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AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

rickmanelius.com

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Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#301

Post by otterley »

godwinson__4-8 wrote: post #164
gortok wrote: post #36

The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person. If I'm reading something on the internet, I'm either reading it to learn, or I'm reading it to be persuaded. If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I…

Yes, we get it. Laziness has always abounded in human endeavors. Despite the common social norms against it, there is a clear reason. Obviously, if you can get the same reward with less work it is a greater ROI. The incentive is pretty straightforward. In a mechanized world the incentives are even more aligned towards a kind of laziness given the capacity for automation to scale. None of this is new. People who act l…

It's not controversial that if left alone, most people will tend towards minimizing laborious work, and that the use of technology to do that ought to be expected. Consider, however:

1. This work was largely optional to begin with. Few people actually need to post on LinkedIn, write blogs, etc. It's arguably a mountain of content waste (which is why the term "slop" is so fitting). Not only does it waste the producer's time to produce it, but it also wastes the reader's time to try to consume it.

2. It's not a substitute for actual work. If it becomes clear that you're using LLM to do work you are paid to do, eventually the person who pays you will notice, and replace you with the LLM. If your employer values you because of the work you do, it's in your best interest to do the job yourself.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#302

Post by qarl2 »

Alpha3031 wrote: post #298
qarl2 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course not. I didn't say anything like that. But I do see a consistent trend here regarding hostility to AI. It seems to be a pattern, and a strange one. I've never had someone angry at me for posting a Google search, for example.

I've never seen anyone post a copy-and-paste of some pages of the Google search results while also excluding the search term, and I would find that bizzare. I would assume that you, like most people posting a Google search, would post the link to that search, which in the case of Google includes a copy of what would be equivalent to the prompt. In my experience, most people posting Google links would also include a s…

>I've never seen anyone post a copy-and-paste of some pages

I have.

For example, I was looking for a bathmat. My wife pasted me a list. Just a week ago.

I don't think my wife is bizarre. It's unfortunate that you do.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#303

Post by panopticon »

sebastiennight wrote: post #163
LPisGood wrote: post #56

My coworkers continue to dump hundreds of lines of AI documentation in every PR and every other line of code has between one and ten lines of AI generated comments, talking about the real unlock and how things are byte for byte identical on the load bearing path or how the acceptance ladder is misleading. Features are coming out and metrics are improving, but we’re basically in a post readability code base, with the…

Am I the only one who's had Claude almost systematically remove human-written comments? It might be touching one line of actual code in a file, and take advantage of it to remove 20+ lines of actual useful comments. Everybody is talking about the opposite, so I'm wondering if this is rare.

Is this in one of the skills or CLAUDE.md? This was happening in our codebase, but turned out it was interpreting an instruction to not add "what" comments as license to strip out comments.

Sometimes I have luck interrogating Claude on why it did something. It'll either point to a skill or agent file with the culprit, or it'll respond with some vapid nonsense and apologize.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#304

Post by Aramgutang »

gortok wrote: post #36

The part that astonishes me is that in the year of our common era two thousand twenty-six that it's not universally offensive and reviling to post an AI-generated response to another person. If I'm reading something on the internet, I'm either reading it to learn, or I'm reading it to be persuaded. If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I…

There's an old meme tweet that goes like this:

> the fact that i'm at risk of seeing a 14 year old's opinion at any point during my day is a human rights violation

This always strongly resonated with me; if something was written by a 14-year-old, I don't want to read it, end of story. There is no way it can provide value to me. I shudder to think that I may have unknowingly argued with 14-year-olds on the Internet in the past.

But if I had a child who was 14, I wouldn't object to interacting with them, obviously.

It's the same with LLMs: the only time I want to be reading LLM output is when it's my model that I prompted myself.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#305

Post by ilaksh »

Valid and fair especially in the 95% of cases where the AI added a lot of unnecessary detail.

On the other hand, I suspect that we are pretty quickly going to get to the point within a few years where we realize that the best AIs are not just being overly verbose. But rather their communication is just more compressed and thorough.

So even though we still see a lot of jaggedness and weird failures in some places，in other ways I think this is actually an aspect of intelligence where AI has surpassed humans. Just in terms of being able to deal with a certain density of information.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#306

Post by godwinson__4-8 »

otterley wrote: post #301
godwinson__4-8 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we get it. Laziness has always abounded in human endeavors. Despite the common social norms against it, there is a clear reason. Obviously, if you can get the same reward with less work it is a greater ROI. The incentive is pretty straightforward. In a mechanized world the incentives are even more aligned towards a kind of laziness given the capacity for automation to scale. None of this is new. People who act l…

It's not controversial that if left alone, most people will tend towards minimizing laborious work, and that the use of technology to do that ought to be expected. Consider, however: 1. This work was largely optional to begin with. Few people actually need to post on LinkedIn, write blogs, etc. It's arguably a mountain of content waste (which is why the term "slop" is so fitting). Not only does it waste the producer'…

1. This doesn't make any sense. On this reading, most any work is "optional" in that you had the option to do something else. But few people have the option to not work at all. If creating slop generates a decent enough ROI, and you have to work, then why is it waste? It may be waste to you, but for them it is an income. Just like there are entire industries or products I might personally think are a waste and yet make tons of money. In the modern economy most work is optional then. So what point are you making?

