Saying an article is of inferior quality just because editing was AI-assisted is like saying a book is lower quality just because it was printed rather than written by hand
Saying the article was AI assisted is also wrong. Current consumer models can read a vehicle user manual in moments and indicate probable writing errors. This article had a few stylistic errors (or choices) that were irrelevant, except to prove the author is human. If he/she had used AI even in an assistive manner, knowing the nitpicking behavior of the intended audience, it would have had none.
Also, the author’s other public writings have similar errors/choices in style. When “consumer AI” writes or rewrites, it’s impossible for it to mimic one’s writing style so similarly. Literally impossible, because it can’t disregard everything else that it “knows” (voluminous training, guardrails, interface design, social boundaries) for it to
1. Disregard all that training after processing the user’s prompt
2. output a complete article in the user’s style
3. Turn back on its knowledge
4. then continue to function.
That’s just not how consumer products work.
Rather interesting than clanker slop defenders downplay the clanker aspect and highlight the human by calling it "ai-assisted", which defeats their entire point.
I hope you do some introspection and start consciously recognizing that the human input and the clanker slop is just debasing it.
Not just that, I think a lot of people are going to waste their time losing the battle (and make no mistake, they will lose) fighting against AI writing without ever asking themselves what makes writing good in the first place.
There’s good AI writing and bad organic writing. But it’s easier to point out a few LLM-isms than to actually identify the problems with text.
Sure, but the LLM-isms in AI writing are mentally exhausting to see in every way at this point.
The whole point of reading, frankly, is to understand the voice of other people. When you pass that through a distorted filter that makes everyone sound the same... its bad, lossy, frustrating communication
It's also dishonest. When you publish something that is direct output without your wording. Digital catfishing at best.
The only good AI writing is providing the prompt, because the question is way more interesting, and way more constructive to learning than the answer
The point of writing is to convey an idea to another person or yourself at a future date. Authenticity has nothing to do with it. I frankly do not care about the “authentic voice” of the author of a random blog. I want to know if they have any interesting ideas.
One of the butchers in the Trump regime wrote a book on how we need to devalue USD so we can go back to being competitive making shoes and all the other sort of unskilled factory jobs China did before they developed. So I guess one could consider this in "our" interest as well.
Trying to revert a service-based economy into a manufacturing-based one is an incredibly stupid idea and there is no way this doesn’t blow up in our face. Devaluation of the dollar threatens our reserve currency status, yield rates, and will cause rapid inflation, all to chase some pipe dream that Joe the Factory Worker and his family will be able to live a middle-class life again on a single salary.
In actuality, cash will flow into equities, the rich will benefit and the average American will suffer the consequences of their vote.
Thanks. I am usually not super pedantic but I've noticed some people using "mt" for meters recently. I immediately fall into confusion when the wrong symbols are used. Then go down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out if it is a cultural or regional thing.
People have used all sorts of abbreviations for the SI prefixes and SI units for as long as I can remember. I want to ask—are people not taught this in school? I had multiple introductions and revisions of the SI units and SI prefixes in secondary school, pre-university, and university, and every time, a wrong prefix or a wrong symbol was penalised by half a mark per question. I had classmates who mixed them up regularly and lost something like seven marks each time. They learnt very quickly not to, as those seven marks could make one or two grades' difference.
As someone who champions sole use of the SI units, this annoys me to no end.
I've seen things like 'kgs', 'gm', 'gms', 'mtr', 'mt', 'K' instead of 'k' (note capitals) for 'kilo-', mixing 'm' and 'M' (which are supposed to mean 'milli-' and 'mega-' respectively), usage of 'u' instead of 'μ' for 'micro-' (the one exception I will concede is 'mc' in the medical field, because people apparently confused 'μ' and 'm' which results in a 1000× over/underdose), and don't bother with the degree symbol (Alt+numpad 0176 on Windows, Option-Shift-8 on macOS) for °C, or use °K for kelvins (there is no degree, as it is an absolute scale and not relative to anything else, unlike the Celsius/centigrade and Fahrenheit scales), and so many other typographical errors.
I love this, thanks so much for writing it! I'm writing a blog post on metrication and this will be a super-useful resource for the sort of pedantry I intend to engage in.
Then see my point about the UK/metric/Imperial. ;-)
Incidentally, in that link there's a very common example of bad usage namely the volt/voltage. 120V is shown as bad usage and 120 V good. One sees the former usage on machines, appliances, in printed material etc. so often that it's almost a de facto standard.
I'm inconsistent in my use too, one time I'll include the space at other times not.
I agree about standardization, but I think this framing comes off as lacking empathy. Plenty of folks either
- Avoided the topic in school or put all their effort into other subjects
- Didn’t learn this in school—there are a wide variety of education systems across all the decades and distances that folks on this site may have grown up in
- Learned this in school, but a lifetime ago, and haven’t had a reason to revisit it. At a certain distance, your life experience and work experience massively overshadow what you learned in school.
