Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

tombedor.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 551 posts

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

#381

Post by softwaredoug »

It's not just about being annoyed - it's very practical.

If the creator exerted human effort, they'll be able to maintain it. They can take responsibility for it. Even if the value of the 100% AI generated artifact is amazing, and the "creator" of it can't actually maintain it, then what's the point?

It's similar to scenarios I've seen where a brilliant ML person comes into an org, trains a model, that seems to solve an important problem. Invariably when that person leaves the org, the ML model stops being used, the team falls back on older / technically worse methods. But the team can be responsible / own it in a way they couldn't the brilliant one-off work.

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

#382

Post by mindwok »

Archer6621 wrote: post #358
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.…

These kinds of principles are sensible at their core, and I am a big proponent of the mindset, but the main problem as a sibling comment pointed out in a way is that this assumes that everyone is striving for an honest and accurate correlation between display of effort and value, and that everyone is looking deep enough into and behind that display to recognize the true value behind it. But actual effort, let alone v…

I’d push back on this, I think people have a very intrinsic sense of what is valuable and often if you think it’s “perception” of value being rewarded, it’s just that you value something different than that person.

Even in performative scenarios, like say someone gets promoted at work over another person because they are a great “performer” and always make noise, whereas the other actually delivers - they’re being promoted because the promotion is defensible and legible for their superior. That is true value for them, just not to another viewer.

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

#383

Post by [deleted] »

rwmj wrote: post #197
usefulcat wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is to merge more of his PRs on the condition that he takes at least partial responsibility for any resulting problems.

That's not how anything works. Even if he says he's going to take responsibility, when the customer call comes in at midnight you're going to be the one fixing his problems.

[deleted]

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

#384

Post by rightbyte »

swiftcoder wrote: post #348
rightbyte wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you place all burden on high performers If their PRs don't get merged they don't perform. It is trivial to overload your coworkers with secondary tasks due to your "high performance".

> If their PRs don't get merged they don't perform. It is trivial to overload your coworkers with secondary tasks due to your "high performance". We're all aware that a huge portion of the busywork that makes a team successful is not actually reflected in their upwards-facing deliverables (increasing test coverage, improving infra, adopting new tools/methodologies, preemptive security patching, etc). Your actual high…

Yeah I agree. I was trying to makee the point that it is quite easy to make yourself blocked by others and it is a deep skill to get other stuff done while blocked anyway, like say cleanups and tests etc.

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

#385

Post by inigyou »

visarga wrote: post #131
emodendroket wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if everyone is telling you they want you to adapt AI, then it's rational to see just how much of your job you can get it to do for you.

It's even worse when everyone around you is using it. How can you keep up? Companies face the same dilemma: investors, competitors, and users already use AI and have factored it into their expectations.

AI is supposed to make people 100x more productive. We know it doesn't because nobody remade Windows in 6 months or Photoshop in 1 month. It's just memorized more common cases, that's all. You used to not be able to oneshot a three.js game, now you can, but that's only because it's memorized more three.js games, not because it's more intelligent.

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

#386

Post by inigyou »

nkrisc wrote: post #380
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.

But that's why the context of the question is important. It's not clear from your comment, but I'd give a different answer if the question was strictly academic in nature (reinventing the wheel) or focused on practical work realities (use a library).

Even using a library isn't that practical. It may be the zeitgeist in JavaScript but that doesn't mean it's actually a good idea. Nobody remembers left-pad? If you're writing Java or Python then checking if your date class can already do it is a good idea.

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

#387

Post by Tade0 »

neogodless wrote: post #319
Tade0 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latter has an easy fix: the perpetrator is not allowed to take new work while there are pending review comments left unaddressed.

By perpetrator you mean the person postponing performing a code review? Right? Right?! Otherwise you place all burden on high performers to not only push PRs but babysit the rest of the team. It's not an easy fix, especially with AI letting people cosplay as high performers.

To make myself clear:

Reviewers have comments which were not addressed by the PR author - author not allowed to do other work.

No such comments, especially no reviews - author can do other work.

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

#388

Post by inigyou »

carlosjobim wrote: post #120
zetanor wrote: post #56

What I find strange is how rarely LLM output is distributed alongside the LLM input, especially outside of code repos. Why can't I rerun the prompt that resulted in your work next year, when models have gotten better? Are people ashamed of their prompts? Ashamed of having used AI? i unno Prompt used to generate this message: "Create a comment for Hacker News which bemoans the lack of AI prompts being shared with the…

For your next prompt, tell it to end with a hateful and offensive tangent to prove its humanity, since LLMs have those "safe guards".

I don't know if writing the URL will get me banned but someone had this idea for licenses at plus.com

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

#389

Post by jjice »

niuzeta wrote: post #34

A very prolific coworker who fully embraced claude has inflicted the team with a flood of AI-generated PRs. About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention. I don't think anyone - including myself - _intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It's just that he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at. This single headline perfectly captures what…

> About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention

What irks me the most with this new trend is when people don't review the code themselves thoroughly enough and you're pointing out obvious flaws that you know that they should be aware of. LLMs can be such a great tool, but it's unfair to make people review your code before you've even seemingly looked at it yourself.

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

#390

Post by dormento »

Telemakhos wrote: post #90
Jensson wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will help if your wall of text cost less tokens than theirs, they will run out before you do if you have the same company quota per person.

I'm not sure what the right vocabulary would be to describe this, but this sounds more like the calculations behind nuclear war than a healthy collegiality or cooperative work relationship. This sets up a competition to determine a loser based on resource scarcity, not a way to achieve mutual goals to advance the organization's goals.

In a previous job, we had this saying "killing penguins" we used when referring to throwing more computing resources (more GNU/Linux instances) than necessary at a problem. In today's landscape of indiscriminate AI spending, I bet we could repurpose the term to mean "actually negatively impacting the arctic biodiversity".

We are all throwing penguins at each other.

Post reply on HN