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If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

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

#441

Post by hliyan »

mlhpdx wrote: post #396
keiferski wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true if you're writing a letter about a difficult topic. For HN comments, 99.9% of the time, a short comment is a low effort one and should be disregarded.

on the other hand, when I see a long post here I assume it’s yet another ego-driven tirade and skip past it.

> yet another ego-driven tirade

I tried to recall the last time I saw what I felt was an ego-driven tirade on HN comments, and I'm currently drawing a blank. There's a lot of what's called "performative erudition", and there is the occasional lengthy diatribe, but I would call neither one of those ego-driven tirades.

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

#442

Post by steelkilt »

He was handed a gameboy before he could walk, but it didn’t lessen his humanity. He was handed a smartphone before middle school, but his humanity remained intact. He started calling the “people” he met on social media his friends, and humanity didn’t suffer. But alas, using AI is a bridge too far.

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

#443

Post by CrazyStat »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #414
Archer6621 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These kinds of principles are sensible at their core, and I am a big proponent of the mindset, but the main problem as a sibling comment pointed out in a way is that this assumes that everyone is striving for an honest and accurate correlation between display of effort and value, and that everyone is looking deep enough into and behind that display to recognize the true value behind it. But actual effort, let alone v…

an honest and accurate correlation between display of effort and value Hmmm. Your choice of words here has just sparked a realization for me. Before you said this, I was completely on board with the original post. But in juxtaposing effort with value, it illustrates that we're basing the idea on the Labor Theory of Value. That idea seems intuitive, and Adam Smith wrote about it 250 years ago. But it turns out that LT…

Labor theory of value is a Marxist idea, not an Adam Smith idea. Internet Marxists sometimes point to a passage in The Wealth of Nations to suggest that Smith also supported a labor theory of value, but this is—in the most generous interpretation—a misreading. Smith says that the value of a thing can be measured by how much labor it can be exchanged for: an exchange theory of value, not a labor theory of value (which says the value of a thing is based on how much labor it takes to create).

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

#445

Post by nosioptar »

Silasdev wrote: post #374

I had a new colleague on the team, who I had to on-board. I gave him a few simple tasks, just to get him into the whole setup. He literally copy/pasted my task description into Claude and asked it to complete the task. To begin with, I didn't suspect this, so when he asked for more help, I gladly wrote up a detailed explanation with more information and detail for him to learn. Little did I know, he never read it but…

I always get "Foreign Object" by the Mountain Goats stuck in my head wheb I deal with people like that...

(Track 31):

https://themountaingoats.bandcamp.com/track/foreign-object-j...

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

#447

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

bandrami wrote: post #147
moomoo11 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

having worked in tech and now running my own company.. the honest truth is that maybe 10-20% of SWE (at best) are “good”. sure it is harsh but i won't lie. if you're good you'll probably relate. the rest kind of suck. i’ve never gotten anything lower than Exceeds Expectations in my career so I’ve seen how awful some engineers were. i’ve seen how amazing a tiny minority were and i made them my mentors. these days i ha…

Everybody talks about finding that mythical 10X but in my recent hiring experience it's more like there's a whole bunch of 0Xs and the trick is finding the actual 1Xs among them.

Someone else said it on HN a couple years ago...Something about how there's no such thing as a 10x engineer, but there are a LOT of 0.1x engineers and a few 2x.

The absolute worst is someone that tries to brand themselves as a 10x engineer by constantly using programming terms like "dynamic programming", "polymorphism", "recursion" and the like, but they're really a 0.1x engineer because they don't truly understand what any of those are and when they should actually be using them, and so try to shoehorn them in when they don't need them while also not understanding them, and end up writing low-quality crap.

Took too long for management to get rid of that guy.

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

#448

Post by nosioptar »

beej71 wrote: post #93
zetanor wrote: post #56

What I find strange is how rarely LLM output is distributed alongside the LLM input, especially outside of code repos. Why can't I rerun the prompt that resulted in your work next year, when models have gotten better? Are people ashamed of their prompts? Ashamed of having used AI? i unno Prompt used to generate this message: "Create a comment for Hacker News which bemoans the lack of AI prompts being shared with the…

FMFL. I'm going to build a paper-based social network where non-handwriting is prohibited. Like in the 70s.

You should. Then I could start my SHWAAS business offering unbreakable encryption for it.

(Shitty Handwriting As A Service).

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

#449

Post by steveBK123 »

Yes, I worked with a guy (not for long) who had two modes of interaction:

"it didnt work" - providing neither the code nor the error

"I ran this" - dropping 500 lines of code into slack, not specifying where he ran it, what line it broke or what the error was

Either mode required 15 iterative questions to get to a useful state of information.

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

#450

Post by jcgl »

nicbou wrote: post #239
andai wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think it's a matter of process vs end result. I just want to feel that a human with taste judged that it was worth my attention. If a human put some effort into it, that's a signal.

This is mostly what it is for me too. We're all awash in an information deluge, and we need heuristics to keep from drowning. Human effort, proof-of-work if you will, is a heuristic that helps with the AI-generated part of the deluge.
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