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Doing the thing is doing the thing

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Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#171

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…

> The tone of writing feels awfully similar to LLM. This particular piece is LinkedIn “copy pasta” with many verbatim or mildly variant copies. Example: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/chriswillx_preparing-to-do-th... And in turn, see: https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-... Relatedly, LLMs clearly picked the "LinkedIn influencer" style up. My guess is some cross-over between those who write th…

I suppose we missed the change to make that the "Linkedinfluencer" style ?

Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#172
post #75
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…

you remove "managers" then simply rate of output goes up. specially the middle managers i.e engineering managers, senior engineering manager, director of engineering duh duh there's less coordination to do - to keep managers up to date. the most functional software orgs out there - don't have managers

Which orgs did you have in mind?

Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

we didn't really survive photoshop.

The obviously fake ones were easy to detect, and the less obvious ones took some some sleuthing to detect. But the good fakes totally fly under the radar. You literally have no idea how much of the images you see are doctored well because you can't tell.

Same for LLMs in the near future (or perhaps already). What will we do when we'll realize we have no way of distinguishing man from bot on the internet?

Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#176

[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'm not so sure. There's a fair amount of voice and first person in their writing. I wonder if they just use LLMs so much that the language and style of LLMs have rubbed off on them.

Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#177

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…

> While I do agree with the content, this tone of writing feels awfully similar to LLM generated posts > Commenter's history is full of 'red flags': - "The real cost of this complexity isn't the code itself - it's onboarding" - "This resonates." Wow it's obvious in the full comment history. What is the purpose for this stuff? Do social marketing services maintain armies of bot accounts that just build up credibility…

Dark forest, y'all. We live in the grey goo scenario of content.

Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except you do this in a corporate setting and they will stop you the second it works. And then you are stuck maintaining a barely working version forever. I learned this the bad way, but now I just lie and say it doesn't work until it's good enough for me

This is what it looks like when trust has broken down at a company. Management don't trust engineers when they say "this needs more time". And engineers don't trust management with the truth (it kinda works - we really could ship it now if we wanted to). Remarkably common, but not inevitable. Thankfully there's plenty of workplaces which don't look like this. And yeah, lying is certainly one way to get work done in a…

I think the problem is that in the current system, the blame is always on the engineer. If you ship something early and it didn't work, then it's your fault because you didn't QA it enough.

If you don't ship it in time it's also your fault

This is bound to happen with any company that needs to deliver to clients. Sales are incentivized to sell at all cost, even if the product is not there yet.

Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#179
post #4

This is very similar to [1] (as discussed here [2]). It is a good message though, which is why I remember the earlier post at all. 1. https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-... 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45939431

It’s eye-brow-raisingly similar to StrangestLoop’s original article

Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#180

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…

> While I do agree with the content, this tone of writing feels awfully similar to LLM generated posts > Commenter's history is full of 'red flags': - "The real cost of this complexity isn't the code itself - it's onboarding" - "This resonates." Wow it's obvious in the full comment history. What is the purpose for this stuff? Do social marketing services maintain armies of bot accounts that just build up credibility…

Building up karma, for its own sake or to gain the right to flag politically disagreeable content
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