"substrate" - I don't know what training they did with Opus 4.7 --> Fable/Mythos 5, but dang does it like the word substrate. Drives me insane. I had never heard anyone use this word prior in real technical writing or speaking.
Another one is "surface", like in "across all product surfaces". I've been in the field for 15 years and have never heard that particular usage before.
I hate when it starts talking about code in terms of planes. I have no idea what it means. I guess it's better than talking about heaps of spaghetti with noodles connecting to each other, but that would be much closer to what it actually writes.
I do UI design/dev and say "surface up" a lot. Although I don't use the term, in this area people call different container depths as surfaces (base, card, overlay as surface).
In my brief and abortive foray into education, I discovered that they friggin' love to use "surface" as a verb. As in: This activity surfaces an understanding of the turboencabulation principle for learners. Or somesuch. It's been a while, happily.
Unless you're a submarine, "surface" is not a verb.
Idk. I've always used that verb with clients, usually when I notice either malfeasance or hidden behavior. Like: "I was checking our code for where a half cent of sales tax might be accidentally rounded down, and it surfaced something weird going on at franchise #77 in New Jersey..."
I find this usage less objectionable than the education jargon. It suggests that we all have a latent understanding of the turboencabulation principle just waiting for the right activity to force air into its ballast tanks and make it pop above the waves.
That said, I don't love this non-education jargon usage for its passive-voiced-ness. The letters didn't "surface" of their own accord. Somebody found them, decided that they were noteworthy, and made the choice to bring them into the public view.
That one probably comes from maths, where surfaces show up all the time in geometric interpretations of things. I've been involved in more mathsy parts of engineering and I've heard it a lot.
It's a pretty common word if you've worked in anything that vaguely resembles an accountancy system. Also, anything crypto related will often use that word (the distributed ledger, etc)
That's the case for most of these LLM tropes or word choices. They are all common lexicon in their respective fields, but the LLM doesn't make that distinction and uses them everywhere making them standout.
No one would bat an eye about "ledger" appearing at a high frequency in content about accounting, but it starts to look odd if "ledger" is showing up in other contexts.
"Load bearing" is from engineering; "Substrate" is primarily from biology & biochem, etc.
I don't know if this is true, but part of me suspects the labs want to make the models appear smarter so they reinforce this word choice in the weights, assigning some words a higher intelligence weight or something. "I will show you a list of options" vs. "I will surface a ledger of your options" and it prefers the later to sound smart to the human reader.
> No one would bat an eye about "ledger" appearing at a high frequency in content about accounting, but it starts to look odd if "ledger" is showing up in other contexts.
The reason why I chose that specific term to push on is that practically every SaaS has a ledger _somewhere_ in its stack to keep track of customer payments. I'll give you load bearing and substrate, but ledger IMO should be quite common. Certainly a career devoted to say compiler internals or some specific scientific product could avoid it, but I'd imagine a sizable majority of HN users have worked on some system that accepts online payments for services, necessitating some contact with something likely referred to as a ledger.
It sounds like you're saying labs intentionally doing it, but it's far more likely the labs or post trainers are unintentionally doing it by upvoting answers that seem smarter than those with more common language.
Of course this presents another conundrum, people that are smart typically have a vastly larger lexicon then those that are not. Humans typically have a lot more social clues on when to use those words and when not to, but it doesn't always work. I loved reading science/biology books as a kid far beyond my ages reading level. Actually using those words around other kids got me called a nerd.
The first week I encountered this "substrate" I asked it to justify the usage and IIRC it claimed the word is used in some infra/systems lexicons... I wonder...
It’s incredibly popular in the mushroom growing community. Maybe they’ve trained it on the shroomery.org? It could also explain the alleged leaked full reasoning logs that are totally bonkers incoherent digital glossolalia…
The one I've noticed a ton recently with Sonnet 5 is that it loves the phrase "different not in degree, but in kind." It drags that one out constantly now, at least once a day. Gemini and GPT don't at all.
seriously... i literally tell claude every prompt to not use the word substrate. i have never seen an agent use a single word so much. how did that happen? it is so interesting
Working Effectively with Legacy Code is the best Software Engineering book I have ever read. Most authors will show you very trivial examples, but Feathers shows detailed examples and an almost formulaic way to make your code testable. You can read and memorize SOLID principles, but he shows you how to _do_ SOLID principles.
I was revisiting that book again last night briefly and was having a chuckle at some of the example code in Java (I assume it's Java?) before some of the more modern features came into the language and thinking "yep, using iterator and .next() to do your loops sure is legacy code alright!". It smelt like Java 1.4
This is a free book and the first comprehensive book on child-computer interaction. This is written by my former grad school advisor/mentor. He is the smartest, humblest guy that I know. I am pretty inspired that he compiled and summarized the state of child-computer interaction and is offering it as a FREE book.
Netflix puts out some great articles about architecture in the cloud. Auto-scaling, chaos monkey, and how they handle 'steal-time.' Does anyone know of any other company that publishes so much about cloud architecture? This is great stuff!
Using AWS does not magically give you a HA infrastructure when you have a complicated service oriented architecture like Netflix. All the stuff mentioned here are still relevant even if they're running their own DC.
I am with you. Nice job NSA. In fact, this "technology" doesn't really surprise me at all. If an article came out that said, "NSA can't hack a computer unless it is connected to their own private LAN," then I would be pretty disappointed in my tax dollars at work :)
I switched a year ago and the usability improvement is substantial. This isn't vim vs. emacs, this is emacs vs. MS Wordpad. Is it perfect, no, but it is so much better than Eclipse. Eclipse is one tool for all jobs which makes the UI very clunky and not very intuitive. Even C++ developers on our team when switching back and forth between Eclipse and Visual Studio (we do cross-platform development) would loath at their time using Eclipse. I used to defend it, but not any more. Sure, maybe this will turn into an Android vs. iPhone debate, but let someone use IntelliJ for 6 months (after having experience with Eclipse) and tell me how many people want to switch back.
