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petercoopertoday at 12:49 PM2 repliesview on HN

"it doesn't silently go unnoticed", "would be silently inert", "instead of silently overwriting", "you can never silently overwrite"

The biggest tell for me is overuse of the term "silently". "quietly" is another one you often see from Claude in particular. Models love adverbs for whatever reason, whereas a human writer would use them in moderation for emphasis or prefer terms like "by accident".


Replies

ameliaquiningtoday at 3:07 PM

In my experience, "silently overwrite" appeared regularly in technical writing long before LLMs were a thing, because it's a useful concept to be able to point at. "Silently go unnoticed" is kind of redundant, though.

IanCaltoday at 1:46 PM

Accidental things and silent things are very different. Accidental means you didn't mean to do it, silent means you don't know you've done it (or might not if you want to get picky, you could notice).