We don’t know how Claude code is internally implemented. I would not be surprised at all if they literally inject that string as an alternative context and then go with the higher probability output, or if RLHF was structured in that way and so it always generates the same text.

Sometimes I just ride the lightning to see how off course it is willing to go. This is not a productive use of my time but it sure is amusing.

In fairness, I’ve done the same thing to overconfident junior colleagues.

Yeah, I want a feature which stops my agent as soon as it says anything even vaguely like: "let me try another approach". Right after that is when the wheels start falling off, tests get deleted, etc. That phrase is a sure sign the agent should (but never does) ask me for guidance.

Usually it’s a response to my profanity laden “what are you doing? Why? Don’t do that! Stop! Do this instead”

This can still happen even with thinking models as long as the model outputs tokens in a sequence. Only way to fix would be to allow it to restart its response or switch to diffusion.

I don’t think there is any basis for GP’s hypothesis that this is related to the cursor being closer to the user’s example. The attention mechanism is position independent by default and actually has to have the token positions shoehorned in.

The human stochastic parrots (GP, not you) spouting these 2023 talking points really need to update their weights. I’m guessing this way of thinking has a stickiness because thinking of an LLM as “just a fancy markov chain” makes them feel less threatening to some people (we’re past the point where it could be good faith reasoning).

Like, I hear people say things like that (or that coding agents can only do web development, or that they can only write code from their training data), and then I look at Claude Code on my computer, currently debugging embedded code on a peripheral while also troubleshooting the app it’s connected to, and I’m struck by how clearly out of touch with reality a lot of the LLM cope is.

People need to stop obsessing over “the out of control hype” and reckon with the thing that’s sitting in front of them.

Sounds like a kind of Schelling point:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)?uses...

I would call it a meme

convergence

I think it's a perfect (and subtle) way to signal that refreshing is unnecessary to see the latest data without wasting UI space explicitly explaining it. It was my favorite thing about the UI and I will be borrowing it next time I design a real-time interface where the numbers matter more than the precise timing.

Might make more sense to start at zero and then rapidly scale to the current number? To indicate fresh data is being loaded in without making it look like the reader happened to catch a new occurrence in real-time.

I think the problem is people’s priors. This isn’t the first time we’re seeing data fake-arrive like this, and virtually always it’s done either to fake liveness or to lie about rate of change. So, it comes to mean not “live”, but “fake”, even though nefarious motives don’t make much sense in this fun context.

It’s a shame, I think it’s a clever thought, and it doesn’t feel great when good intentions are met with an assumption of maliciousness.

API responses seem to be alternating between saying 19+20 and saying 0+0, at present.

Weird the screen goes 18, 19, 21, then back to 18 and cycles again.

(On iPad Safari)

Probably brings up memories of travel sites saying "10 other people have this room in their cart"

Interestingly you're using long polling instead of WS or SSE, what was the reason behind that ?

Do you happen to have a counter how many times people create a webpage for data, intentionally show fake data, and submit that to HN?

My bank app asks me to review it every time, and only when, I deposit money. It’s so transparent in its attempted manipulation: you just got some money and are likely to be in a better mood than other times you’re using the app!

Literally every deposit. Eventually, I’ll leave a 1-star nastygram review for treating me like an idiot. (It won’t matter and nothing will change.)

I worked on a system that did some calculations for a user after submitting a form. It took milliseconds to crunch the numbers. Users thought we were faking the data because it was "too fast", after enough complaints and bad reviews they added a fake loading bar delay, and people stopped complaining.

I've definitely had systems freeze badly enough that our modern dumb spinners stop spinning... so at least they're still some sort of signal.

…although in many cases you kind of don’t have a choice here, right? If you’re waiting for some API to return data, there’s basically no way to know whether it has stalled. Presumably there will be a timeout, but if the timeout is broken for some reason, the spinner will just spin.

Maybe I'm old or just wrong, but "dark pattern" for me means "intentionally misleading" which doesn't seem to be the case here, this is more of a "add liveliness so users can see it's not static data" with no intention of misleading, since it seems to be true that the data is actually dynamic.

You're absolutely right!

> It's a dark pattern

No, a dark pattern is intentionally deceptive design meant to trick users into doing something (or prevent them from doing something else) they otherwise wouldn't. Examples: being misleading about confirmation/cancel buttons, hiding options to make them less pickable, being misleading about wording/options to make users buy something they otherwise wouldn't, being misleading about privacy, intentionally making opt in/out options confusing, etc.

None of it is the case here.

This has to be the most over/misused term in this whole website.

No, it's just the kind of dishonesty that people who create dark patterns start with. It's meant to give the believable impression that something that is not happening is happening, to people hopefully too ignorant to investigate.

Of course, in the tech industry, you can safely assume that anyone can detect your scam would happily be complicit in your scam. They wouldn't be employed otherwise.

-----

edit: the funniest part about this little inconsequential subdebate is that this is exactly the same as making a computer program a chirpy ass-kissing sycophant. It isn't the algorithms that are kissing your ass, it's the people who are marketing them that want to make you feel a friendship and loyalty that is nonexistent.

"Who's the victim?"

jeez, this is a fun website, can't believe how quickly we're godwining here!

I am missing a victim

Nope.

