My son is currently learning Romanian and I was trying to help him with verbs. I don’t know Romanian but recalled when learning a foreign language for the first time it really helped me to break down how a verb form or tense worked in English, then learn the equivalent in the new language. So I wanted to make some charts and pages that he could use as learning resources.
I used Claude to help. I don’t know how to quite describe it, but because the text was polished and well constructed my brain was giving me the the signal “if you aren’t getting this it’s because you’re not focusing” so I’d read it again and then again and it still was not landing. It sorta felt like when you read something technical or heavy when very tired - you are reading but not processing.
Only after wrestling with this for a few days did I realize that it wasn’t me. As I started going through, sentence by sentence, forcing it to re-write things to be more clear the concepts became easy to understand.
I wish there was a name for this situation. It’s almost like a pseudo-language where it has the correct form and presentation but is missing critical components.
The more complex the topic, the more I sense this.
This is a really good description of the problem. I’ve been trying to use Claude to get familiar with the mechanics of a new codebase, and there have been so many moments where I’ve stopped after reading the same paragraph five times in a row and thought “Am I tired? Or stupid? Or is this codebase just wildly more complex than anything I’ve seen before?” before realizing that it’s just taken English and smushed it around like a ball of clay into some abstract sculpture that kind of evokes something from real life.
I think part of it might be an innate feature of LLMs, but Claude seems extra prone to it lately. I ran the same query about the same codebase with Codex, and it gave me an answer that was about 1/4 the length and made me realize that it really wasn’t all that complex.
If nothing else, it’s good training for my own writing. I’ve been working on making myself be more straightforward and concise, and Claude’s writing is a good example of how cleaner prose is a functional choice, not just a stylistic one.
It's a Claude problem, chatgpt is about x10 better and it's quite rare that I'm getting such foggy vague texts that I have to reread to understand. Chatgpt used to have the same problem in the early days but even then it was less pronounced than how it is in Claude today. Fable is a bit better but not as good as Chatgpt.
It swapped at the Opus/Fable 5 and Sol developments.
Opus 5 uses such convoluted language that it takes me multiple seconds to parse it. I specifically have to instruct it to use some kind of sane language (Caveman the AE STD English hack or something) to make it understandable.
Before that it used to be GPT that used 500 words when 5 would do. The ChatGPT version still does, but Codex is a lot better now.
Ironically, I've been already active on codex after trying it for the past 1.5 months, from Claude, and I find it to be similarly complex and confusing.
I think they all have the similar styles and tells. If I were to go to Claude, and use it now it would probably be clear for a little before reverting.
And I don't know why it feels to me like the language "drop off" happens after some time with the system. It makes me wonder if my account are getting silently degraded or sent to lower intelligence/lower priority queues after being a member for a while.
The human spirit. When you read a real person's thoughts you can often intuit the thought processes that led them to write it which aids understanding. Or at least have a general idea of "where they're coming from". But an AI is missing that. It just knows everything, without a "thought process". Instead of a flawed 3d person, we get a nice 2d picture instead.
Feels like the way a video game will render the outside of a wall or solid surface, but you can run into it and warp partly through and there's nothing internal to it at all.
> I wish there was a name for this situation. It’s almost like a pseudo-language where it has the correct form and presentation but is missing critical components.
The best I’ve heard of this is peeling the onion. The first pass is always very high-level and you have to make it go deeper. That can be done manually with follow-on prompts but I like using subagents, each with a different angle on the problem.
> I wish there was a name for this situation. It’s almost like a pseudo-language where it has the correct form and presentation but is missing critical components.
I understand the sentiment, but not quite what I’m thinking. It’s not that the AI is necessarily wrong, it’s more like, it replaces clarity with rich but unhelpful text. Maybe like candy. Full of flavor, texture and color but lacking the nutrients.
The way I like to describe it is that it feels slippery, like it's been polished down to oblivion and my eyes slide right off of it. There's no place to find a mental foothold, and if you zoom in there aren't any details.
But I also like your candy analogy because I think it's spot-on for how LLM text superficially looks informational/nutritious, even though it's actually just junk.
No no no. Harry Frankfurt wrote at length the difference between liars (who care about the truth, and twist it) and bullshitters (who don’t care about the truth, but just the way they’re received).
This is some third category of untruth. Almost more sinister than the other two altogether.
I think, they don’t care about truth at all, just whether the reviewer rates it highly. Otherwise, it would be deleted after that round of training. It values test-taking ability over critical thinking.
