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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

#471

Post by reddit_clone »

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.…

> Give a cursory answer

That may be enough in some cases.

Sometimes people are not looking for fully fleshed out high-effort answers. They want a pointer (to documentation, or a repo) to get going from someone more experienced.

Google search may throw up too much information and it is hard to make a choice. A one sentence answer from an expert may be enough to set them on the right path.

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

#473

Post by gwd »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #439
nucleardog wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had this same policy since before AI. I kind of formalized it for myself (and this team) after enough instances of "I'm trying to do X. It's not working. Help." type messages. You need to put as much effort into the question as you expect someone to put into the answer. It's not "fairness" or "AI" or anything else, it's that doing this any other way fundamentally fucks up the team dynamics. You have a problem. Y…

> after enough instances of "I'm trying to do X. It's not working. Help." type messages. Related to this, I will never for the life of me understand why people think it's okay to say "I get an error" without saying what the error is. I don't expect a non-technical person to understand the error, but I do expect a non-technical person to know that what the error message is is useful to the person trying to help you an…

The thing is, they've still taken the time to actually write "I get an error". So by principle of reciprocity, you can just take 2 seconds to say, "What's the error?" Usually that won't lead anywhere; but as long as you don't spend more time than they are, you aren't really wasting much time; and they can't exactly complain that you weren't helpful. And occasionally it will lead somewhere, in which case it's a win.

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

#474

Post by CrazyStat »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #470
CrazyStat wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 S…

Fair. The concept predates Marx, but in contemporary thought is most closely associated with Marxism.

The quote about silver from Peru is particularly striking to my ears. That’s a long and dangerous journey, and obviously (to my modern sensibilities) the person making it should be compensated appropriately for the far greater risk taken on.

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

#475

Post by thaumasiotes »

DanielHB wrote: post #338
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 think the point is that automatically-generated documents by LLM is lower quality the manually-generated ones or at least guaranteed lower quality than automatically-generated + manually-reviewed. Therefor if you are not putting human effort on the document it is low-value. We have seen this before when big data started to be a thing, tons and tons of reports being auto-produced weekly (or even daily), but even if…

> Therefor if you are not putting human effort on the document it is low-value.

That's true. The document is low-value.

Asking people to put in personal effort isn't going to change that. If they comply, the document they produce will still be worthless, and you still won't want it.

You're diagnosing a problem unrelated to the problem you actually face.

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

#476

Post by hathawsh »

When I tell my coworkers to stop using AI to dress up their words, it's not because I care about human effort. The problem is that my coworkers often start with incorrect assumptions, and AI is good at amplifying bad assumptions and making them sound plausible. I have to spend extra time guessing at what the author originally wrote and then address the partly-hidden original points rather than what the AI generated. Give me your spelling errors, your grammar, your mumbles, your incoherent streams of thought, your doubt and uncertainty. Those things are extremely important, yet your robot obscures them.

Strangely, I've also observed that some customers respond very well to words dressed up by AI, even if the words oversimplify the truth. Now I'm working to understand why they want that. Are my customers not swimming in AI slop like the rest of us?

BTW, this doesn't mean I'm anti-AI. AI coding is an incredible superpower and I use it constantly, but it seems to me that AI coding works because code expresses the minutiae that is rightfully omitted from most other communication.

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

#477

Post by swiftcoder »

necovek wrote: post #417
swiftcoder wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a higher trust environment, PR review is a helpful thing you usually desire, not dread Respectfully, in a high-trust environment, feedback should be delivered well before the PR stage. If you've let someone write a whole bunch of code without having a shared understanding of how the solution should work, you may have earlier process issues that PRs are papering over

A discussion ahead of the implementation can also bias the two parties to that discussion and have them overlook the same implementation issue: many things you only understand once you start implementing. If you have these parties review each other's code, I agree that rarely brings much value. I think the best way to understand our experience with reviews is to stop and say: in a few sentences, what do you expect ou…

> in a few sentences, what do you expect out of a quality code review? (sounds like nothing in your case, but I am curious)

From my perspective, there are three sorts of PRs:

- One is very close to the final form of a particular change, and any feedback you get at that late stage is indicative of holes in your process.

- Another is one where someone throws something up and says "hey, this is an experiment, can I get feedback on the approach". This is great, the parameters are clear, not much to say about these.

- The 3rd sort is someone making a trivial 5-line patch to a makefile/cargo.toml/github workflow/etc. These add basically no value to anyone.

Of those only the 2nd type really brings much value, and those are the ones that folks would keep posting even if you didn't require PRs (since they have an actual question, or a cool thing to show off).

I'll also note that this only really negatively impacts small remote teams, because on a sufficiently large, co-located team, you just ask your buddy one desk over to rubber stamp all the trivial commits...

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

#478

Post by swiftcoder »

rightbyte wrote: post #384
swiftcoder wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If their PRs don't get merged they don't perform. It is trivial to overload your coworkers with secondary tasks due to your "high performance". We're all aware that a huge portion of the busywork that makes a team successful is not actually reflected in their upwards-facing deliverables (increasing test coverage, improving infra, adopting new tools/methodologies, preemptive security patching, etc). Your actual high…

Yeah I agree. I was trying to makee the point that it is quite easy to make yourself blocked by others and it is a deep skill to get other stuff done while blocked anyway, like say cleanups and tests etc.

> it is a deep skill to get other stuff done while blocked anyway, like say cleanups and tests etc.

Which themselves generate more PRs (or larger PRs)...

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

#479

Post by Slow_Hand »

nucleardog wrote: post #379
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.…

I've had this same policy since before AI. I kind of formalized it for myself (and this team) after enough instances of "I'm trying to do X. It's not working. Help." type messages. You need to put as much effort into the question as you expect someone to put into the answer. It's not "fairness" or "AI" or anything else, it's that doing this any other way fundamentally fucks up the team dynamics. You have a problem. Y…

I intuitively put this much effort into asking good questions when I need help, and what I often find is that by spending time to formulate a question that makes it easy for others to help me I end up discovering the answer for myself or identifying a much more salient problem that I should be asking instead.

In this way, putting more effort into the question ends up putting me closer to the answer without actually receiving help.

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

#480

Post by warkdarrior »

hliyan wrote: post #441
mlhpdx wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"performative" = "ego-driven"
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