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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

#461

Post by cestith »

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…

Part of art is the process of creating it. It’s not just the physical artifact, nor even just the completion of the final product. The inspiration, subject matter, the consideration of form, the initial concepts, the redesigns, the meaning or emotion the artist tries to impart, the beauty of the thing, the skills employed and further developed during the process, the choice of materials, the use of perspective, and how the work is presented are all part of the art.

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

#462

Post by cestith »

gwd wrote: post #335

"Don't expend more effort than they are" has actually long been a good principle to have internalized. Someone done only cursory research before asking a question on a mailing list? Give a cursory answer. Someone obviously spent hours trying to figure things out on their own? Give them a good chunk of your time. Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind.…

From the other side, there have been brief tutorials for many years about how to ask useful questions in a technical forum. Making hundreds of other people fish for details about your case is poor form.

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-ask-good-technical-... is a pretty good example.

Going back more than two decades is ESR’s “How to Ask Smart Questions”. http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

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

#463

Post by whstl »

monkeydust wrote: post #427
gwd wrote: post #335

"Don't expend more effort than they are" has actually long been a good principle to have internalized. Someone done only cursory research before asking a question on a mailing list? Give a cursory answer. Someone obviously spent hours trying to figure things out on their own? Give them a good chunk of your time. Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind.…

AI has collapsed the cost of producing content while leaving the cost of reviewing, verifying higher imho. This has inverted the economics of collaboration. Reviewer attention, not output volume, is now the scarce resource, this happened with my engineering teams (PR reviews) and is now happening in my world in Product.

In some cases there's also no preparation or verification happening at all, which massively inflates the productivity gains of AI. Lots of VCs and investors asking companies to move into "trust the AI" mode.

I once consulted for a company in the content marketing business that was one of the largest and fastest growing startups of its country. The content production in itself was "cheap", a dollar for 500 words. But it collapsed, due to the unbearable amount of people required to review

Now virtually all content is generated by AI and the old customers don't have anyone to verify anymore.

Companies are made of people who are shitty to each other but trust machines blindly.

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

#464

Post by smokedetector1 »

juanre wrote: post #458
smokedetector1 wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the coolest tech things I've seen in a while. Can you explain how the "Check a document" works? I'm not sure I understand how you would check if the timing aligns based only on the text content.

Thanks! I had a lot of fun doing it. The signature includes a hash of the text, done at the browser so that the server does not have to see the content.

Ah, okay! Would you mind explaining what does "comparing wording, not exact text" mean?

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

#465

Post by bobsomers »

anthuswilliams wrote: post #456
swiftcoder wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have been championing this mindset since well before LLMs. It is an admittedly controversial opinion, but one I hold strongly. Code reviews are a productivity tax. No truly effective team would rely on them. The fact that so many software teams view them as indispensable just shows how few effective software teams there are in our industry. They are akin to a quality check step in manufacturing. Part of what Deming…

> owned by all participants

How does this work in practice? In my experience, any metrics owned by a group inevitably languish and are largely ignored.

Anything you want to improve needs a DRI.

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

#466

Post by rightbyte »

bandrami wrote: post #236
LandR wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! All my experience in trying to hire developers has been wading through an endless stream of people who were just useless. Me: I want to represent a 2d grid, what data structure should we use? Them: A string? This was someone applying for senior engineer. Others I've had filled their CV with SQL related acronyms. But couldn't explain what a foreign key was and then stubbornly insisted that at their current corp…

I have a question I usually ask which is "How would you convert a Julian yyyy-ddd date string to a military yyyy-mm-dd date string?" (I explain how a Julian date works if they aren't familiar with it.) The answer that almost guarantees I'll hire you is "there's got to be a library function for that, so I look in the manual". Almost as good is somebody whiteboarding how they'd convert ddd to mm-dd (and then account fo…

> My favorite answer was on a phone interview where he just hung up and wouldn't answer when we called back.

Heh ... yeah well I wish I had it to do that.

However, you are asking gotcha questions.

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

#467

Post by juanre »

smokedetector1 wrote: post #464
juanre wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! I had a lot of fun doing it. The signature includes a hash of the text, done at the browser so that the server does not have to see the content.

Ah, okay! Would you mind explaining what does "comparing wording, not exact text" mean?

It's a very poorly written way of saying that instead of storing your text it uses a hash of your text to sign. When you want to check the signature you only need to hash the text to check, again without touching the server.

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

#468

Post by maccard »

dormento wrote: post #395
maccard wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this happen to me twice. The first time I ignored it, second time I responddd with “I could have asked ChatGPT myself but I asked you”. Never happened again.

"why are you such a drag on team morale?", "why are you invalidating your colleagues learning experiences?" "Next time you do this, HR will have to step in" etc etc. There's no justice in this world.

I’d you’re not willing to stand your ground and have a direct conversation with your co worker then there’s no solution to it.

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

#469

Post by jordanpg »

satvikpendem wrote: post #108
solfox wrote: 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.

David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs in action.

I was just thinking about this. LLMs are nothing if not easy litmus tests for identifying bullshit jobs.

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

#470

Post by CWuestefeld »

CrazyStat wrote: post #443
CWuestefeld wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I mostly agree with your criticism of my post. I was being generous trying to avoid being inflammatory here, since I know there are readers that strongly support socialist ideas (in the strict sense, not just the "safety net" sense). It was certainly Marx that pushed it so hard.

But researching this a bit, I find that it still predates Marx. I find:

Sir William Petty, 1662: "If a man can bring to London an ounce of Silver out of the Earth in Peru, in the same time that he can produce a bushel of Corn, then one is the natural price of the other."

More important, it seems that David Ricardo (a big name in economic history), in 1817 latched onto what Smith had written and states it quite definitively.

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