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The human-in-the-loop is tired

pydantic.dev

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Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#201

Post by baq »

claudiulodro wrote: post #199
baq wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying I'd rather have a dude in a digger than a hundred folks who need to be supplied, some of them drunk, some of them thieves, some of them just plain bad at digging and only making a mess of the dig site.

In this metaphor, your dude in a digger could also be drunk or a thief or bad at his job, and that'd be a bigger problem vs. a few people from a 100 person hand crew.

This is true, but my priors say it’s much less likely to get a thief or a drunk in a digger than in a group of a hundred folks with shovels.

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#202

Post by Barbing »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #111
Barbing wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sure—pretty sure—we can use em-dashes w/o setting off the slop bells. And try to substitute them, you may; but the bell might still ring. (Yeah it stinks we have to adapt to avoid sounding like a model, especially for the best writers who were probably ripped off a lot more than the rest of us.)

I have started honing a method of trolling where i intentionally write like a crappy AI, but, do it by hand, just to prank my anti-AI friends. Gotta get my kicks somewhere. It's not just fun-- it's annoying. :-)

lol :)

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#203

Post by streb-lo »

queenkjuul wrote: post #172
xtracto wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh but it really is. An LLM is no magic wand. It's a model as its name rigthly indicates. Those of us who have worked in modeling and simulations know two principles of models: - garbage in, garbage out - all models are wrong, some are useful. Point being, usually when "the model is wrong" it's because we put the wrong input (too complicated prompt for the model?) or something similar. Its just a machine, like a meat…

I really think LLMs are capable of screwing up good input. They're not deterministic like a meat grinder

I think you mean "They're not deterministic, like a meat grinder"

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#204

Post by NoGravitas »

taneq wrote: post #129
roomey wrote: post #107

We've started calling it "Human on the hook" instead of human in the loop in work. It is more accurate, in terms of, it only matters when something goes wrong. Edit:"On the hook" is a general expression that means if something goes wrong it lands on you as the responsibile party, generally in a negative way. As in, if it goes right, you don't get kudos, if it goes wrong, you're on the hook for it

Employee Role: Blameable Component.

Employee Role: Meat Shield

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#205

Post by bluefirebrand »

taneq wrote: post #129
roomey wrote: post #107

We've started calling it "Human on the hook" instead of human in the loop in work. It is more accurate, in terms of, it only matters when something goes wrong. Edit:"On the hook" is a general expression that means if something goes wrong it lands on you as the responsibile party, generally in a negative way. As in, if it goes right, you don't get kudos, if it goes wrong, you're on the hook for it

Employee Role: Blameable Component.

I initially read this as "Blameable Compost" and honestly I sometimes feel like that's how executives think of me, so it still is accurate

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#206

Post by zelphirkalt »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #108
athrowaway3z wrote: post #102

> I came to the formalisms of software engineering through painful experience rather than academic instruction. If anything, that made me take those principles more seriously once I understood them. Not related to the article, but I've seen this thought before and I think its wrong. This isn't what good academic instructions gets you. Instead, they provide a systematic approach to learning foundational/core formalism…

I worked for years at a manfuacturing facility where the engineers were men who only had a high school education and slowly (from the 80s through to the late 2010s) had been promoted up to doing engineering, but, with ZERO academic or theoretical background. It was a massive disadvantage for them. They could carefully recreate the exact same thing over and over for new products that were similar to the previous versi…

If only we listened more to people who studied CS on the job. Many disasters could prevented entirely.

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#207

Post by bluefirebrand »

ryandrake wrote: post #195
BrandonM wrote: post #96

> But the bottleneck was never the code. It was always the human attention, the engineering judgment, the ability to hold a coherent vision for a system. We just didn't notice because writing code felt like the hard part. I keep wondering what I’m missing in the AI enthusiasm, and maybe this is a big part of it? Writing code has never felt like the hard part to me. In my 20s, I was excited about using a computer. AIM…

Someone in a HN thread a few months ago put it in a way that makes a lot of sense to me: "AI seems good at things you are not good at." So, if you're not actually a programmer, or not a good programmer, you look at AI output and think "Wow, I could never have done that so well/fast. AI is great at this!" It's solving something he's not good at. On the other hand, if you already are a good/skilled programmer, AI is no…

This rings true to me. There are some pretty notable software engineers that are saying otherwise, that they are getting tons of value out of AI, but there are also some very notable engineers saying otherwise. There are studies that say there are no improvements, some that say there are small improvements, some that say there are actually decreases. We're very far from any settled understanding of what LLM use is doing

Lots of noise, and no actually measureable improvements. Just a lot of anecdotes

And people should keep in mind how much money that there is riding on this. Especially on a site like this, there's probably people who are multi-, maybe even hundred-, millionaires if their AI bets continue to pay off.

I dunno. There's a lot of dust in the air. All I know is I hate using it for code generation. I don't like being personally accountable for code I didn't write. I don't like TDD and I don't think large test suites are a guarantee of good software anyways. I'd rather work with a team of eager juniors than prompt an LLM all day.

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#208

Post by bluefirebrand »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #110
bluefirebrand wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why do people feel the need to run this fast Because if they don't they feel like they will be replaced by someone who will

This attitude gets people to willingly engage in abusive crunch practices such as in the games industry. I think the people who are like this are the ones who later talk about crunch like it was good in some way or necessary. Basically a bad relation to labor and sustainable lifelong work.

I agree with you completely and I push for saner work-life balance anywhere I work. Unfortunately this unhealthy work culture is really entrenched most places

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#209

Post by eugmai86 »

Part of the fatigue comes from agents explaining everything in prose. When important operations happen through constrained tools, the human can review structured inputs, results and logs instead of reconstructing the entire conversation. Fatigue comes when doing same things many times day by day. What we did in our team - created MCP server that does most of routine operations automatically for us. We explicitly state to LLM that output shall be in simple words; structured in this or that way depending on the project and task. Yes architecture and decision making still on our shoulders but this is the part of the dev job nowadays

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#210

Post by verdverm »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #62
verdverm wrote: post #38

Should we not get to work less if Ai is increasing productivity so much while also making us exhausted more quickly? Perhaps on the way to UBI and the end of labor, we could get a 32 and 24h work wweek with lots more vacation, my hope at least

Name one time in all of history when increased productivity translated to workers working less. I'll wait.

We used to have people, including children, working up to 80 hours a week. We now have laws that limit those things. One does not have to create a direct causal relationship. One should more likely expect them to be separate because of the adversarial aspects between labor-capital.

https://www.aeaweb.org/research/workweek-restrictions-great-...

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