2. Yes, people get replaced at work all the time. And actually most employees who figure out who to maximize their own ROI (and thus their companies) get rewarded, not punished. If your slop code is "good enough" and you are moving the metrics the C suite cares about, your colleague taking far longer to create far less is obviously going to be punished.

If some sea change happens that replaces a whole class of workers, that is beyond the scope of the individual worker to think about. The modern economy can be viewed as one long process of automation, where most workers have been subsidizing their own eventual replacement, given the privileged position of capital over labor. This is historically obvious. It does not mean it benefits the individual to go back into some state of nature, or not reap what benefits they may gain from the prevailing system while it is still the one at hand.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#307

Post by Alpha3031 »

qarl2 wrote: post #302
Alpha3031 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen anyone post a copy-and-paste of some pages of the Google search results while also excluding the search term, and I would find that bizzare. I would assume that you, like most people posting a Google search, would post the link to that search, which in the case of Google includes a copy of what would be equivalent to the prompt. In my experience, most people posting Google links would also include a s…

>I've never seen anyone post a copy-and-paste of some pages I have. For example, I was looking for a bathmat. My wife pasted me a list. Just a week ago. I don't think my wife is bizarre. It's unfortunate that you do.

I said I would find the action bizarre ("that", not "them"). Personally, I don't find it unfortunate to admit that some things still surprise me. If you choose to interpret that as judgement of your wife as a person, then that is up to you.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#308

Post by supermatt »

minimaxir wrote: post #214
supermatt wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which is barely any at all Clearly you either didn't read it, misunderstood it, disbelieved it, or just DGAF :)

Many different people in this HN submission have given you similar feedback: given that, you should consider that your priors are not correct.

There are also many others stating the same things - and they are getting flagged and downvoted for it.

Just because those of you who disagree are more vocal, downvote and flag-happy doesn't make you right.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#309

Post by rbongers »

LPisGood wrote: post #56

My coworkers continue to dump hundreds of lines of AI documentation in every PR and every other line of code has between one and ten lines of AI generated comments, talking about the real unlock and how things are byte for byte identical on the load bearing path or how the acceptance ladder is misleading. Features are coming out and metrics are improving, but we’re basically in a post readability code base, with the…

Two very useful directives to give AI when it comes to documentation:

1) Document what's there, not the diff. Documentation of how code was removed or changed to fix a bug or add a feature is not useful and difficult to maintain; documentation should explain how code works now.

2) Documentation should live close to the source as possible. Prefer line based comments and standardized function documentation. Top-level sweeping architectural essays are not maintainable for every change.

The last will depend on your codebase. It CAN be very useful to have a human-readable spec documented for the entire program and have it updated when anything changes. But the key is again, you're CHANGING it every time. If you add a whole new disconnected documentation file it should set off alarm bells; nothing in one system is truly disconnected.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#310

Post by kennyadam »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #276
Insimwytim wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are some, who couldn't be a part of the public conversation, precisely because of they inability to add anything to said conversation. LLMs enables them to post (or, rather, paste) something, in an attempt to trick others into believing they do have something to say. They think they sound smart now, because LLMs are "very much the “stupid person’s idea of an intelligent person”"[1] So now we are flooded…

Wow! that comment you linked speaks to me. I was watching a review video for a game yesterday that was so obviously written by AI it was actually painful to listen to. I started reading the comments and there were several people praising this Youtuber on their great use of metaphor. Literally "subbed because you're such an amazing writer." It actually shook me to my core. If those were real people making those commen…

At least you didn’t over-react. Some people seem so afraid of consuming AI-generated content that they see it everywhere. A popular YouTuber says “thanks for the pushback” in a YouTube video and has the mob at his door, instantly, despite it not being written by AI. In the comments for any blog post or article that hits the HN front page, there is always someone confidently calling it out for being unmistakeably written by Claude. It’s so tiring. Let’s say the YouTube video that rocked the very foundation of your being was scripted with AI assistance. It was apparently good enough for people to praise it specifically. Why is that a problem? If it wasn’t AI, which may well be the case, would your soul be calmed?
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