The fix for this is to say: only report to me in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English.
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.
A better guide would be something like Google Developer Style Guide
> The US government's Plain English lacks the strict vocabulary restrictions of the aerospace standard, but represents an attempt at a more general writing standard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_English
> Modern corporations and academic organizations hire technical writers already trained to follow a simplified form of English that the layman reader can easily understand, known as plain language (PL).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_language
And so we've looped back around OP’s “plain English” phrasing.
A bit of googling did not help me, I have no idea what this is even supposed to mean.
> Det är ingen ko på isen – “There’s no cow on the ice” (Sweden)
A tractable beachhead is a solvable first chunk of work that sets you up for the rest of the project
When I was 19, I had a psychologist who employed a lot of baseball idioms. "We'll touch base next week..." and although I am not a baseball fan, my father is, and we're all Americans, and so the baseball references were well-understood by his audience of one.
When an LLM starts going off about a "tractable beachhead" that behavior indicates that it's unaware of its audience, and also ignorant of how to put together a human idiom. That's exciting that emergent behavior is coining new idioms that may be applicable to some situation, and also explainable by dudes on Hacker News, but that wasn't the point of the comment.
The point is that the LLM's audience wasn't a veteran of D-Day in WWII, and even with an understanding of what those words mean individually, neither he nor I recognized "tractable beachhead" as a meaningful idiom for speakers of standard English.
…should make for an interesting SCP story :)
It's as if the model is speaking Mentalese, or in some "bag of concepts" language.
Many would be works, writings, etc.
I dunno, it feels pretty similar to an elementary student blindly swapping words with a thesaurus to increase the sophistication of their writing (which I readily admit I was guilty of doing once). It sounds more intelligent but lacks substance.
Tractable = you can make it work, but it’s not going to take care of itself, you have to get your hands around it
Beachhead = you’re on a mission, you’re trying to probe to find the right way in to get started to eventually accomplish the whole thing, but first you have to find a little spot to get situated and then expand from there.
“A good starting point” is almost certainly all it needed to convey and what it should have written.
My only exposure to english literature comes from the Brontë sisters at this moment in time.