At one point, I was thinking that if any of my customer send me a snail mail with an actual physical stamp on it, we will call the customer immediately and solve their problem.
If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
431–440 of 551 posts
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#432"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.…
I've had this same policy since before AI. I kind of formalized it for myself (and this team) after enough instances of "I'm trying to do X. It's not working. Help." type messages. You need to put as much effort into the question as you expect someone to put into the answer. It's not "fairness" or "AI" or anything else, it's that doing this any other way fundamentally fucks up the team dynamics. You have a problem. Y…
I’d add that it’s basic respect and decency for your fellow humans who are paying for the attention with their own life.
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think everyone should be looking to balance their work effort against the payout of the job. They should also be changing jobs when the effort to reward ratio starts to become unfavorable compared to other jobs on the market. The problem with the personality above is that the person isn't playing like a team (like you said) but as an individual maximizing their own visibility while loading their coworkers up with t…
> They should also be changing jobs when the effort to reward ratio starts to become unfavorable compared to other jobs on the market. The problem here is that all tech companies look alike. Take for example the interview process (copied by almost any company out there that thinks they are google). Another example: the under/meets/above expectations BS. And now the most recent example of “token usage as sign of produ…
My experience couldn't be more different. The tech companies I've worked for in the past 10 years have been so completely different from each other, from interview process to company culture, that I can't agree that all tech companies are the same.
You can also look to change to different roles (product management, even sales) or jump to a different career completely.
There are options if you look. You're not going to find a dream job that pays $600K for 4 hours of no-pressure work per day and perfect coworkers, but there are a range of job options with tradeoffs along the compensation-effort pareto front.
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#434I increasingly find that I don't care whether I am talking to an anonymous AI or an anonymous human, and believe that we will increasingly stop caring. Because why not? AI will simply on average be nicer to talk to than most humans, with clearer thinking and better arguments, less contradictions, and easier to comprehend. I don't know how humans could compete with that (but it also does not seem all that horrible, gi…
have you considered that you're just progressively lowering your threshold for discomfort?
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#435The volume of LLM output is effectively infinite. Therefore, it is not worth my time or effort reading a single syllable of it. I will not read (nor correct) LLM output, since if I did, I would quickly be doing nothing else with my life. And since LLM output is infinite, but I am finite, my efforts would still be completely without results, comparatively speaking.
(6 month old repost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45936352>)
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Learn things deeply even if you use AI because its the deep knowledge workers that will keep getting hired. The problem is that this realistically is only applicable and actionable to a subset of the labor pool, and that subset is decreasing. There are a lot of people who discovered that their "deep knowledge" and "deep skill" wasn't as deep as they thought (read: "deep" enough to make them irreplaceable to their e…
Right, like I hope your deep knowledge wasn't something you can just ask Claude!
The depths of knowledge required to beat Claude will only grow with time. "Deep" knowledge will become everyday normal knowledge, and will eventually offer no competitive advantage whatsoever. Continuous education takes a lot of effort and money, and returns are ever diminishing.
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#437This exactly reflects my feelings lately. I have a specific coworker who has gone somewhat overboard - every single code review, answer to any question on email or Teams, every new story, even their personal opinions during a design or ideas meeting, are all direct AI output with no massaging or human touch or review. They're working on planning out an upcoming project, and I just get verbose and long documents to re…
And you also have people who out an idea in ChatGPT or Claude, come back with bunch of documents and think they have created a business.
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#438Obligatory Marketoonist: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#439"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.…
I've had this same policy since before AI. I kind of formalized it for myself (and this team) after enough instances of "I'm trying to do X. It's not working. Help." type messages. You need to put as much effort into the question as you expect someone to put into the answer. It's not "fairness" or "AI" or anything else, it's that doing this any other way fundamentally fucks up the team dynamics. You have a problem. Y…
> after enough instances of "I'm trying to do X. It's not working. Help." type messages.
Related to this, I will never for the life of me understand why people think it's okay to say "I get an error" without saying what the error is.
I don't expect a non-technical person to understand the error, but I do expect a non-technical person to know that what the error message is is useful to the person trying to help you and to proactively provide the contents of the error message, even if it's a shitty cell phone picture of the error.
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#440Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
an honest and accurate correlation between display of effort and value Hmmm. Your choice of words here has just sparked a realization for me. Before you said this, I was completely on board with the original post. But in juxtaposing effort with value, it illustrates that we're basing the idea on the Labor Theory of Value. That idea seems intuitive, and Adam Smith wrote about it 250 years ago. But it turns out that LT…
Use value or exchange value?