5 ms·

"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 quest

• jappgar 4mo ago
  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.
  • yCombLinks 4mo ago
    Way to miss the point. Bob on the other side of the room didn't train the model
  • kingkawn 4mo ago
    You can’t take credit for other people’s work to displace the absence of your own
  • Telaneo 4mo ago
    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.
    • inigyou 4mo ago
      Back when people would train Markov bots on IRC that was actually something novel for the first 30 minutes and you could appreciate it because they put in the work
  • doctorpangloss 4mo ago
    @dang it's too bad the most interesting single comment in this whole thread is grayed out. as much as i love reading the same thing written 1,200 different ways, maybe the whole system needs to be revisited
  • lewispollard 4mo ago
    That's like saying that low effort human-generated posts are worth your time because the phones and computers they're writing on take a lot of time and effort to build from scratch.
• bluGill 4mo ago
  > 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.
  • someguyiguess 4mo ago
    Couldn't agree more.
  • Telaneo 4mo ago
    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.
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  • keiferski 4mo ago
    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.
    • mlhpdx 4mo ago
      on the other hand, when I see a long post here I assume it’s yet another ego-driven tirade and skip past it.
      • hliyan 4mo ago
        > yet another ego-driven tirade I tried to recall the last time I saw what I felt was an ego-driven tirade on HN comments, and I'm currently drawing a blank. There's a lot of what's called "performative erudition", and there is the occasional lengthy diatribe, but I would call neither one of those ego-driven tirades.
• dentemple 4mo ago
  > Either don't respond, or respond in kind. !
  • dredmorbius 4mo ago
    <https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/14/exclamation/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/14/exclamation/> ?
• Archer6621 4mo ago
  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 value, is not always clearly visible or honestly displayed, and the perception of it is also subject to your own biases. You could say that people have the responsibility to demonstrate that they put in the effort and created value, but then you get the situation where people naturally optimize perception of effort or value over actual effort or value, because in the end that is what is rewarded. Then you can also say that people also have the responsibility to look a bit closer before estimating real value, but that takes more effort and people naturally strife towards efficiency. I would guess that the problem today is that the balance between these two is off, and we're doing too much of the former and too little of the latter.
  • suncemoje 4mo ago
    I experienced a similar interaction recently, where this principle was hard to apply, when I was emailing with a CTO / hiring manager who had some "deeper" screening questions. It was essentially: 1. HM: AI generated email with "tailored" questions 2. Me: AI assisted response with answers (I confess) 3. HM: AI generated email with a "thoughtful" response + invite 4. Me: AI generated "thank you & looking forward" response ... Looking back at the thread, I have to laugh and cry at the same time. It's so obvious and sad.
  • mindwok 4mo ago
    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.
  • 4mo ago
• CWuestefeld 4mo ago
  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.
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• nucleardog 4mo ago
  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. You want someone's help. If the cost to you is effectively nil (or negative, since you're asking someone to do your job for you), but the cost to the other person is non-zero, then incentives aren't lining up here. Pretty quickly that person is going to start carrying too much load and become a bottleneck. It can also mask that the context of the work is too concentrated in one person, and does little to nothing to help build that elsewhere in the team. The other end of this is exactly what you're saying--put as much effort into the answer as they put into the question. You're not doing anyone a service by taking their low effort input and giving them high effort output, least of all yourself. If someone asks "how do I X", that's low effort. If you happen to know the answer off the top of your head, spare a few sentences to explain or point them where in the code they need to be. If you don't know, don't go track it down for them.
  • hluska 4mo ago
    I don’t formalize anything that extreme for my teams because I can’t diagnose people, but I know that things like anxiety, imposter syndrome and a whole wack of things that aren’t related to work get involved. It’s acceptable to ask for help. I like to know what people have tried but sometimes they don’t know how to start. And that’s a great place to start. I guess we all have different styles but some may be more inclusive than others.
    • bisby 4mo ago
      How the problem and request are presented matter. "I don't know where to start" is a different problem than "I've done nothing, just solve this for me." And how someone shows an effort was made will vary person to person, so I agree a strict formalized set of rules doesn't make sense. The concept boils down to "expect people to put forth some effort of their own" "Teams" are also going to have different dynamics than "strangers on a help forum."
• justin66 4mo ago
  > Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind. Or, depending on the context, perhaps give a thorough enough answer with citations that it should either answer questions on the topic fully or explain where anyone interested in the topic can do their own research, such that if the question is asked again one could just link to your previous post. This might not satiate a poster if they're dumb enough, but it's worth remembering that the post will be searchable and usable for reference by other people.
• toss1 4mo ago
  Yup. The most concise version I've heard of this, which I find useful for many situations, is: "If it isn't important to you, it isn't important to me."
  • TallGuyShort 4mo ago
    "Use your brain before you use mine"
• monkeydust 4mo ago
  AI has collapsed the cost of producing content while leaving the cost of reviewing, verifying higher imho. This has inverted the economics of collaboration. Reviewer attention, not output volume, is now the scarce resource, this happened with my engineering teams (PR reviews) and is now happening in my world in Product.
  • whstl 4mo ago
    In some cases there's also no preparation or verification happening at all, which massively inflates the productivity gains of AI. Lots of VCs and investors asking companies to move into "trust the AI" mode. I once consulted for a company in the content marketing business that was one of the largest and fastest growing startups of its country. The content production in itself was "cheap", a dollar for 500 words. But it collapsed, due to the unbearable amount of people required to review Now virtually all content is generated by AI and the old customers don't have anyone to verify anymore. Companies are made of people who are shitty to each other but trust machines blindly.
    • andrekandre 4mo ago
      > Now virtually all content is generated by AI and the old customers don't have anyone to verify anymore. i see this first-hand at $company, where the pr's are so obtuse and descriptions are incomprehensible or just too long and gratuitous that thorough code review is also falling by the wayside and becoming more of a "rubber stamp"; this is what management is calling "productivity boost"...
      • whstl 4mo ago
        Another productivity boost I'm seeing is from $COMPANY is asking devs to let AI do the design, instead of having a designer do it. I have a dirty secret: I do the design myself. Productivity gains are still there. People are amazed at the "AI".
• cestith 4mo ago
  From the other side, there have been brief tutorials for many years about how to ask useful questions in a technical forum. Making hundreds of other people fish for details about your case is poor form. https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-ask-good-technical-questions/ https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-ask-good-technical-... is a pretty good example. Going back more than two decades is ESR’s “How to Ask Smart Questions”. http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
• reddit_clone 4mo ago
  > Give a cursory answer That may be enough in some cases. Sometimes people are not looking for fully fleshed out high-effort answers. They want a pointer (to documentation, or a repo) to get going from someone more experienced. Google search may throw up too much information and it is hard to make a choice. A one sentence answer from an expert may be enough to set them on the right path.
• eli_gottlieb 4mo ago
  This is the policy I was always told to exercise about cold emails, both those I receive and those I send. Someone seems to have spent weeks reading your books and papers before emailing to meet with you? Make time for that guy. Someone just asks if you've got time to meet about your work because they'd like to work for you? LOL they didn't check enough to realize you're not a supervisor.
• cgio 4mo ago
  Short responses are increasingly becoming a signal of genuine human attention.