ncgl 13 days ago

The practice of rephrasing to get your word count up really irks me.

"Today, wolves, foxes, and snakes inhabit the cave, but it was once a popular spot for human pastoralists and their domesticated animals."

"Rather, they think it was a convenient spot for herders to stop and provide their flocks with shade and water."

"Even though humans didn’t have a permanent presence in the lava tube, the natural structure provided shelter for people and their herds for thousands of years"

  • cogman10 13 days ago

    Gotta have 8 paragraphs so they can squeeze in 20 ads.

    • seemaze 13 days ago

      Maybe my dns blacklist needs updating, but the ads were so bad I bailed.

      • walrus01 13 days ago

        ublock origin browser plugin and I saw zero ads

  • Simulacra 13 days ago

    Maybe, it could also just be professional immaturity. It seems more written by a college student than a seasoned journalist.

  • mensetmanusman 13 days ago

    The quality of news peaked about 20 years ago after search killed monetization. There is no going back.

  • barfbagginus 12 days ago

    They're a gizmodo writer. An attention predator. If they cared about producing genuine values for humanity, they would not be working in attention predator journalism

    Therefore don't expect their writing to improve from your criticism. It's designed to take, not give.

    I like to stop reading these kinds of authors as soon as I realize I'm experiencing a memetic attention attack. Then I write a snarky comment so others will start to hate them as well.

  • whereistimbo 13 days ago

    It is fine enough for me as my English skill is bad enough to notice these things.

  • aster0id 13 days ago

    The verbosity reminds me of ChatGPT generated text

    • temporalparts 13 days ago

      Where did you think ChatGPT got their training data?

      • cj 13 days ago

        Doesn’t matter.

        Generalizing topics and/or adding caveats about how something may not always be true is the easiest way for a LLM to increase the rate of providing factually accurate responses (aside from refusing to answer). Both of those strategies requires being more verbose.

        Concise and to the point is not in the best interest of a LLM designed to give decent answers 99% of the time.

        • mk_stjames 13 days ago

          I also believe that OpenAI's RLHF process highly biased the model towards producing that sort of specific verbose, padded-out 'chatGPT speak' that we are seeing. The RLHF fine tuning process took outputs from the instruction-tuned model and A/B tested variations with human workers who may or may not have had the same feelings towards writing quality as many of us.

          The process resulted in those verbose, interjection-laden responses that we see now, because that type of response was deemed 'better' (thumbs-up'd more) than the shorter, more-direct-but-less-impressive-sounding responses.

          • philipswood 13 days ago

            My chats usually start with:

            >Hi again :wave:.

            >As always I prefer terse replies.

            >Let's <context of activity>

            ><First question>

            I usually then get short answers and then I query for more info if required.

            • bigDinosaur 13 days ago

              Set a custom instruction (I think only a ChatGPT paid option?). But $20 a month or whatever is easily worth it for the utility it provides.

              • reaperman 12 days ago

                I use it for work so much I’d gladly pay way more than $20 just for access to GPT-4. It’s pretty terrible at programming but it still saves me loads of time generating the easy functions.

                Anything remotely complex I still do by hand. But holy shit its nice having something do my boilerplate.

  • chickenchase-r 13 days ago

    Gizmodo and anything gawker media is utter and total junk, pushing Disney media and other hidden agenda. Was irked when I accidentally clicked it, I block it on almost all my systems to avoid feeding the beast.

ern 13 days ago

Spoiler alert: it was a shelter for people moving herds between oases, and doesn’t seem to have had a permanent population.

mkl 13 days ago

The location: https://www.google.com/maps/@25.5879436,39.7629388,1317m/dat...

If you zoom out there are a crapload of lava flows and volcanic craters nearby. A bit to the east there is this landscape: https://www.google.com/maps/@25.6327898,39.9400629,22944m/da...

alex_young 13 days ago

“Humans sheltered for thousands of years” isn’t quite right. Humans stopped by and used this shelter from time to time for thousands of years.

  • UberFly 13 days ago

    "I've lived in my house for 20 years"

    • stoperaticless 13 days ago

      Depepends, if you want to introduce ambiguitity or remove it.

twobitshifter 13 days ago

Seems like it would make a good sietch.