Forgive the inference, but based on your recall of specific grading policies I would guess that your time in school is still near to you, or at least very important. It’s not that way for everyone.
(I am of course doggedly accurate with my unit abbreviations.)
"People have used all sorts of abbreviations for the SI prefixes and SI units for as long as I can remember."
In the US that is, not in metric counties that use SI by default.
For those in the US (and to a lesser extent the UK) there are multiple metric systems. The other notable system that's still in use is the cgs (centimetre–gram–second) system.
'cgs units' are still used in some areas notably physics as they can make calculations easier, there they're called Gaussian-cgs units.
Incidentally, often, as here, 'cgs' is in lowercase to reflect the case of the units' abbreviations. That said, the uppercase abbreviation is also often used. For instance, as I typed this my browser kept correcting the lowercase to 'CGS'.
> In the US that is, not in metric counties that use the SI system by default.
India which metricated in the late 1950s is still a big (ab)user of poor SI symbolism. A lot of the 'cms', 'gms', 'cc', 'kgs', etc come from Indian writers and Indian publications (case in point: the article in this thread).
> The other notable system that's still in use is the cgs (centimetre–gram–second) system.
> 'cgs units' are still used in some areas notably physics as they can make calculations easier, there they're called Gaussian-cgs units.
I'm not sure they're used all that much—I was under the impression most CGS units fell out of favour as MKS and eventually SI took over. I was an RA at my physics department for a while and we used SI as much as we could. Some specialisations use a certain form of natural units (like geometrised units in general relativity), but by and large SI dominated.
Right, there are offenders everywhere but the chief offender is the US by far (many don't have a clue about SI let alone metric, ask an American what 20°C is in Fahrenheit and they've no idea).
The UK is also troublesome in that whilst supposedly a metric country Imperial is still commonplace. For example, there's widespread use of antiquated units like the 'stone' (14 pounds)†, even BBC medical programs still regularly use the term.
Re Gaussian/cgs, in physics it's still widely used especially in field theory/Maxwell, SR (Special Relatively), etc. because in charge calculations and such involving permeability, permittivity, speed of light certain terms can be restated as 1 instead of their actual SI values.
Personally, I understand why this is done but from my perspective it's confusing if not misleading for reasons well outside this discussion (but who am I to argue with those more learned than me?). This Wiki provides justification of sorts (see Unit of charge): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_units.
† In Australia where I am, only people of my generation who've been around for decades would even know what a 'stone' was. Anyone born after say the mid 1970s would likely think you're talking about a rock. Trouble is, we see BBC/UK programs here. Fact is the UK is oblivious to the problem or it'd first correct its exports.
Why would your average American need to know what 20°C is in Fahrenheit? Very few people use Celsius here. All our appliances use Fahrenheit, weather reports use Fahrenheit, our recipes use Fahrenheit, and for science and physics we use Kelvin.
Honorable mention for "cc", which stands for "cubic centimeter" which is exactly equal to 1 ml. I can't find any logic to explain why cc is used in some contexts and ml in others.
The problem is old habits die hard and to be (or appear) to be consistent then an official designation can be unwieldy, as here.
I simply cannot remember when I last saw cm³ but cc and ml are everywhere including on commercial chemical reagent bottles etc.
The same nomenclature problem is all over chemistry too, the preferred IUPAC name for say isopropyl alcohol is propan-2-ol, and the preferred name for acetone is propan-2-one (systematic 2-Propanone). I can't say I've ever heard anyone ask me to pass them the bottle of propan-2-one, it's just not done (not in my world anyway).
If there's a choice between an awkward or simpler term then the simpler one wins out every time.
Yea, you can create a website on S3 and set up a Lambda trigger every minute. To schedule this, you can use a CloudWatch rule with a 'Schedule' expression to trigger the Lambda function.
Alternatively, you could use GitHub Actions and schedule the workflow to run every minute.
Note: Running your status page on Lambda is a bad idea if your main site is on AWS. You want your status page to be on separate infrastructure so that it can be used during an outage.
It is a sport where the race outcome is mostly determined by a rider’s max power output. And the max power output is in large part determined by genetics. Going beyond that max requires some “assistance“.
As a non native English speaker, it’s very helpful to use a LLM to validate if a sentence I wrote is clear, correct, and if there is a more idiomatic way to express the same thing - btw, I did not do it with what I wrote here :-)
Awesome use case for LLMs. I built my mom-in-law a DMV test prep app that translates answers to her native language so she can study more effectively. She had failed the written DMV test 4 times before I decided to build it, then finally passed it after a week's worth of practice with the app. I wrote about my process and challenges here: https://www.sabrina.dev/p/aipowered-infinite-test-prep-part-...
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