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The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

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Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#281

Post by huurtehoog »

zzzeek wrote: post #244
huurtehoog wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have done that as well. Not a single time I asked an LLM for any sort of analysis that I could trust upon verification so I stopped doing that. If I need verify, much easier to just ask for suggestions of papers and books and do the analysis myself.

I guess this is subject matter dependent, certainly the LLM should be able to cite the papers/books for which it's deriving its critique. if it can't, then you know the advice it was giving is of poorer quality. I do that all the time I guess there's a whole suite of skills that allow LLM use to be more or less useful. (I dont actually "guess" this, I sort of am pretty sure of it at this point, so it makes me wince w…

I always ask for sources. LLM analyses often fails by being simplistic or wrong in comparison with the sources it provides. More often than not, to the point that it is wasteful to ask it for analysis so I only ask for sources now and do my own analysis.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#282

Post by baxtr »

Frost1x wrote: post #32

I work at an intersection of tech, applied research, and science. Something I’ve noticed in collaboration that does occur is an increased confidence in people outside their domains to say things with conviction. I have people who have limited experience with software pushing out layers and layers of abstracted code that’s fairly sophisticated but often misguided in intent who will say what they’re doing is correct, w…

>It’s making me want to be a lot less collaborative with such individuals. I don’t want to sit around and refute Claude text outputs all day.

at least this behavior reveals now much faster people you don’t want to work with.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#283

Post by acedTrex »

prepend wrote: post #63
Frost1x wrote: post #32

I work at an intersection of tech, applied research, and science. Something I’ve noticed in collaboration that does occur is an increased confidence in people outside their domains to say things with conviction. I have people who have limited experience with software pushing out layers and layers of abstracted code that’s fairly sophisticated but often misguided in intent who will say what they’re doing is correct, w…

> It’s making me want to be a lot less collaborative with such individuals. I have the same conclusion and am getting a growing list of mental blacklisted people who I just sort of ignore or greatly discount their efforts. I suppose I always did this if people were time wasters but what used to be a tiny list of “idiots” is now getting much, much bigger. Hopefully it doesn’t grow to everyone I work with like an AI No…

yep, this is how it goes, you just ignore the llm brained people.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#284

Post by teiferer »

wrsh07 wrote: post #247
teiferer wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You actually didn't. The construct is slightly different. Well I know that I did, so you are wrong with that claim, which sheds a strong (negative) light on other statements of fact that you posted in this discussion. You may disagree with me, or I may even have gotten something wrong, but just claiming I didn't read the article ... sorry man, I thought HN had higher standards than that.

I think they were referring to your fake llmism

Ah thanks. Fair.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#285

Post by teiferer »

wrsh07 wrote: post #250
teiferer wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes AI slop is prevalent. But the casualties that get thrown under the bus are also real, don't you agree? Is it really worth it to sacrifice those? In the name of the larger good? I'm arguing that we're losing something by doing so, as a community. > I find complaining about AI callouts If they are correct then I'm all for it. But just suspicions turned into statements of fact are not helping anybody. People used em…

The rule of thumb is simple: if most of a user or author's writing is consistently human-generated, then I think we are very happy giving them the benefit of the doubt if one article or snippet flags the actually good ai detector Unfortunately, many of the largest voices against pangram simply don't like it because it gives their lies less credibility. I don't mind reading llm writing, indeed, I read more llm writing…

> if most of a user or author's writing is consistently human-generated, then I think we are very happy giving them the benefit of the doubt if one article or snippet flags the actually good ai detector

I would agree to that approach.

But that didn't happen here. Nobody has done that due diligence and folks are just blindly accusing. The author has published for many years. That's what I'm calling out.

> This notion that somehow the authors of slop are victims is complete nonsense.

