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Show HN: Human Lambdas – Create Human in the Loop queues and outsource them

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Re: Show HN: Human Lambdas – Create Human in the Loop queues and outsource them

#51

Post by skinnymuch »

prepend wrote: post #39
skinnymuch wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds..not good. You know how I know how much of a cog some one is? How much they are being paid. Putting a bow on top of work that pays peanuts is worse in my opinion than being honest. Your tactics appear to try to manipulate underpaid or lowly paid cogs into not believing they are what the company and managers truly see them as - just that.

My office took the DISC [0] personality profile and it revealed that there are some people who love compliments, just love them. Even if they aren’t genuine, they like hearing “You’re a rock star, I’m so grateful you’re here today” even if the person is completely unable to evaluate rockstar vs. non-rockstar. Even if they say it every day to everyone. And there are people who hate compliments. So it’s funny how withi…

Haha this is a point I didn’t bring up but loosely in my opinion lends credence to why obfuscating cogs as cogs is morally wrong.

The opposing view on here appears to be if you can compliment the cogs who enjoy that and keep them happy that way, things are better. This view is self serving and for the benefit of the higher ups. Not the cog.

Thanks for this though. Interesting to think about. I’ve added your comment and the link to my DEVONthink wiki on status quo :)

Re: Show HN: Human Lambdas – Create Human in the Loop queues and outsource them

#53

Post by skinnymuch »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #46
skinnymuch wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds..not good. You know how I know how much of a cog some one is? How much they are being paid. Putting a bow on top of work that pays peanuts is worse in my opinion than being honest. Your tactics appear to try to manipulate underpaid or lowly paid cogs into not believing they are what the company and managers truly see them as - just that.

I think the name is clever and a bit cute, though perhaps easy to misinterpret. But on point of principle: No matter what someone is paid (or whether they are paid at all), they are a person, with hopes, dreams, feelings, and dignity. I know you probably already believe that, but it's worth stating anyway. Our society does tend to treat people like cogs, but that is a problem with our society. Words influence how we…

I don’t want “respect” or whatever other ways things are being framed if I’m being paid a low wage. I always found it insulting when done. When I was treated more like a cog in line with my pay, I don’t remember having any specific consistent resentment or annoyance.

This is my own personal life anecdote.

—

It also isn’t just pay. Being all cute and “nice” and “respectful” but on top of low pay, not being flexible with something like taking half a day off or coming in late or leaving early because of life stuff, shows how the company and higher ups truly feel about you.

Most of the time lower wages correlates with the loss of the above flexibility. There are major exceptions like when the job is interchangeable and you can swap shifts with others.

At that point. The company knows you’re a cog. Treats you as a cog, but sometimes spins things as if you’re a person that matters to them.

—

Edit: I do agree jerks suck. I guess I see putting a bow on stuff as jerk material as it is generally done with cogs.

Re: Show HN: Human Lambdas – Create Human in the Loop queues and outsource them

#54

Post by motohagiography »

Impressive, we could instrument a lot of municipal licensing and public service form filling with these templates. It's like kiosk applications as a service.

I'm interpreting that it's like taking the features of a PowerBI app, but something with less overhead, and more accessible to smaller orgs.

Re: Show HN: Human Lambdas – Create Human in the Loop queues and outsource them

#56

Post by raddan »

fny wrote: post #12
sam_goody wrote: post #10

You know, this exact same idea could be done in such a way that doesn't dehumanize the, uh, humans. In fact, I bet your mileage would even increase if you could figure out a way to actually respect even the grunt laborers. That is, I like the idea of streamlining your workflow, of compartmentalizing, of assembly lining. I like the ideas of integrating that which can be fully automated with what cannot. And of making…

> If they feel they are being "cogged", they will work like cogs Most people who get into Turking know they're going to be cogs, and honestly, the only thing they care about is getting paid properly for it. No pie-in-the-sky marketing BS is going to make up for sub minimum wage compensation.

Some of our prior work, AutoMan, (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2927928, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/voxpl-p...) which developed this very idea (almost a decade ago!), explicitly addresses many of the issues around exploitative practices. By default the system pays the minimum wage. We usually paid workers quite a bit more than minimum wage while developing the system. You can read more about it in our CACM letter response (http://www.cs.williams.edu/~dbarowy/acknowledge_crowdworkers... scroll down the the bit titled "Acknowledge Crowdworkers in Crowdwork Research".

Also, while it does not have the convenience of being a web service, you can download and use AutoMan now (https://docs.automanlang.org/). Most importantly, AutoMan provides statistical quality guarantees. It looks like Human Lambdas uses a manual auditing approach, which does not scale. It's surprisingly common for some crowdsourcing tasks to be as hard to audit as it is to do them in the first place. For the kinds of tasks that AutoMan supports, this is basically a non-issue.

I still actively maintain the library, and I am always happy to talk to people about use cases.

Re: Show HN: Human Lambdas – Create Human in the Loop queues and outsource them

#58

Post by raddan »

raddan wrote: post #56
fny wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they feel they are being "cogged", they will work like cogs Most people who get into Turking know they're going to be cogs, and honestly, the only thing they care about is getting paid properly for it. No pie-in-the-sky marketing BS is going to make up for sub minimum wage compensation.

Some of our prior work, AutoMan, ( https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2927928 , https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/voxpl-p... ) which developed this very idea (almost a decade ago!), explicitly addresses many of the issues around exploitative practices. By default the system pays the minimum wage. We usually paid workers quite a bit more than minimum wage while developing the system. You can read more a…

I should also add that the requester ratings site, Turkopticon (https://turkopticon.ucsd.edu/), rated our jobs highly. I can't seem to find our reviews now (probably because we haven't run any jobs in awhile), but if someone can figure that out, you should see that workers were pretty happy with our system. I often got emails from workers asking for more work! Also, the throughput on a good job when using a properly designed system is insane. If I recall correctly, our case study on estimating calorie content from photos gathered thousands of labels in about 45 minutes.

Re: Show HN: Human Lambdas – Create Human in the Loop queues and outsource them

#60

Post by bckr »

fny wrote: post #49
brobdingnagians wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the name is clever and a bit cute, though perhaps easy to misinterpret. But on point of principle: No matter what someone is paid (or whether they are paid at all), they are a person, with hopes, dreams, feelings, and dignity. I know you probably already believe that, but it's worth stating anyway. Our society does tend to treat people like cogs, but that is a problem with our society. Words influence how we…

You can call people "sanitation engineers", "sandwich artists", or whatever (these are real titles by the way) and for as long as you treat them as replaceable, interchangeable, and cheap, they will be cogs. Also are "production worker", "factory worker", "shipping clerk", or "driver" any better or worse than "human lambda"?

I was a "Dish Machine Operator" for a few months, and it actually did make me feel cooler than being a "Dishwasher".

"Human Lambda" being the name of the company, perhaps the workers are "Lambda Operators".

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