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If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

tombedor.dev

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

#11

Post by edot »

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.

For some things, yes. But I'm half-assing some really cool stuff right now. Made a scraper to pull my city's meeting minutes, agendas, recordings, made transcripts. Regex for "Flock", found every mention, passed those files into a cheap model (DeepSeek V4), had an understanding of who in my city is down with building the surveillance state and who isn't. I've got research on everyone, and had emails drafted for each one based on what they said. Quotes and figures and all. I lightly polished each email and fired 'em off. Already got some replies back. Plenty more in the quiver too (pulled and analyzed CSVs of FOIA'd datasets).

If they're gonna spy on me with AI cameras, I can oppose them with AI research. :)

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

#12

Post by TFNA »

sshine wrote: post #3

> when [sending AI generated content to teammates], I take care to clearly label what is AI generated Reading AI-generated text for hours every day, it's obvious to me. I take care to make my messages easily readable. I don't care if they're AI-made, as long as they're short. I'm a very verbose person, and if I don't make an effort at being concise, I'm just as annoying as the average AI. Being flooded with AI text e…

Brevity is the big disaster of human-generated text since the rise of the phone as default device and the appearance of Twitter. To discuss matters with sufficient depth and nuance, one often has to write a few solid paragraphs.

If people are now wincing at longform text because they automatically assume it was LLM-generated, then that bodes ill.

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

#14

Post by doctorpangloss »

Most OSS should adopt DKMS-style extensions systems so that people can code and distribute their own solutions to problems. Then it doesn't really matter, right? If the end user is using Claude to fix stuff in your shit, extensions make it irrelevant what "code owners" think.

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

#17

Post by abnercoimbre »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #9
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.

We just need bots to read all these facebook posts and then we can put the phone down and go back to doing something real.

My last post [0] has proof-of-work: video evidence of my physical notes. How many people are willing to draft a complete essay on pen and paper first?

[0] https://abner.page/post/are-we-harold-bloom/

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

#18

Post by xp84 »

pevansgreenwood wrote: post #8

Was it Blaise Pascal who wrote: I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter. The argument that "using AI to generate text is disrespectful because it took no effort to write" misses the point. Respect for the recipient is measured by whether the message serves the recipient's needs, not how it is produced. Similarly, any errors are the senders responsibility, and not the fau…

I agree that the bottom line really ought to be usefulness; if it's useful and doesn't waste my time, it's fine if you received it by the use of seer stones for all I care.

However, I don't blame anybody for having red lines like this:

1. Don't send me a big long string that is merely LLM output resulting from pasting a trivial prompt + text I already have access to (or my own words!). I know about Claude too, and if that's what I wanted I'd have done it myself.

2. Don't throw an AI-generated argument at me that you don't even fully understand.

3. If you're preparing information for me, and it's overly verbose and wastes my time, I'll be twice as mad if it's obvious AI than if it's obviously human. This is basically the article's point. The asymmetry of wasting an hour of my time reading a bunch of crap that took 15 seconds of your time should make it clear why this is antisocial behavior.

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

#19

Post by paytonjjones »

edot wrote: post #11
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.

For some things, yes. But I'm half-assing some really cool stuff right now. Made a scraper to pull my city's meeting minutes, agendas, recordings, made transcripts. Regex for "Flock", found every mention, passed those files into a cheap model (DeepSeek V4), had an understanding of who in my city is down with building the surveillance state and who isn't. I've got research on everyone, and had emails drafted for each…

You created the surveillance state to fight the surveillance state lol

Edit: it's a joke people

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

#20

Post by nlawalker »

This isn’t sufficient, it needs to be “if you are asking for assumption of accountability, demonstrate human effort.”

In my experience, people who make requests like this don’t care about your attention, they only care about getting you on the hook for something. Your application of attention as a requirement for that is irrelevant to them.

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