keep you guessing.

You did you a hyphen rather than an emdash here though

Well they did say "emulate" and emulators are always slightly off the mark

I've recently asked claude to be concise in writing documents. It's brilliant for me. You get things like:

  <cmd> force-off  # pull the plug

No faffing around.

It may not be verbose, but it's still faffing around by using an idiom

Idioms can be much more dense than otherwise.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra

Yes, I think the appropriate thing to do here would have been

  <cmd> force-off  # force off

All the brilliance of the original, but also no inappropriate idioms.

It's also not even correct. The diagram in README says the app is run on "built-in Java runtime" after it is converted, which, as I recall, is a virtual machine.

Maybe it is intended for LLMs? For writings of more than a page, most readers are going to use LLM summarizations anyway.

> For writings of more than a page, most readers are going to use LLM summarizations anyway.

Citation very much needed. And I sure hope you’re not right, or we’re already beyond fucked.

Feature, not bug

It's not a bug, it's PR!

At least it's short and every "no" clause adds critical information.

This one is fine.

Hey, at least it didn't call it "beautiful" or "elegant".

Too late, people already talking like this too

You're absolutely right!

I remember the first time I heard a young girl talking to her friends in the TikTok pattern. That was a clear sign we were doomed.

why are we doomed, it sounds like normal language change pursuant to pop culture influence, just like literally always

pop culture is quite new. It has what 3 to 4 human generations?

We're at probably a century and a half, and then I feel like we're quibbling over semantics, but the Coliseum seems like a pretty good example of a manifestation of pop culture.

But this is a digression. Language changes. It always has. What's the big deal? That it's not your generation controlling it this time?

I was only making a comment about pop culture.

Languages have always evolved and will always evolve, I agree and am ok with that.

> girl talking to her friends in the TikTok pattern.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influencer_speak

Some call it a triple construction.

How would you prefer it. Does it not get the point across? Why does it even matter to you?

Variety is the Spice of Life

"Run Android apps natively on Apple Silicon Macs. Uses translation instead of emulation."

No, slop generally doesn't get the point across efficiently.

It's hard to parse, it's grating, and in addition to the strange language you have to apply additional skepticism due to gross inaccuracy being more likely than in human-written text.

For one, say what it does instead of what it doesn't do

"Run Android apps natively on Apple Silicon Macs."

Yes I got that, but afterwards it doesn't explain how until you get all the way down into the diagrams saying that it translates the code one-time. It's once again like no emulators, no virtual machine, no Android, no Linux kernel, no items, Fox only, final destination, whatever

> When you say "don't do X" and end up with a README saying: "achieved by using Y, not X"

Or more like, "achieved by not doing X"

"Why does it matter to you?" Many Claudisms are grating to many people. Annoying is enough of a justification.

> Many Claudisms are grating to many people.

Would they be grating to them in the pre-LLM days?

They would be nowhere near as prevalent. All claude-user output is in the same style, which is really annoying.

I said several months ago that bots like your coworker, personal assistant, search engine, and customer service are now all the same person. They also write all the blog posts and articles you read and scripts for YouTube videos.

Precisely. Regis Philbin, Paris Hilton, Charles Barkley - they each have a pretty distinctive way of speaking and I have always actually enjoyed hearing each one's way of phrasing things. But it would quickly become hell if each week an additional 1% of the things we read was written exactly how Regis would phrase it.

(I purposely picked people with pretty specific speaking habits because yup, the Claude output is 100% that distinctive).

Then tell Claude to speak in a Regis voice???

I don’t get to customize the prompts used by others. I’m sure if I generated a lot of prose with Claude I could convince it to talk differently. It’s all the content others make that is so annoying.

Imagine if everything in the world you read was written by one author - and you didn't particularly like that author's writing style. Or even if you did like the author's style, it began to grate on you simply because there was no reprise from it.

That's the world we are shifting to.

> Would they be grating to them in the pre-LLM days?

No, same way "synergy" wasn't grating before every middle manager started saying it.

You probably won't see this, but yes they would - that is why they're grating, the syntax is just awful

If you run a readability analysis on slop it scores very poorly. LLMs generally continue to be mediocre with the veneer of quality without context to guide them.

Cliches annoyed people before LLMs. There is a whole microgenre of essay ranting about the proliferation of various annoying cliches, bits of jargon, etc. the proliferation of Claude prose is simply rendering certain turns of phrase into annoying cliches, which people are reacting to in the normal way. Cliches also get the point across but nonetheless lots of people find them grating.

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