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  • Hacker News
  • They scan too many classical literature.
  • Do they scan too many classical literature or does classical literature happen to love metaphors and allegories, which are basically weights/patterns?
  • Too much classical literature

    Many would be works, writings, etc.

  • Unlikely. A lot of classical literature is fairly readable. The only issue are archaic words of you use old translation.
  • Or have too few programmers read classical literature?
  • It probably tests well when they're doing reinforcement learning. Humans trying to use in-group terminology or uncommon vocabulary to impress other humans with their knowledge and sophistication is a tale as old as time.
  • thanks this isn’t just an individual experience… I was starting to think i’d become too dumb for opus
  • Good to know it's not just me! I also found it's way too verbose. So much so that I added an entry in my Claude.md telling it to be concise.
  • Looks like pure hallucinations just in a more poetic sophisticated register?
  • Tangentially, Opus-5 is the first model to understand my (bad) jokes: "Site refuses non-curl user agents (joke 266 status)." [0]

    [0] https://itmeetsot.eu/posts/2026-07-27-opus5/

  • Ah that's just because the new training set also includes "The King in Yellow".
    by j-pb
  • Imagine someone sneaking in The King in Yellow into the training sets used by all projects training models somehow, breaking all future models irreparably -- and then the engineers trying to find this poison pill in the dataset and going mad one by one as they find it and aren't able avoid reading into act 2.

    …should make for an interesting SCP story :)

  • I've had "tractable beachhead" a bit earlier today. Like in "the tractable beachhead was the coupling between X and Y".

    A bit of googling did not help me, I have no idea what this is even supposed to mean.

  • It's a shame that LLMs took off at the exact same time humanity entered it post-literate phase.
  • There's a scene in the movie Clifford, starring martin short. "I just need you to talk to me like a real human boy! You can't do it, can you???"

    "...the load bearing seam is the self referential spin. Superstition compounds throughout your entire pipeline."

  • I wonder if this is a "loan idiom" from a non-English-speaking culture.

    > Det är ingen ko på isen – “There’s no cow on the ice” (Sweden)

    https://bigthink.com/high-culture/idioms-around-the-world/

  • Tractable is solvable, the opposite of intractable, and a beachhead is a landing point for an invasion.

    A tractable beachhead is a solvable first chunk of work that sets you up for the rest of the project

    by sdwr
  • Damn, I've been telling the same thing to Claude, good to know I'm not alone. I've also noticed that Opus 5 is much worse in this regard than Fable.

    It's as if the model is speaking Mentalese, or in some "bag of concepts" language.

    by rzk
  • It reminds me of the PoMo jargon generator. See some results here:

    https://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/

  • I've had to make the same request multiple times recently. Has anyone noticed it getting worse with the more recent models? It reminds me of when someone is trying to convince you of their intelligence by replacing simple and straightforward explanations with words pulled out of a thesaurus, so maybe that's the objective of these more recent iterations. Throwback to grade school.
    by usui
  • An interesting solution suggested in the replies (https://x.com/andrew_n_carr/status/2081534245370314816):

        The fix for this is to say: only report to me in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English.
    
    More info about it here: Simplified Technical English - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Technical_English
    by rzk
  • Nice. It sounds like doing a few passes on industrial product documentation with this might be beneficial.
  • I looked into it a bit more, and while it does look helpful in the first glance, it actually isn't a good fit for code. It's very aviation-terminology-focused.

    A better guide would be something like Google Developer Style Guide

  • I was curious so I asked Claude how it would do that: https://gist.github.com/waddie/b26166eec6cf675c044c09a95a754...

    I thought this bit was interesting:

    > TE has no register for hedging, ownership of an opinion, or acknowledging that a reasonable person would disagree. Modality is roughly can / must / do not. […] Where a thought can't be said in STE without becoming a lie, I'd mark it and say it plainly rather than mangle it. Confidence and disagreement are the two things I'd insist on smuggling through.