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Why is AI slop so frustrating to read?
AI writing often obscures main ideas and invents awkward phrases, making sentences more complex than necessary.
Many of these slop patterns violate writing principles established in English writing books.
In our benchmark, AI writing breaks these principles far more often than human writing, with Claude Code replies by far the worst offenders.
We show examples of the most common slop patterns in this thread
ALT How often AI and humans break writing rules
bird retweeted
Government imposed policy costs make up 57% of the clearing price of a new flat in London and 42% of a new home in the Home Counties.
Despite a big housing shortage and positive planning reforms, new home starts in England are declining from 182,000 in 2022 to under 125,000 last year.
While the macroeconomic context has worsened with build cost inflation and high interest rates, the Government is imposing more burdens on new homes, not fewer.
Taxes, levies, planning, and mandates add over £440,000 to the cost of delivering a home in London and nearly £225,000 nearby, with several of these imposed recently like the Second Staircase, Future Homes Standard, Building Safety Levy, Biodiversity Net Gain and Residential Property Developer Tax.
Individually these may be justified, but together they are making new homes unviable.
As a result, large developers are buying less land and small builders are going out of business; nearly 4,000 construction firms went bust just last year.
If we want to build more homes, we should be easing the burdens on them, not adding more.
Making housebuilding viable again is the most important issue in housing policy and my co-author, Edward Donovan, has completed excellent modelling showing how big the challenge is.
Read the full report: cps.org.uk/wp-content/upload…
And simulate what changing the policies does with Edward's modelling here: easing-the-burdens.cps.org.u…
bird retweeted
This is generally a huge problem in Britain, regarding both China and Russia. The government wants people who speak the language fluently and understand the culture, but who have also never lived there and have no connections there. These people don't exist.
The government's stated preference is for people who are country experts, but their revealed preference is that they would much rather have people who don't speak the language and know nothing about the country they profess an expertise in, while instinctively taking a hostile line, repeating the grievances of various political exiles.
bird retweeted
I love that scene in Good Will Hunting where Ben Affleck is talking to Matt Damon's titular character Will Hunting and he's like “you've got a gift man and you've gotta get outta this town and make something of yourself” and the gift in question is being really good at math and the town he needs to get out of is Boston, Massachusetts.
bird retweeted
Indistinguishable from satire.
We’ve raised $1.3M from YC & Afore Capital so you never have to type or speak again.
Typing is slow. Talking into your computer is awkward. Subvocal fixes both
Our glasses give you the speed of speech without you making a sound or touching a keyboard.
It tracks your internal speech muscles with non-contact sensing and decodes silent, almost invisible mouthing into text at more than 200 words/min.
Pre-orders are now live at:
subvocal.co/preorder?utm_sou…
Stayed in airbnbs in German Switzerland and it's literally this plus the host will leave you a comment like "couple could've been cleaner"
Recently I’ve seen a lot of people complaining about being asked to clean an Airbnb when they’ve already paid a cleaning fee
As a host, I find this attitude quite worrying
My wife and I rent out the apartment in Germany. We charge a €145 cleaning fee, and we still expect guests to:
1. Strip the beds and start a wash, separating whites from colours
2. Wash, dry and put away all dishes
3. Sweep and mop the floors
4. Take out all rubbish, separating paper, cardboard, clear glass, coloured glass, plastics, metal, organic waste and residual waste
5. Take bottles with a deposit to the supermarket return machine.
6. Send photos showing the apartment is ready before the 8:30am checkout
These tasks must be completed before departure. If you have an early flight, allow time the evening before
The cleaning fee pays for professional cleaning. It does not pay for someone to pick up after you
Here in Europe, we teach children to leave a place as they found it
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect the same from adults on holiday
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bird retweeted
People in France will really be like "you believe in voting? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, looting a small business" and then go loot a small business
Just saw someone trying to use a printed barcode ticket on the contactless area of the ticket scanner and had to help them
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