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Doing the thing is doing the thing

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Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#131

Post by falcor84 »

jgeada wrote: post #61

At a previous company we used to joke that most of management was a "problem admiration society": They'd love to talk about problems, investigate them from all angles, make plans on how to plan to solve the problem, identify who caused it or how to blame for it, quantify how much it costs us or how much money we could make from solving it, everything and anything except actually doing something about it. It was never…

That definitely happens, but I wish had the displeasure of working at companies that were enamored with the solution they have, and couldn't be convinced to look again at the problem and see how it's changed since they originally solved it. As with most anything, the best approach is to somewhere in the middle, combining a love for the problem with a drive to repeatedly solve it. And one of the best tools for that seems to be dog-fooding, when the people in the company really want to use it for themselves.

Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#132

Post by concats »

A_Venom_Roll wrote: post #123
jackfranklyn wrote: post #77

[flagged]

While I do agree with the content, this tone of writing feels awfully similar to LLM generated posts that flood some productivity subreddits recently. Are there really people who "spend weeks planning the perfect architecture" to build some automation tools for themselves? I don't buy that. Commenter's history is full of 'red flags': - "The real cost of this complexity isn't the code itself - it's onboarding" - "This…

I didn't catch it immediately, but after you pointed it out I totally agree. That comment is for sure LLM written. If that involved a human in the loop or was fully automated I cannot say.

We currently live in the very thin sliver of time where the internet is already full of LLM writing, but where it's not quite invisible yet. It's just a matter of time before those Dead Internet Theory guys score another point and these comments are indistinguishable from novel human thought.

Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#133

Post by pickleRick243 »

gabriel-uribe wrote: post #127
A_Venom_Roll wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I do agree with the content, this tone of writing feels awfully similar to LLM generated posts that flood some productivity subreddits recently. Are there really people who "spend weeks planning the perfect architecture" to build some automation tools for themselves? I don't buy that. Commenter's history is full of 'red flags': - "The real cost of this complexity isn't the code itself - it's onboarding" - "This…

This reminds me of how bad browsing the internet will likely get this year. There are a ton of 'Cursor for marketing' style startups going online now that basically spam every acquisition channel possible. Not sure about this user specifically, but interesting that a lot of their comments follow a pattern of ' nailed it'

This is true, but the need to read critically especially on the internet has become an indispensable skill anyway.

Psy-ops, astroturfing, now LLM slop.

Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#135

Post by [deleted] »

A_Venom_Roll wrote: post #123
jackfranklyn wrote: post #77

[flagged]

While I do agree with the content, this tone of writing feels awfully similar to LLM generated posts that flood some productivity subreddits recently. Are there really people who "spend weeks planning the perfect architecture" to build some automation tools for themselves? I don't buy that. Commenter's history is full of 'red flags': - "The real cost of this complexity isn't the code itself - it's onboarding" - "This…

[deleted]

Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#136

Post by dspillett »

concats wrote: post #132
A_Venom_Roll wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I do agree with the content, this tone of writing feels awfully similar to LLM generated posts that flood some productivity subreddits recently. Are there really people who "spend weeks planning the perfect architecture" to build some automation tools for themselves? I don't buy that. Commenter's history is full of 'red flags': - "The real cost of this complexity isn't the code itself - it's onboarding" - "This…

I didn't catch it immediately, but after you pointed it out I totally agree. That comment is for sure LLM written. If that involved a human in the loop or was fully automated I cannot say. We currently live in the very thin sliver of time where the internet is already full of LLM writing, but where it's not quite invisible yet. It's just a matter of time before those Dead Internet Theory guys score another point and…

> … the internet is already full of LLM writing, but where it's not quite invisible yet. It's just a matter of time …

I don't think it will become significantly less visible⁰ in the near future. The models are going to hit the problem of being trained on LLM generated content which will cause the growth in their effectiveness quite a bit. It is already a concern that people are trying to develop mitigations for, and I expect it to hit hard soon unless some new revolutionary technique pops up¹².

> those Dead Internet Theory guys score another point

I'm betting that us Habsburg Internet predictors will have our little we-told-you-so moment first!