I find the GPT-5 model having turned the friendliness way, way down. Topics that previously would have rendered long and (usefully) engaging conversations are now met with an "ok cool" kind of response.

I get it - we don't want LLMs to be reinforces of bad ideas, but sometimes you need a little positivity to get past a mental barrier and do something that you want to do, even if what you want to do logically doesn't make much sense.

An "ok cool" answer is PERFECT for me to decide not to code something stupid (and learn something useful), and instead go and play video games (and learn nothing).

> Correctness is secondary, user satisfaction is primary.

Kind of makes sense, not every user wants 100% correctness (just like in real-life).

And if I want correctness (which I do), I can make the models prioritize that, since my satisfaction is directly linked to the correctness of the responses :)

> Correctness is secondary, user satisfaction is primary.

And that's where everything is going wrong. We should use technology to further the enlightenment, bring us closer to the truth, even if it is an inconvenient one.

"Thought pattern" might be overstating it. The fact that "You're absolutely right!" is statistically more likely to precede something consistent with the user's intent than something that isn't, might be enough of an explanation.

> ... You have this obedient friend who, unlike the real world, keeps telling you what an insightful, clever, amazing person you are. It even apologizes when it has to contradict you on something. None of my friends do!

You're absolutely right! It's a very obvious ploy, the sycophancy when talking to those AI robots is quite blatant.

Wow, 2 downvotes. Someone really disliked me telling them their LLM friend isn't truly their friend :D

Telling someone they "shouldn't be insecure" reminds me of this famous Bob Newhart segment on Mad TV.

Bob plays the role of a therapist, and when his client explains an issue she's having, his solution is, "STOP IT!"

> You shouldn't be so insecure.

Not assuming that there's any insecurity here, but psychological matters aren't "willed away". That's not how it works.

Not only is that a weird presumption about my ostensible insecurities on your end, it's also weird that the state of my own mental resilience should play any role at all when interacting with a tool.

If all other things are equal and one LLM is consistently vaguely annoying, for whatever reason, and the other isn't, I chose the other one.

Leaving myself aside, LLMs are broadly available and strongly forced onto everyone for day-to-day use, including vulnerable and insecure groups. These groups should not adapt to the tool, the tool should adapt to the users.

the machine is always right. adjust your feelings to align with the output of the machine.

Very good point - at the risk of being called insecure again, I really do not want my tools to apologise to me all the time. That's just silly.

I especially like this sentence: "Use these charts where the communication goal is to show intent or generality, and not absolute precision."

With all these dark patterns nowadays, it's nice to see a 'light pattern'. ;) Instead of using UI to make dubious things seem legit, this is a way to use UI to emphasize things that are not precise.

Wow this is gorgeous, definitely finding a way to shoehorn this into my next project. Even if it's not by the same author, I am grateful to both you and him for making me aware of this nifty library :)

> pay-per-use LLM APIs are basically incentivized to be verbose There's competing incentives. Being verbose, let's them charge for more tokens, but it's also not prized by text-consumers in the most common contexts. As there's competition for marketshare, I think we see this later aspect dominate. Claude web even ships with a "concise" mode. Could be an issue long term though, we'll have to wait and see!

> In an optimistic sci-fi line of thinking, I would imagine APIs using old-school telegraph abbreviations and inventing their own shortened domain languages.

In the AI world this efficient language is called "neuralese". It's a fun rabbit hole to go down.

Gay male marriages remarkably have the lower divorce rates than heterosexual marriages, while lesbian female marriages have higher divorce rates. Multiple studies show that lesbians consistently have far higher divorce rates than gays. This implies a level of neuroticism with females, that they probably do need to be appeased more, and that if you have two needy people who need to be appeased it's probably not going to be a good dynamic.

> I always find the claim hilarious that in relationships women are the ones who need to be appeased, when in reality it's mostly men who can't stand being wrong or corrected.

Not my experience at all. It's not men constantly running off to therapy for validation.

My parents, 40 years ago, would say "look it up", either in the dictionary, or the 1959 encyclopedia set we had. With my kids i never told them to look something up in the literal dictionary, but i would tell them to look at wikipedia or "google it". Not about profound questions, though; although a definition of "profound questions" might jog a memory. We do look things up in an etymology dictionary (i have 5 or 6) sometimes, though.

I am not sure why my parents constantly told me to look things up in a dictionary.

Rarely, but it did happen, we'd have to take a trip to the library to look something up. Now, instead of digging in a card catalog or asking a librarian, and then thumbing through reference books, i can ask an LLM to see if there's even information plausibly available before dedicating any more time to "looking something up."

As i've been saying lately, i use copilot to see if my memory is failing.

There, I've fixed it

https://github.com/yoavf/absolutelyright/commit/3d1ff5f97e38...

"Here I am, brain the size of a planet and all they ever do is ask me those stupid questions. And you call that job satisfaction?"

I actually put a directive to always reply to me in French just to see if it was reading the rules. Spoiler: it was reading the rules and ignoring the ones that I cared about but it could tell me about it in French so.. victory?

I've only had good experience concluding any prompt with "and don't talk about it" but my colleague says it hampers the agent because talking to itself helps it think. That's not been my experience, and I vastly prefer it not spending tokens I give no shits about

They really should add a button "punch me".

I am not only absolutely right but also astute and thoughtful - there's awful lot of us!