Claude comment detection

Claude-generated code comments are annoying for many reason. One of them is that they can embed falsehoods in a place where later Claude instances take things very seriously.

I had a rather weak sense of whether a comment was Claude-generated or written by a human with care, so I created an automatic classifier that detects Claude-generated comments. I probably don't need it anymore, because after staring at model diagnostics for so long I have a good idea myself of what a Claude-generated comment looks like, but I'll share some of the details anyway!

(Next week I'll publish a follow-up with a better trained model, made from public and well-labeled data, which you can use in your web browser!)

Full article (14–31 minute read): Claude comment detection

Flashcard of the week

Traffic engineering! Because it's fun to have something to think about while you're driving!

Roughly at what density is optimal flow achieved?

In the answer to this question, density is measured in passenger cars per kilometre. Flow is measured in passenger cars per hour.

(Measuring flow as passenger cars per unit time sounds controversial and it is! Why not measure people per unit time? Or total value of transportation per unit time? We'd get different results if we did. The typical example is bus-only lanes: a great idea if flow is measured in people per unit time, but not so good if flow is measured in passenger cars per unit time.)

If it helps for the question optimal flow, you can try to instead guess the utilisation, i.e. percent of road covered by vehicles, at which flow is optimal. (Given that a passenger car averages 4.5 metres of road covered, the utilisation can be converted back to density.)

It might be worth knowing that flow depends on both speed and density. Fewer cars gives higher speeds, but lower density, so flow suffers. Similarly, more cars give higher density but lower speeds, so again, flow suffers. There's a point at which the number of cars per distance of road leads to the highest number of cars per unit time.

The optimal density for flow is

Roughly 30 passenger cars per kilometre.

If a car averages 4.5 metres, then a kilometre is 222 car-lengths. This means a utilisation of 14 %. If you got close to either of those numbers, good job!

This means when the car ahead and behind of you is a around 6 car-lengths (or 30 metres, whichever is easier to estimate) away from you, flow is locally optimal! Note that speeds are not at their highest at this point, so as an individual, you will feel constrained. But as a collective, you and your fellow drivers are moving the optimal number of cars per unit time through that portion of the road.

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