If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by barrell » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 9:14 AM UTC

jstummbillig wrote: post #231

I increasingly find that I don't care whether I am talking to an anonymous AI or an anonymous human, and believe that we will increasingly stop caring. Because why not? AI will simply on average be nicer to talk to than most humans, with clearer thinking and better arguments, less contradictions, and easier to comprehend. I don't know how humans could compete with that (but it also does not seem all that horrible, gi…

I think it’s safe to say that this will not be consensus. Personally, I am getting increasingly (irrationally) angry at AI generated content. AI generated art quite literally makes me nautious. I mean an actual, physical reaction where I feel queasy.

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way, and notice more and more people reporting the same. Several of my non-technical

AI generated content is bland and soulless. There’s only so much bland and soulless most people can take in their life before they start to get fed up.

When everything feels the same, nothing is interesting anymore.

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

#242

Post by kibwen » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 9:16 AM UTC

andai wrote: post #223

niuzeta wrote: 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…

I often hear people say lately, "why should I bother to read this, if you didn't even think it was worth writing?" I've been thinking about this in art. Is it the end result that matters, or the process of creating it? I once saw a hideous sculpture. Didn't like it at all. Then the video zoomed and I saw that the whole thing (quite massive) had been hand-built out of individual toothpicks, and suddenly I thought it w…

> Is it the end result that matters, or the process of creating it?

One of the main reasons that art is valuable is in its ability to communicate emotions. Good art has the ability to serialize emotions within the artist and deserialize them within the mind of the viewer. It's not just "wow, this is a pretty picture", it's "wow, this is how another person sees the world, and now that I understand that, I feel an intimate connection with them".

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

#243

Post by frameset » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 9:20 AM UTC

I've thought this for a while, and I summarise it as: If you want me to take time to read it, you should take the time to write it.

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

#244

Post by Aldipower » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 9:22 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #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 am offering a product (via MCP) that interacts with LLMs and user data. Every single day I get user support emails to my inbox written by their LLMs with LLM hallucinations. If the user (a human) would have read them before, that would save me a lot of time and anger!

Your post sounds logical at the first glance, but has nothing to do with the reality. The topic title is totally on point! If the user would put human effort in it, I wouldn't get those crappy emails.

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

#245

Post by janpeuker » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 9:25 AM UTC

This is beautiful. I even had people reach out to me with suspiciously long "long time no chat" instant messages until I realised they were AI written (in one case misspelling the name of their own partner). "If you are requesting human attention, demonstrate human effort" is going to be my new answer to that!

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

#246

Post by cncjvu7 » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 9:30 AM UTC

gonzalohm wrote: post #72

voidfunc wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI and companies reward sociopathic behavior. When he eventually complains to his boss that his work isn't being merged and it's been done for days/weeks/months that will filter up and look bad on the people holding him up.

At that point then disable merge checks and let them merge without a review. If there is a problem it's on them

This is my current strategy, it's working great. Half the team has been fired for slop and the other half got fired for not doing anything.

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

#247

Post by pjc50 » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 9:33 AM UTC

keybored wrote: post #213

crjohns648 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even before AI, I've worked with people who would produce a huge wall of code and ask for review, and sometimes that code was completely off base or needed a significant rework. I would always feel bad in those cases, because it's clear they spent a lot of time, and I'm going to have to say "no" and they will feel like they wasted a ton of effort. The thought process around this has started shifting for me in the las…

It’s good that clankers are not afraid of throwing away code. The biggest problem with code generation (that is version controlled) is maintenance. It’s better to throw away questionable code rather than say eh, we don’t quite understand this part (and our agents can’t make a compelling story about it) but we spent a lot of effort on it and it apparently works so we better keep it.

.. only if you know what the code is doing, though. Often the requirements get scattered and lost to the winds and the code is the only record of its own idiosyncratic behavior. And yes, someone's depending on the bugs in it.

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

#248

Post by swiftcoder » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 9:35 AM UTC

niuzeta wrote: 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…

As someone who pushed ~4x the median PRs on my team before LLMs were a thing, I kind of think the problem here is PRs as a concept. Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans, it definitely can't scale to agents.

And the exact same things you would need to safely give up on PRs for human developers (auto-formatters, linters, comprehensive end-to-end tests, continuous deployment pipelines, etc), are also things that place meaningful guardrails on LLMs, and help them maintain a reasonable quality bar.

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

#249

Post by adamlrhodes » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 9:38 AM UTC

treesknees wrote: post #22

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…

100% agreed. I've shared output I didn't fully understand, didn't feel good good about it, and now I really try to digest, understand, and be able to actually talk about it if I expect other people to do the same. I hope in time your coworker comes to similar realizations.

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

#250

Post by juanre » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 9:38 AM UTC

A couple of weeks ago I essentially failed the Turing test (took to be an AI). I found it a bit annoying, so I built Possibly Made By A Human. It tracks your keyboard use (not the content, ms between keystrokes etc) and produces a signature for you. It can of course be spoofed, but that also takes some effort.

Actually made by a human, signature: https://possiblymadebyahuman.com/7PuEdZs1i1