My two favourite words for this are “conditioned” and “catechized” where the latter is a bit more on the nose but way more obscure.
A lot of it is hedging and using lots words to avoid saying something that isn't true. That way, it looks a lot like text that contains meaningful information, even though it doesn't. The speaker can pass the scrutiny of an informed audience, because they are able to substitute their knowledge into the words, as if by pareidolia. It's the sort of 'diplomatic' language you see from politicians, lawyers, students writing essays, and any other moderately intelligent person who is put in a position where they will face consequences for not answering. Behind all the fluff, there is a very loud voice yelling "I DON'T KNOW."
I mean, yes - but somehow this feels like a different category. At least to me. I view slop as the classic garbage like:
[Thing] isn’t just [X]—it’s [more dramatic Y]. And [short validating statement].
I can see and smell this type of slop from a mile away. What I’m referring to is in the same family as slop but somehow different - it fools my brain by putting on the presentation of credibility and thus it is even worse. I can skip right over classic slop without much effort. This kind of text tricks me into laboring over it before I realize it’s hollow.
I know what you mean. The sentence appears to makes sense, it is correct grammatically, but lacks substance. It's the equivalent of AI image generated stuff where at first glance the image looks fine, but it hurts your brain. Then the more you look the more you see nothing makes sense in it, and it just gives the appearance that it does.
It's definitely worse that slop, because it really hurts your brain. You read it over and over, and feel like you're supposed to understand the sentence, it's coherent, eloquent even, but by the end of it, you don't know what the f it was about.
As far as terminology goes, I still see these both as subcategories of slop, but I can buy that they do deserve different categories of obvious slop versus more virulent slop.
At least in my mind, lack of substance was always the defining feature of slop. Stuff like "it's not just x, it's y" would be reasonable (if grating) tics from a human writer. Whereas humans are also capable of clever-sounding but substance-free writing, and it still sucks. AI just produced enough slop that we were forced to give it a name.
My frustration is with services like Uber, Bolt, Airbnb, etc. where you need the push for core services and then the provides use them to slip in spam.
Apple/Google has effectively made notification worthless because they allow services to abuse notifications. I wish they respected my time/attention more.
Uber is especially bad here. I live rural, but when I travel I use it (and uber eats sometimes) when I'm out of town. At this point I uninstall the app and only install it when I know I might use it because it's so invasive with marketing crap. Even more annoying is the fact that why yes, I would love a burger delivered but there's literally nothing your service can get me to my home.
A group of us in our community broadcast many of the local high school sports. Our original setup had a scoreboard that was really clunky to manage and was hard to learn, so I built a web-based version that pretty much any 12 year old with an iPad could use.
I have worked with the logs extensively over time to convert the simple data inputs from the scoreboard controls into charts & graphs that update in real time on the screen to “tell the story” of the game, and generate “talking points” from the data. It allows us to plug in students as commentators and they can talk about the game much more confidently because they can visually see the game's storyline that is based on actual data. “The Trojans are on a 14-4 streak starting late in the 3rd quarter, and that has flipped the lead in their favor” is a lot more fun than “the Trojans are doing well the last little bit”.
It’s been fun (and challenging) to develop the right UI to display the game’s story in a way that is rich yet easy to read at a glance. And it has been cool to see the students increase in how professional they sound on the live broadcast.
Would love to see this in action. Anything you can share? Also, what gear is used for this? Having recently been in charge of a scoreboard made by Daktronics for high school games, I was intimidated by the UX.
All features are included in the free version, just some usage limits. If you decide to use it, send a message using the “Contact Us” from with the account and I’ll send you the details on the analytics / charts as they are at unpublished URLs.
This. When I first started learning Russian, we immediately jumped into basic grammar rules. After two weeks of incredible frustration, I realized I did not have sufficient mastery of English grammar to be able to establish a framework for understanding Russian grammar. I often say that my first two months of learning Russian were spent learning English and it is not a joke.
Interesting. We had a lot of grammar parsing of Russian since the 2nd grade of school. Especially we analyzed parts of speech and constituents. For the latter, we'd underline words in sentences in different ways.
It's so widespread that today if you want to play word guessing with gestures, and you have several words, you just imitate that underline style, and everybody understands it. (Just remembered, we also did a lot of word analysis, marking up prefix, root, suffixes and ending, and everyone knows this markup too.)
