* "This isn't X. It's Y"
* "Some sentence emphasizing something. Describing the same thing with different framing. Describing it a third time but punchier.
* The em-dash of course
* A hard to describe sense of "cheesiness"
I only hope the models get good enough to not be so samey in the future.
> "These are not complaints, merely observations."
> "There are repairable laptops, and then there are ThinkPads."
> "iFixit approached the relationship as collaborators, not critics."
> "[...] they didn’t declare victory and go home. They kept pushing."
> "Designing for repairability doesn’t mean compromising innovation or premium experiences; when done well, it actually drives smarter innovation, better modularity, and more resilient platforms."
> "It would be one thing to make a highly repairable but low-volume niche device or concept. Instead, Lenovo just threw down a gauntlet by notching a 10/10 repairability score on their mainstream-iest business laptop."
> "This is [...] how repair goes from being an enthusiast’s “nice-to-have” to being baked into procurement checklists and fleet-management decisions."
Unless I'm reading for pleasure, I want everything in concise summaries. I don't need flowery language. Or even complete sentences.
Maybe an LLM verbosity slider that dynamically truncates text we don't need. I'll dial mine down.
Presumably the smelly AI text problem is just ... a problem that will be solved. Or maybe we'll just get used to it.
It was about a very fragile part of the process, and so it seemed like an error of omission that seemed atypical for iFixIt. It made me suspect the instructions might not have been wholly human written. I feel a bit vindicated for that suspicion.
The most generous interpretation I can have for this type of article is that it's a second-order phenomenon. If it was written by a human, it was written by one who consumes a lot of AI generated content and whose standards for what they produce have slipped.
This is the "Reddit" factor. I picked up on it being LLM written with this sentence:
"This is the treacherous, final-boss stage where repairability usually dies,"
Why would you hope to be more easily fooled?
Thank you for replying, but that doesn’t answer the question. Why would you want to make made up bullshit output more tolerable to read? Being intolerable to read is a feature, it’s a useful signal to know a piece of text may not have had human review, and that you should spend your time reading something else.
I use that same strategy with website consent banners. If a website is so invasive that they go out of their way to make rejection hard (which, by the way, is against the law), I know it’s a company not worth supporting.
I'm glad I haven't let AI write much for me, its better for it to help me develop my ideas and writing and do the work to learn, explore and end up with something where my brain is in the gym. . Passive generation might not always map well to passive consumption
If the studies that say that humans prefer AI writers are to be believed then you'd be a fool not to
I find that Gemini uses that phrase way too much.