--------

[0] Though it is already hard to tell when you don't have your thinking head properly on sometimes. I bet it is much harder for non-native speakers, even relatively fluent ones, of the target language. I'm attempting to learn Spanish and there is no way I'd see the difference at my level in the language (A1, low A2 on a good day) given it often isn't immediately obvious in my native language. It might be interesting to study how LLM generated content affects people at different levels (primary language, fluent second, fluent but in a localised creole, etc.).

[1] and that revolution will likely be in detecting generated content, which will make generated content easier to flag for other purposes too, starting an arms race rather than solving the problem overall

[2] such a revolution will pop up, it is inevitable, but I think (hope?) the chance of it happening soon is low

Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#137

Post by seec »

So the typical nonsensical argument is that an architect should be a builder. Alright.

You can very much do the thing when it's not too costly to fuck up. For many important things, thinking about doing the thing is even more important than doing the thing.

Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#138

Post by dspillett »

A_Venom_Roll wrote: post #123
jackfranklyn wrote: post #77

[flagged]

While I do agree with the content, this tone of writing feels awfully similar to LLM generated posts that flood some productivity subreddits recently. Are there really people who "spend weeks planning the perfect architecture" to build some automation tools for themselves? I don't buy that. Commenter's history is full of 'red flags': - "The real cost of this complexity isn't the code itself - it's onboarding" - "This…

> Are there really people who "spend weeks planning the perfect architecture" to build some automation tools for themselves?

Probably. I've been known to spend weeks planning something that I then forget and leave completely unstarted because other things took my attention!

> Commenter's history is full of 'red flags'

I wonder how much these red flags are starting to change how people write without LLMs, to avoid being accused of being a bot. A number of text checking tools suggested replacing ASCII hyphens with m-dashes in the pre-LLM-boom days¹ and I started listening to them, though I no longer do. That doesn't affect the overall sentence structure, but a lot of people jump on m-/n- dashes anywhere in text as a sign, not just in “it isn't - it is ” like patterns.

It is certainly changing what people write about, with many threads like this one being diverted into discussing LLM output and how to spot it!

--------

[1] This is probably why there are many of them in the training data, so they are seen as significant by tokenisation steps, so they come out of the resulting models often.

Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#139

Post by bodge5000 »

A_Venom_Roll wrote: post #123
jackfranklyn wrote: post #77

[flagged]

While I do agree with the content, this tone of writing feels awfully similar to LLM generated posts that flood some productivity subreddits recently. Are there really people who "spend weeks planning the perfect architecture" to build some automation tools for themselves? I don't buy that. Commenter's history is full of 'red flags': - "The real cost of this complexity isn't the code itself - it's onboarding" - "This…

> Are there really people who "spend weeks planning the perfect architecture" to build some automation tools for themselves?

Ironically, I see this very often with AI/vibe coding, and whilst it does happen with traditional coding too, it happens with AI to an extreme degree. Spend 5 minutes on twitter and you'll see a load of people talking about their insane new vibe coding setup and next to nothing of what they're actually building

Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#140

Post by bodge5000 »

concats wrote: post #132
A_Venom_Roll wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I do agree with the content, this tone of writing feels awfully similar to LLM generated posts that flood some productivity subreddits recently. Are there really people who "spend weeks planning the perfect architecture" to build some automation tools for themselves? I don't buy that. Commenter's history is full of 'red flags': - "The real cost of this complexity isn't the code itself - it's onboarding" - "This…

I didn't catch it immediately, but after you pointed it out I totally agree. That comment is for sure LLM written. If that involved a human in the loop or was fully automated I cannot say. We currently live in the very thin sliver of time where the internet is already full of LLM writing, but where it's not quite invisible yet. It's just a matter of time before those Dead Internet Theory guys score another point and…

To me it seems like it'd only get more visible as it gets more normal, or at least more predictable.

Remember back in the early 2000's when people would photoshop one animals head onto another and trick people into thinking "science has created a new animal". That obviously doesn't work anymore because we know thats possible, even relatively trivial, with photoshop. I imagine the same will happen here, as AI writing gets more common we'll begin a subconscious process of determining if the writer is human. That's probably a bit unfairly taxing on our brains, but we survived photoshop I suppose

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