Rumor also has it that in virtually any major grocery store in the USA you can put in any (valid) area code and 867-5309 and it will work as a rewards member number to get you the discounts. I have done it when traveling and have had success.
I would assume that as many are using it for the discount, there are at least a substantial portion who use it for gas discounts at Kroger gas stations. You can get up to 30 cents per gallon off if enough has been spent lately.
To be sure, Live Nation owns and / or operates many of the venues. They also provide management services to artists. So it’s not that TicketMaster demands exclusivity from the venue, they #are# the venue.
And in court they will probably argue that this is vertical integration that creates savings they pass along to the consumer. DOJ will likely argue they are pocketing it.
If isn’t just vertical integration. It’s also abuse of monopoly power. I’m sure the DoJ won’t have any trouble showing how much market share TM/LN have.
I think the real issue is the limited supply of tickets to the most popular shows. Supply and demand dictates that the prices for these limited goods be very high, yet social norms discourage artists from charging the true market value for their tickets (fans will rebel against their favourite artist for perceived greed). So TM provides an effective reputation-laundering service to the artists and collects a hefty fee for it. If the DoJ were to win their case and succeed in breaking up the TM monopoly then I bet the extra revenue would go to some other ticket brokers, not to the artist or into consumers’ pockets.
It’s partly this but also the artists benefit in other ways from large strata of their fan base being able to attend live shows, but merch in person and mingle with each other. The venue and Ticketmaster only benefit from the ticket sales.
Scalpers are also a source of guaranteed sales, so you're diluting the risk of a concert because someone is already buying up all seats already for you and running the risk of not being able to sell them at a higher price later.
The Paramount Decrees way back in the 1940s/1950s: that's why Hollywood studios cannot produce movies and own the theaters which exhibit them. It's also similar to the (much more complex) reasons TV Service Providers (DirectTV, Spectrum, XFinity et. al) are separate from TV Networks, and why you don't see Disney trying to buy, say, DirectTV. Of course, streaming upended almost all of that.
> It’s also similar to the (much more complex) reasons TV Service Providers (DirectTV, Spectrum, XFinity et. al) are separate from TV Networks
Tell me more about how the “TV Service Provider” Xfinity (a subsidiary of Comcast) is separate from the various TV networks run by NBC Universal, LLC (a subsidiary of Comcast).
If you look at many older anti-trust cases from before 1970s, the bar for successful enforcement often seems unbelievably low when comparing it to how things are today. Take a look at this, for example: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/370/294/
But then there was a drastic change in approach to anti-trust during the Reagan era:
"Bork argues that the original intent of antitrust laws as well as economic efficiency makes consumer welfare and the protection of competition, rather than competitors, the only goals of antitrust law. Thus, while it was appropriate to prohibit cartels that fix prices and divide markets and mergers that create monopolies, practices that are allegedly exclusionary, such as vertical agreements and price discrimination, did not harm consumers and so should not be prohibited."
"From 1977 to 2007, the Supreme Court of the United States repeatedly adopted views stated in The Antitrust Paradox in such cases as Continental Television, Inc. v. GTE Sylvania, Inc., 433 U.S. 36 (1977), Broadcast Music, Inc. v. CBS, Inc., NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, Spectrum Sports, Inc. v. McQuillan, State Oil Co. v. Khan, Verizon v. Trinko, and Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v. PSKS, Inc., legalizing many practices previously prohibited."
A state government inhibiting that choice for minors, which is a well-established practice for all sorts of things. Alcohol consumption, tobacco, driving a car, voting in elections, gambling, and ability to enter into certain types of contracts, to name a few.
Men can't win. After centuries of being regarded as sex fiends who can't last nore than 2 minutes in bed, now "difficulty achieving orgasm" and "decreased libido" are considered dysfunctions.
I used Claude to help. I don’t know how to quite describe it, but because the text was polished and well constructed my brain was giving me the the signal “if you aren’t getting this it’s because you’re not focusing” so I’d read it again and then again and it still was not landing. It sorta felt like when you read something technical or heavy when very tired - you are reading but not processing.
Only after wrestling with this for a few days did I realize that it wasn’t me. As I started going through, sentence by sentence, forcing it to re-write things to be more clear the concepts became easy to understand.
I wish there was a name for this situation. It’s almost like a pseudo-language where it has the correct form and presentation but is missing critical components.
The more complex the topic, the more I sense this.