[ssl-3]

"That's such a clever way to see things! Let's delve into that!"

The bots (all of them) seem to show patterns of overuse of specific phrases, words, and punctuation.

Some of those are the ones you mentioned. Another that I've been seeing lately is overuse of the term "gate", wherein: As a human, I know what a gate is. A gate is a thing that can be open, or that can be closed. It might be locked or unlocked. The path beyond the gate may be passable or impassable or nonexistent. The gate is just a gate, and the presence of the gate doesn't imply whether it is open or closed.

But in bot-speak, a gate only refers to a hard block -- an impassable construct. Like a fence or a wall, or even a lava-filled moat.

But while a lava-filled moat is intended to be impassable, the bot uses "gate" -- a thing that is designed to be passed -- to describe that same kind of obstacle.

That's misuse of the term, I think, based on decades of dealing with gates in reality: Usually when I encounter a gate that is closed, I just open it and walk through.

I do have instructions that tell the bot to avoid that usage of the word and it ignores them sometimes anyway.

But "gate" is just today's problem-word that comes to mind as I write this. Yesterday, it was something different. Tomorrow, it will be something else entirely.

The overall pattern here is that of gratingly-repetitive bullshit-grade jargon that doesn't fit to begin with.

"And that's the real, no-nonsense truth!"

[derdi]

I found Codex to use "gate" in a different sense: As the condition of an if statement. I have a local style rule not to use that. Another really grating thing is to use "X-shaped" for "something vaguely related to X". And using temporal words like "still" and "already" in contexts with no temporal connotation.

[stcg]

I like the word "botspeak".

Another example of typical botspeak is "smoke test". Why not just say "test"? It feels like a way of downplaying the ability to detect problems.

[ssl-3]

One thing I did recently with the bot definitely involved actual smoke tests, though: I was working with real hardware that can blow up in real ways, with the bot doing all of the circuit design work and coding based on my goals while I just distantly commanded the show from On-High and plugged shit into a breadboard.

(The project works well and I consider it to be Good Enough; I might go back and polish it more later. There was no smoke, but there could have been.)

[zahlman]

This makes more sense if you think about the contexts in which people would talk about gates on the Internet, I dare say.

[ssl-3]

Oh?

I've been on the Internet for ~35 years. What did I miss?

[zahlman]

My expectation is that you'd hear a lot more about "gated communities", "gatekeeping" etc. than any of the uses of gates that give warm fuzzies. (As a suffix, it's also associated with scandals; but that probably isn't relevant here.)

[ssl-3]

I was thinking about gated communities earlier today, in fact. We don't have many of them around here.

But where we do have them: At a given time, the gate might be open or closed; passable, or impassable. The presence of a gate is implicit, but the status of that gate is not known without advance knowledge or direct observation. And even when it is closed (even if it defaults to always being closed), there's generally a cromulent way for a person to get that gate to open and then move beyond it. It is designed to be opened and closed.

Gatekeeping: Sure. I've run across a ton of artificial gatekeepers online in my time. I've bypassed countless scores of them. Those are easy: Just ignore them and keep moving.

These aren't examples of the hard-blocking, impassable lava moats that the bot is fond of using "gate" to describe.

[win311fwg]

In the context of an LLM using "gate" within code: obviously one can always modify the code to bypass the gate, so there is a built-in implicit assumption that the gate isn't "impossible lava". Most readers are able to read between the lines, but you cannot serve everyone.

[ssl-3]

That's not how the bot uses the word, though -- at least in my experience. The bot uses "gate" to describe a thing that only blocks, and can never open.

[win311fwg]

So what you are saying is if you don’t want to read about Gates, target Linux instead of Windows?