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If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

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

#361

Post by someguyiguess »

bluGill wrote: post #341
gwd wrote: post #335

"Don't expend more effort than they are" has actually long been a good principle to have internalized. Someone done only cursory research before asking a question on a mailing list? Give a cursory answer. Someone obviously spent hours trying to figure things out on their own? Give them a good chunk of your time. Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind.…

> Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind. "I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter." - Blaise Pascal. The length of the response doesn't indicate effort.

Couldn't agree more.

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

#362

Post by everyone »

I feel like I live on a different planet to many on HN.. Any time I've dabbled with the current roster of LLMs for work tasks (I'm a game programmer). They are utterly useless, complete waste of time. Definitely not something that seems promising and warrants more time invested.

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

#363

Post by Telaneo »

bluGill wrote: post #341
gwd wrote: post #335

"Don't expend more effort than they are" has actually long been a good principle to have internalized. Someone done only cursory research before asking a question on a mailing list? Give a cursory answer. Someone obviously spent hours trying to figure things out on their own? Give them a good chunk of your time. Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind.…

> Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind. "I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter." - Blaise Pascal. The length of the response doesn't indicate effort.

There are obvious exceptions to that rule. Laconic phrases are short but have a lot to them, while AI slop is long while having very little to it. But it's a decent rule of thumb when considering the middle of the bell curve.

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

#364

Post by Zambyte »

bluGill wrote: post #354
Zambyte wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because improving a high schoolers project is probably not as good of an idea as giving the original task to a senior engineer.

If the high school project has been improved by many engineers over a few years it likely is complex enough that a senior engineer cannot rewrite it for a reasonable cost. It isn't clear if next years models will be enough better that they can rewrite it for a reasonable cost. If they are they can probably extract the requirements and special cases from the code.

Following my analogy, the high school project would have been continuously extended by high schoolers passing the project on from class to class each year, rather than "improved by many engineers". The "engineers" (future models) don't get the project until currently models have had their way for a while. I think that makes the "rewrite from scratch" plan a whole lot more compelling.

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

#365

Post by Telaneo »

jappgar wrote: post #340
gwd wrote: post #335

"Don't expend more effort than they are" has actually long been a good principle to have internalized. Someone done only cursory research before asking a question on a mailing list? Give a cursory answer. Someone obviously spent hours trying to figure things out on their own? Give them a good chunk of your time. Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind.…

It takes considerable energy to train models and run inference. You can't dismiss AI generated content as "low effort", but you can dismiss it as a wasteful diversion.

The person copy-pasting an AI response is generally not the person who trained said AI. Even if the total amount of effort is fairly large, the amount of effort put in by the person you're actually interacting with, is generally small.

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

#366

Post by bandrami »

firmretention wrote: post #310
bandrami wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's a pretty good interview question because it tells me if somebody's instinct is to reinvent the wheel or not. What I didn't expect was how many people couldn't say how a wheel even works.

People are not generally answering interview questions based on instinct, but rather based on what they think the interviewer wants to hear to get the job. I would have interpreted this is as a leetcode style algo question and started by treating it as such, even though IRL my first instinct would be "get a lib that does it". Awful, awful strategy.

Nope, not remotely awful. I've made great hires from it, which is its point.

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

#367

Post by CWuestefeld »

gwd wrote: post #335

"Don't expend more effort than they are" has actually long been a good principle to have internalized. Someone done only cursory research before asking a question on a mailing list? Give a cursory answer. Someone obviously spent hours trying to figure things out on their own? Give them a good chunk of your time. Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind.…

This has been my policy for a couple of decades. When somebody posts just a bare link (especially if it's to a video), I refuse to click. If it's not worth your time to introduce why something is relevant, then it's not worth my time to go figure that out.

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

#368

Post by throwaw12 »

wccrawford wrote: post #322
swiftcoder wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you think human is a bottleneck, then either optimize for humans, or remove humans. What's the problem? Sadly, in my case, it is the auditor. Our SOC2 documents have this lovely "every change has been reviewed by at least one other human", and it's going to be a fun battle to get that reworded

I think the "and merge it" is the problem in the above comment. If a coworker is creating a ton of AI-made PRs, I think the first step should always be to run an AI against them with the "assume this is low quality code and find all problems, big and small" text that was suggested in a comment here, and let that be the first line of defense. To keep the dev on their toes, each dev should come up with their own prompt…

You have some assumptions here

> first step should always be to run an AI against them

What if they write an agent which takes the feedback and resolves them with a new commit. Which again didn't do anything other than offloading more to humans who are reviewing.

> each dev should come up with their own prompt for AI PR review and they can switch off who reviews it each time, until there are no problems remaining.

This assumes AI reviews are correct most of the time, if so, why do we need even humans. Why not have repository level code reviewer which is run immediately after code has been created?

regardless of where you move it, there is still a bottleneck: humans.

If you don't remove them, you will just pass the ball between agents and at the end of the day human still needs to review it.

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

#369

Post by [deleted] »

bluGill wrote: post #341
gwd wrote: post #335

"Don't expend more effort than they are" has actually long been a good principle to have internalized. Someone done only cursory research before asking a question on a mailing list? Give a cursory answer. Someone obviously spent hours trying to figure things out on their own? Give them a good chunk of your time. Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind.…

> Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind. "I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter." - Blaise Pascal. The length of the response doesn't indicate effort.

[deleted]

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

#370

Post by keiferski »

bluGill wrote: post #341
gwd wrote: post #335

"Don't expend more effort than they are" has actually long been a good principle to have internalized. Someone done only cursory research before asking a question on a mailing list? Give a cursory answer. Someone obviously spent hours trying to figure things out on their own? Give them a good chunk of your time. Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind.…

> Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind. "I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter." - Blaise Pascal. The length of the response doesn't indicate effort.

This is true if you're writing a letter about a difficult topic.

For HN comments, 99.9% of the time, a short comment is a low effort one and should be disregarded.

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