As a non-native, I see how susceptible I am to absorbing such style. There's no way at all for me to perceive anything wrong with the examples you present
It's a bit more subtle than things like "it's not X, it's Y". And even that isn't "wrong", it's just the way AI talks, and therefore an indicator that the author offloaded their thinking to an agent. I've read so much Claude output that it's easy for me to recognize its voice, the same way I could recognize a friend's voice in writing. The examples I quoted are a weird kind of circuitous sentence structure with a certain shape and rhythm that scream Claude to me. Here is how I might rewrite them in human speak:
> Most of the path is automated; a person's attention goes where the risk is
--> We automate as much as possible, focusing human attention on risky parts
> The eval grows with every incident, and every change to the reviewer is scored against all of it.
--> We run reviewer evals against every incident
But that's just my interpretation and my voice. I can't know for sure what the authors would have said if they took the time to write it themselves.
I see. Yeah it's a bit annoying. In my mother tongue, Portuguese, I feel a visceral pain when I read what I classify as bad style. But I never developed such esthetic sense with the other languages in which I can communicate in any level
Personally, a year or two ago writing like that did not really come across as particular bad or AI generated to me, although it was uncommon for humans to write phrases like that. Writing in an unusual way is not inherently bad, it can make your text interesting... but it is less direct and clear than alternatives. But the style becomes unpleasant if you keep seeing the same patterns over and over such as "X'ed against all of it"
Yep. It’s the consistent emphasis in every statement that is so draining to me. A human might use a similar tone once or twice in a piece to drive home a particularly important point, but Claude does it with every point. It’s exhausting.
Also: run experiments to find an "optimal" budget with the right size for your target audience. If you, e.g., set a too restrictive geographic rule, but also set a budget higher than what they manage to burn showing your ads at the area you defined, they will override the rules you set up to guarantee 100% of your money will be burnt.
For a certain class of professionals, slowness is a kind of superpower able to restrain their damage. LLMs have turned off those guardrails.
On one hand, I'm not fully surprised -- LLMs are powerful tools, but of course they can be misused. On the other hand, I'm impressed by how fast things are deteriorating in some shops. At my job they got encouraged, over-confident even, to finally do some long-awaited major overhaul in the code base. I'm genuinely concerned about our ability to continue maintaining this mess in the mid and long-term.
What a nice surprise. Two days ago I glanced a book about Clipper Summer in my bookshelf and thought that it would be nice to have an environment like that for the web. Glad that someone has built it!
By the way, I'm not nostalgic about the tech of those years, but I definitely think that we unlearned a few things along the way
Yeah but I'm not sure if that's the way to go for learning your first 1000 words of a language, especially if you're just trying to spend your 15 minute commute doing something useful.
> I know banking apps are the typical example, but I've always wondered why
My bank uses the app for 2FA, and that became a sort of a standard in Brazil, AFAIK. Mine at least gave me the option of using an RSA SecurID or sth alike when I asked, but I don't know how much it would cost me.
My stock broker on the other hand does 2FA exclusively on mobile (and only Android and iOS). The same for the health insurer.
My car insurer didn't force me to so far, which I find strange, given their interest in tracking my location and speed.
These were some of the major factors leading me to give up on using a feature phone when I tried, a few years ago. It was a good experience, especially at those times of pandemics and political instability, but the inconveniences were many.
Huh? Guess you do learn something new everyday - I've been calling it that for ever too but apparently it is "engine-x" ... (thanks to you, I guess I won't sound like an idiot any more, to some ;).
I worked for a somewhat large bank that used to do this "system analysis" job at its beginnings. Don't recall how they called this process step, but the idea was the same. Besides the internal analysts, they used to hire consultancies full of experienced ladies and gentlemen to design larger projects before coding started.
Sometimes they were hired only to deliver specifications, sometimes the entire system. The software they delivered was quite stable, but that's beyond the point. There sure were software issues there, but I was impressed by how those problems were usually contained in their respective originating systems, rarely breaking other software. The entire process was clear enough and the interfaces between the fleet of windows/linux/mainframe programs were extremely well documented. Even the most disorganized and unprofessional third-party suppliers had an easier time writing software for us. It wasn't a joy, but it was rational, there was order. I'm not trying to romanticize the past, but, man, we sure un-learned a few things about how to build software systems
What a coincidence, I've just read this paper while I prepare my proposal for a PhD. I feel that the difficulties reported by the novice users were related to the peculiarities of the mainframe interfaces + the 3270 emulator. Not exactly to the fact that they were using a TUI.
