Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Don't be a meat proxy

gruhn.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 786 posts

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#271

Post by bell-cot »

mort96 wrote: post #158
eddythompson80 wrote: post #8

I deal with this all day long at work and it’s exhausting. People almost acting like no one has thought of it “I asked Claude what happened, and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right?” What kills me is you might expect this from a busy high level manager that doesn’t really understand the technical details and they just point the AI to an error they got. They don’t know how…

I've literally seen this in HN responses as well, so many times. What the hell is the point of human interaction if the "human" just forwards a chat bot's response

> What the hell is the point of human interaction if ...

Sadly, the point is validating the human worth of the human who can't do any better than this.

But, assuming you're not stuck on that human's Self Esteem Care Team, it can be tricky to tell them that they need to seek validation elsewhere.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#272

Post by rpastuszak »

dwarhl wrote: post #267

I do it, on purpose: it teaches people to do basic research by themselves, and not hit me with questions they could have gotten with a simple chat with their llm. It's a kind of RTFM for current days.

I can imagine it makes things easier for you but I find it hard to imagine it teaches anyone anything. Just offloading social effort to an LLM (fair enough but let’s call a spade a spade)

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#273

Post by tempfile »

rad-b wrote: post #251
supermatt wrote: post #225

> NATS control-plane events: stream leader election / R3 quorum re-form during pod churn. Whats is wrong with this? I work with durable tracing (not using NATS, or k8s though) and this looks almost exactly what I would expect to see in a coordinator log after repartition of a storage cluster. Obviously I don't know what your actual context was, though.

Not the OP, but I understand the sentiment they’re trying to convey. I will frequently work with AI to get done something that is not in my immediate area of expertise. And this kind of speak constantly happens, where you can feel it trying to please its RLHF expert teacher by being as concise as possible. Works ok when you’re deep in the weeds of what you’re talking about, but otherwise just feels overwhelming. Kind…

> You knew what was happening at every turn but still got lost somehow.

I think this is less "it's using jargon" and more "it's explaining incredibly badly". It is very common that the explanation, while correct, is almost written inside out, with the point buried behind 3 paragraphs of "you've hit on the core seam" and "you're right to push back, let's reinforce the load-bearing model".

I think people have an incredibly limited capacity to follow long winding exposition, and they're too embarrassed to admit it. I have started sending stuff back to coworkers just saying "I don't think this is wrong, but I can't parse it, can you?" and getting back "no, but claude managed to generate a fix from it".

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#274

Post by jurgenburgen »

marliechiller wrote: post #137
jurgenburgen wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or should I act like I did it myself, appearing to have super-powers that I don't possess? Do you tell people you used a hammer to hit the nails? Do you go out of your way to explain to people that you don’t use your bare, bleeding knuckles to punch in the nails? Give people some credit and don’t treat them like idiots. Also don’t treat your LLM as some “super-power”, it’s just a fancy hammer and still hits your fi…

Is it not more akin to asking a handyman to go and do the work for you? They are the ones wielding the hammer, youve just sent them off to go and do it on your behalf without getting your hands dirty. If you then claim to take credit for it, I can see how that might be misinterpreted. As I see said quite often, an LLM is deemed of a similar ability to a junior software engineer. If I were that junior and my work was…

> Is it not more akin to asking a handyman to go and do the work for you?

Does your handyman go off the rails and build pipes around the neighbors house because they didn’t know you already have an incoming water pipe?

Does your handyman require you to have expertise in plumbing to make sure they don’t use bubble gum to seal the pipes?

It’s not taking credit if the “handyman” is a gibbering idiot who needs more handholding than a child.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#275

Post by customguy »

throw310822 wrote: post #108
maccard wrote: post #91

At my last job, a coworker did this to me. The first time it happened, I ignored it. The second time, I responded in public saying “thanks but I can ask Claude myself.” Nobody ever pasted me an LLM response again. YMMV with team size and seniority though

[flagged]

[dead]

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#276

Post by projektfu »

ClikeX wrote: post #238
eddythompson80 wrote: post #8

I deal with this all day long at work and it’s exhausting. People almost acting like no one has thought of it “I asked Claude what happened, and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right?” What kills me is you might expect this from a busy high level manager that doesn’t really understand the technical details and they just point the AI to an error they got. They don’t know how…

This one kills me. So many forums, and Reddit in particular, now have people just chiming into topics with ChatGPT answers. It gives them the illusion of being helpful, while they don't really have the knowledge of the subject. But people go to communities to converse with others in the field, and this makes it feel dead internet. I'm glad most of my colleagues are still doing things themselves. But honestly, if all…

So often the sources listed by an LLM are just reddit posts, so this will be an ouroboros pretty soon.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#277

Post by gregoryl »

prash20026 wrote: post #261

> frequently contains all too plausible nonsense, and is increasingly jargon dense. Does anyone know how to deal with the jargon part? It is getting hard to use claude and even worse when someone sends you the direct output from claude.

As with most things LLM, you can generally get what you want by asking for it (maybe not efficiently, but so it goes). "Once you have a answer, please summarize, and ask an agent to convert it to plain English" often helps.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#278

Post by janandonly »

I happen to be currently working on our ISO 27001 implementation and as one of the prerequisites I'm writing our internal AI policy.

I've included a link to this blog post, just for kicks.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#279

Post by girvo »

Gigachad wrote: post #70
jasonkester wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just can’t understand why this is not a fireable offense. Like, I can see getting a strong warning the first time somebody notices you do this, then if you persist you’d have to be let go. Just like anybody else who is clearly not doing their job. Why would you tolerate this sort of behavior at your company?

The psychosis is largely coming from the top.

Fish rot from the head, as they say.
Post reply on HN