Strawman? I didn't claim that or anything close to it. I also find the prevalence of slop writing hugely annoying.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#286

Post by chunky1994 »

fidotron wrote: post #278
chunky1994 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm being nice too and all I've been trying to do in this thread is point at a distinction between GP's point and yours which you seem unwilling to engage with. It is valuable to ask questions about why things are the way they are in order to understand the fundamentals of it vs we should change these things because I am 'smarter than you' and I don't understand why things are done this way (which I called dumb, and…

> It is valuable to ask questions about why things are the way they are in order to understand the fundamentals of it vs we should change these things because I am 'smarter than you' and I don't understand why things are done this way (which I called dumb, and not smart). But you expressed doubt of stated (and frankly not even remotely subjective) experience, so if we dropped you in an organisation your immediate res…

You seem to be imputing a lot of intent into my comment and then extending that to value judgements about smartness etc. I don't know what any of this has to do with what GP was saying. Yeah, there's a balance between questioning everything and questioning nothing, but there are a lot of bureaucratic things that happen in organizations and its generally a good thing to question certain things that don't have clear explanations, isn't there?

The doubt was simply about whether or not what GP is saying is smart behaviour to exhibit - Eventually you have to understand something. And part of that process is being wrong and annoying people. is the same behaviour that you are saying you've experienced ( i.e you are talking about different things).

I'm not even questioning if you can tell if someone is smart or not - its just obvious that forcing decisions based off things that are not understood is not a smart thing to do - which..we all agree on -, and neither I nor GP were saying people should do this?

Maybe I could've phrased it better but my whole point was GP says X, you are saying Y. I think there is a distinction between X and Y and I doubt that the people GP is talking about are the same people you are talking about (hence, smart as you put it vs smart as GP put it).

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#287

Post by neutronicus »

grey-area wrote: post #110
neutronicus wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a one-time physics grad student, I do think there advantages to being ... like this. The flip side of being confidently wrong sometimes is that we treat understanding new systems as something approachable. So, yeah, it's annoying that we don't stay in our lane, but, from my boss's perspective, I'm the only one who's actually willing to just read code, investigate, possibly read a paper, and figure out what's goi…

It is quite possible to be wrong and not annoy people, and it's not even terribly difficult to learn. It does require a bit of humility and introspection though. You don't have to not stray into areas you don't understand, but be humble when doing so - if you think something is being done in a stupid way, you probably don't understand it yet.

I agree!

Missteps are inevitable, though.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#288

Post by NichoPaolucci »

mikepurvis wrote: post #222
NichoPaolucci wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, oddly similar thing happened to me. Anecdotally, I was working with a non-developer. She was building a reporting dashboard with Claude. I pointed out that the system she built was using the filesystem to store one line notes about the report, and I said "I would probably tell the agent to use a database for that, but it's not the end of the world if it works". And she replied "Claude said the developer's right,…

I can see how the situation is annoying there; I've had a similar frustration when doing manual code review for someone's obviously AI-slop PR only to have their bot auto-respond to my comments. There's an asymmetry of effort that feels unfair. Like, don't ask for manual review of something that contains lots of things that your own manual review should have caught first, and if I provide human feedback, I expect hum…

Sure - I don't hold it against them. It was just surprising to read a "Claude said you're right" message. (Yes, I know that I'm right, or I wouldn't have said it)

Didn't ruin my week or anything, but that was the writing on the wall for me.

Technical expertise is no longer viewed in the same light when software development has no barrier to entry.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#289

Post by jackling »

iamacyborg wrote: post #242
meowface wrote: post #4

This article is written by an LLM, by the way. ("Quietly" is... as Claude might put it... "often the quiet tell".)

", and" is the more obvious tell for Opus/Fable writing.

Plenty of people use Oxford commas though, can't really use it as a reliable signal, too much noise.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#290

Post by kaffekaka »

simianwords wrote: post #272
kaffekaka wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Partially true, but only partially. It also makes people believe they understand more than they do, because every answer comes so easily to them. But the LLMs are easily steered and tend to agree with what you want them to say.

> also makes people believe they understand more than they do, because every answer comes so easily to them. But the LLMs are easily steered and tend to agree with what you want them to say. Well agree to disagree but my load bearing claim is that a lot of "effort" that the original people put are mostly useless. If you can get information without having to do that effort, you haven't lost anything. For example an ar…

But finding a spoon (really?) is binary - you have the spoon or not. But understanding a complex situation is nuanced and contains different perspectives, tradeoffs, context etc.

Surely you are not comparing finding a spoon with being an expert in some complicated matter.

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