I've been offered a Book of Shadows for cryin' out loud.
Appearing productive in the workplace
251–260 of 686 posts
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. man I see this on Jira a PM or BA is like "yeah I'll write that AC for you" giant bullet list filled in a bunch of emojis and checkmarks
Does anyone know where that style came from? Did it become popular in listicles or on github or something? Or is there one person deep inside OpenAI or Anthropic who built the synthetic data pipeline and one day made the decision on a whim to doom us to an eternity of emoji bullet points?
Both predate common use of LLMs, unless my memory is even more shaky than usual on this. I'm sure I saw them appear a fair amount on GitHub and related project pages, but I couldn't tell you more specifically how they started & grew.
Somehow they must have been over-represented in the training data (or something in the tokenising/training/other processes magnifies the effective presence of punctuation) because I don't remember them being that common and LLMs seem to love spewing them out. Or perhaps it is a sign of the Habsburg problem: people asked LLMs to produce README files like that because they'd seen the style elsewhere, it having spread more organically at first, and the timing was just right for lots of those early examples to get fed back into training data for subsequent models.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#253It would be nice if someone invented a mouse with a tiny motor inside, so I could put on sunglasses, rest my hand on the mouse, doze off, and still look like I'm working hard.
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Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
I write a lot and have on several occasions tried dictation as an initial draft authoring step. It was trash every time. Good for thinking through a concept but unsalvageable in the edit phase. Easier to throw away and rewrite now that you know what to say. Nowadays I like conversation as an ideating step. Talk to a bunch of people, try to explain yourself until they get it, see what questions they ask. Sometimes in…
> It can take weeks of work to produce a 500 word product vision document. Don't you get dinged as a slow performer? Management expects x5 speed on everything now that AI is available.
It's going to depend on the type of team and environment you work in. Probably on how senior you are as well.
If your boss asks you for specific documents and expects a quick turnaround, and you regularly take 3 weeks or whatever to produce them, then yeah probably.
If your boss generally leaves you alone to find and solve problems on your own, then probably not.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#255That perfectly describes my manager.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. man I see this on Jira a PM or BA is like "yeah I'll write that AC for you" giant bullet list filled in a bunch of emojis and checkmarks
Does anyone know where that style came from? Did it become popular in listicles or on github or something? Or is there one person deep inside OpenAI or Anthropic who built the synthetic data pipeline and one day made the decision on a whim to doom us to an eternity of emoji bullet points?
It's the style of "blazing fast library made with :heart: in rust :crab:" that was popular in github README.md. My guess is that because the models are told to use md they overfit to the style of md documents too.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#257I’m certainly glad we have respected contributing members of our community named things like “diebillionaires”. What’s next, “killallkikes”? HN is an amazing place.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like them. It tells very clearly how much effort went into someone's work. I like them even more on code comments. It tells _precisely_ how much effort went into the pull request, so I don't spend time reviewing lazy work.
So you just rubber-stamp the lazy work? What else can you do when this PR is assigned to you specifically for reviewing?
You tell Claude to review it and if it breaks something you blame Claude. No one can get mad at you for it because they don't want to look like luddites.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Minimum word lengths were really a terrible idea and I wonder what arguments were used to get all the teachers to buy into that system.
Where I encounter it at the higher education level is that academic-level research almost universally has maximum word counts or page counts rather than minimums: if you think you can get your point across in fewer words, you should. No reviewer is going to object to the paper being too short, so long as you succeeded in making your case. John Nash's Ph.D. Thesis is notorious for being short: it's still 27 pages (typ…
Off topic, and not to diminish Nash's work, but quite famously (I thought) Von Neumann and Morgenstern did a bit of the 'inventing' too, and a bit earlier
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without getting into AI-for-work good or bad, > update 42 if statements in 32 different files is a silly behavior for a programmer or an AI to have to do more than twice. We have tools that very effectively remove the need for things like that: programming languages that allow modular and reusable code, good design, etc.
Ideally. But that requires the correct abstraction, requires keeping it up to date.... that's basically an unachievable ideal. You either have overabstraction/overengineering (most codebases) or you have repetition. Repetition is actually more preferable in the LLM-world because you have to keep less stuff in your head. And the LLM's head too. Even if something does look copypasted, it might actually be semantically…
Totally fair, but 42 if-statements across 32 files isn't something you need to fix with like ... a grand refactor or hexagonal architecture or event sourcing or whatever the overengineering pattern du jour is. You can fix that with a utility function or three, and a file/class/module/whatever that owns the code relating to some of those conditions.
I'm not some DRY zealot, but I've been in the "this system needs really similar changes to a ton of geographically distant code for simple changes" salt mines a lot. The people who say that kind of spaghetti is unavoidable are just as wrong as the ones who say it can only be fixed with a grand rearchitecture by a rockstar.