Method,Logistical Requirement
Automatic/Tunnel,The vehicle must be present to be processed through the brushes or jets.
Self-Service Bay,The vehicle must be driven into the bay to access the high-pressure wands.
Hand Wash (at home),"If the ""car wash"" is a location where you buy supplies to bring back, walking is feasible."
Detailing Service,"If you are dropping the car off for others to clean, the car must be delivered to the site."
> it's common for people to be bad at a second language
Non-native speaker here: huh, is "you are absolutely right" wrong somehow? I.e., are you a bad english speaker for using it? Fully agree (I guess "fully agree" is the common one?) with this criticism of the article, to me that colloquialism does not sound fishy at all.
There might also be two effects at play:
1. Speech "bubbles" where your preferred language is heavily influenced by where you grew up. What sounds common to you might sound uncommon in Canada.
2. People have been using LLMs for years at this point so what is common for them might be influenced by what they read from LLM output. So while initially it was an LLM colloquialism it could have been popularized by LLM usage.
Thanks for the thorough explanation, that, indeed, is a level of nuance that's hard for me to spot.
Interestingly, "absolutely right" is very common in German: "du hast natürlich absolut Recht" is something which I can easily imagine a friend's voice (or my voice) say at a dinner table. It's "du hast Recht" that sounds a little bit too formal and strong x[.
Agreed on the sycophancy point, in Gemini I even have a preamble that basically says "don't be a sycophant". It still doesn't always work.
> in Gemini I even have a preamble that basically says "don't be a sycophant". It still doesn't always work.
Using this kind of strategy eventually leads to the LLM recurrently advertising what it just produced as «straight to the point, no fluff, no bullshit». («Here is the blunt truth»).
Of course no matter how the LLM advertise its production, it is too often non devoid of sycophancy.
There's likely a cultural element to it as well regarding how we admit mistakes and correct ourselves.
With how blame-avoidant western individualist culture can be, seeing something "admit" doing wrong so quickly, and so emphatically, could be uncanny valley-level jarring.
It's a valid English phrase but it's also not unlikely that someone states something as a fact and then goes immediately to "you are absolutely right" when told it's wrong - but AI does that all the time.
It fails the basic human behaviour. In general humans are not ready to admit fault. At least when there is no social pressure. They might apologize and admit mistake. Or they might ask for clarification. But very rarely "You are absolute right" and go on entirely new tangent...
I'm also a non native speaker. The point is, you tend to make grammatically correct phrases (mostly), but in a way that's not very common between native speakers. You're right that there are many factors at play. I think dismissing something as AI generated just because it uses common AI-generated strings is not correct. I'm speaking in general and not about the specific case.
It is clear that Alphabet is his baby and neither he not Larry ever fully left.
He is still in his 50s so maybe just too young to play golf and chill on superyachts all day. While him being a billionaire makes any lesson derived have to have an asterisk him enjoying technical work even after long having won the rat race is a pretty cool role model.
This is exactly my thoughts. If you are reading this, author, please either make the snowflakes less distracting or toggleable. They are a pain on mobile.
Yup: all the animation stops, the overlaid snowflakes disappear, and the background changes from blue to yellow. I haven't bothered to check the foreground/background contrast of the two versions, but I suspect that, although the yellow version will have less contrast, the removal of the snowflakes will make for a net benefit to readability for the average person.
Will remember it for the next article to run some more empirical number crunching, thank you! This was more of a rationalist view on things and focussing on Zurich only.
Yes. Thanks for pointing this out. I was hesitant to keep it in the article too as it's a bit too much of a simplification since I pool in different actors like Baugenossenschaften, the city and e.g., pension funds together. Further analyzing would have indeed been better but I wanted to keep it compact.
Yeah, it felt a bit weird to me since if anything to reach the stated goals they need to buy a lot more land/buildings. (The recent failed cantonal initiative would have helped them)
Megacities are obviously a different beast. Interestingly though, as far as I know, Moscow is heavily expanding into/incorporating/eating up the neighboring towns, expanding borders and building metro stations instead of mainly doing Verdichtung. I guess there are/have to be some projects where they build a bit higher but it is not the main shtick.
Came here just to write the same. I've squandered to find an explanation because I absolutely enjoy the subject. Perhaps it's because I'm not a native speaker and generally have non-native speakers around so I don't understand some of the metaphors, perhaps it's because I'm just not used to reading these kinds of long sentences anymore, or perhaps it's just not my kind of beer. I really don't know.
Method,Logistical Requirement Automatic/Tunnel,The vehicle must be present to be processed through the brushes or jets. Self-Service Bay,The vehicle must be driven into the bay to access the high-pressure wands. Hand Wash (at home),"If the ""car wash"" is a location where you buy supplies to bring back, walking is feasible." Detailing Service,"If you are dropping the car off for others to clean, the car must be delivered to the site."
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