Live data from Hacker News

If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

tombedor.dev

41–50 of 551 posts

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#42
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some things, yes. But I'm half-assing some really cool stuff right now. Made a scraper to pull my city's meeting minutes, agendas, recordings, made transcripts. Regex for "Flock", found every mention, passed those files into a cheap model (DeepSeek V4), had an understanding of who in my city is down with building the surveillance state and who isn't. I've got research on everyone, and had emails drafted for each…

You created the surveillance state to fight the surveillance state lol Edit: it's a joke people

It used to be called journalism

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#43

Was it Blaise Pascal who wrote: I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter. The argument that "using AI to generate text is disrespectful because it took no effort to write" misses the point. Respect for the recipient is measured by whether the message serves the recipient's needs, not how it is produced. Similarly, any errors are the senders responsibility, and not the fau…

Exactly. What I want is not effort. It is quality. The sweat of your brow is just gross salt water.

Use whatever tool does the job, and own it if you use the wrong tool and it sucks.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#44
post #11
post #6

I'd say it's because we're tasking ourselves with dumb stuff. No one half-asses building a shelter that keeps their family alive, or throwing a new favorite bowl on the pottery wheel. But instead of that we're writing posts for Facebook etc etc so we can (???) profit. So of course we want bots to do this all this dumb stuff, and of course we get dumb results.

For some things, yes. But I'm half-assing some really cool stuff right now. Made a scraper to pull my city's meeting minutes, agendas, recordings, made transcripts. Regex for "Flock", found every mention, passed those files into a cheap model (DeepSeek V4), had an understanding of who in my city is down with building the surveillance state and who isn't. I've got research on everyone, and had emails drafted for each…

Did you use some stuff like https://github.com/CouncilDataProject or roll your own? Been curious about how to integrate local knowledge like this since local news seems to have lost the niche.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#45

This exactly reflects my feelings lately. I have a specific coworker who has gone somewhat overboard - every single code review, answer to any question on email or Teams, every new story, even their personal opinions during a design or ideas meeting, are all direct AI output with no massaging or human touch or review. They're working on planning out an upcoming project, and I just get verbose and long documents to re…

Instinctively I think the move is to ignore it. I guess that would look different in different contexts. Obviously you have to communicate with your coworkers. But I think the solution has to essential be: "Im not going to read that."

I've had a colleague call it out 'Is this AI slop? Please write your opinion'. I don't think I could do that myself, but I really appreciate that they were drawing attention to it

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#46
post #34

A very prolific coworker who fully embraced claude has inflicted the team with a flood of AI-generated PRs. About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention. I don't think anyone - including myself - _intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It's just that he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at. This single headline perfectly captures what…

why leave comments intended for your human colleague when they will only forward them to the bot?

why not speak directly to the bot yourself instead? then you can drop pretenses and get to the point

I find this to be a new variant of the old behavior where a colleague comments on a typo in a PR, and the team later moans about laborious back and forth for small nitpicks, instead of simply editing the typo right there (and perhaps leaving a note that they did so)

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#47
post #34

A very prolific coworker who fully embraced claude has inflicted the team with a flood of AI-generated PRs. About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention. I don't think anyone - including myself - _intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It's just that he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at. This single headline perfectly captures what…

It sounds like one potential interpretation of his behavior is that he values his own time more than your time.

I wonder if that's occurred to him.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#48
This headline has been seeing some popularity. But it's never made any sense. This is just the labor theory of value, applied to documents.

The labor theory of value doesn't work for documents any more than it works for anything else. If I do something that's easy for me, and it's valuable to you, you'll still want it. If I do something that's difficult for me, it will be less valuable to you, because the difficulty I have with it implies that what I produce will be of lower quality.

This is all equally true of automatically-generated documents. If they're valuable, people will want to read them. Whether it was unpleasant for someone to create them isn't a factor.

So where is this slogan coming from? Are people just afraid to admit that the documents they're getting are valueless?

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instinctively I think the move is to ignore it. I guess that would look different in different contexts. Obviously you have to communicate with your coworkers. But I think the solution has to essential be: "Im not going to read that."

Either that, or call them / walk up to their desk and pick a point from the wall of text and ask them to explain what they mean by it. Then watch them turn red as they have no idea what the message they sent to you means.

I think you're over-estimating how much some people care.

I have had coworkers say "Oh I don't know, Claude added that" in response to questions like that without even a hint of shame or self-reflection.

Post reply on HN