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AI is useful. But the amount of people that are simply offloading all of their thinking to AI and blindly accepting the answer is absurd. Kaggle is most likely
by ecshafer 3mo ago
AI is useful. But the amount of people that are simply offloading all of their thinking to AI and blindly accepting the answer is absurd. Kaggle is most likely using ai to assess the submissions and are not using any common sense by blindly accepting the results.
- jagged-chisel 3mo agoI think we need to address the underlying causes of people outsourcing their thinking like that. And a big contribution is “move fast.” No one has time to read, process, and think, because The Powers That Be (capital) want their results now.
- quantummagic 3mo agoPragmatically speaking, a half-assed answer now, is often better than a perfect answer tomorrow.
- derektank 3mo agoYeah, we live finite lives. Time is the one thing the vast majority of us aren’t getting more of. Of course speed is a priority. This isn’t a “capital” thing, it’s a fundamental part of the human experience.
- freedomben 3mo ago> the vast majority of us Is that a reference to the "live forever" people trying to solve aging?
- derektank 3mo agoNo, but I do think modern medicine occasionally grants a few people more time than they would have had otherwise. New cancer therapies, evolving treatments for cystic fibrosis, etc. Very hit or miss if you’re in a group whose life expectancy sees substantial improvement in your lifetime though.
- inigyou 3mo agoWe aren't improving the world by releasing a firehose of slop. It's possible to use your limited time to destroy or extract value instead of creating it.
- crabmusket 3mo agoThe flip side of that is, why spend your finite life in a way that's not enjoyable? If the experience of constantly being under pressure to deliver, to go faster, to work more, to produce more, isn't enjoyable - then it's a waste of a life. Speed itself isn't the priority. You've got to ask what the direction is. If you're working on a project that is meaningful to you personally (maybe because it is very meaningful to others you care about!) then you'll want it to be done.
- quantummagic 3mo agoThere is pleasure in completing things. In actually producing something, and moving on to the next thing. It isn't enjoyable to have paralysis by analysis... too afraid to take the next step, because you have less than perfect information. In the pathological case (since we never really have perfect information), there are people who never get anything done.
- defend 3mo agoDepends what the cost of failure is. If you're designing powerpoints or entertainment software; perhaps that's true. In the worst case you'll be embarrassed for producing AI slop or lose some revenue. If your tool has the power to seriously harm or inconvenience people if built wrong, then it's just investor-fuelled myopia.
- HPsquared 3mo agoSomething like the time value of money. But on the other hand, a bad answer can have negative value. Although "wrong and early" is better than "wrong and late".
- rebuilder 3mo agoIf “wrong” breaks things, then late is better than early.
- pixl97 3mo agoQuite often the only way to know if you're wrong or right is to start building it.
- bcrosby95 3mo agoI don't know. There's a lot of instances where the first movers lose because they were a bit wrong and others learned from their mistakes.
- stingraycharles 3mo agoYes, but a grand prize result being awarded to an AI slop submission is not it. It deteriorates the legitimacy of the whole contest if all that matters is convincing an AI rather than critical reviewers.
- throwatdem12311 3mo agoI just shame people that give slop. Slop PR? Fix the slop. Slop design? I’m not implementing slop, fix it. Innundated with slop PRs? Send half of them to my super and tell him to deal with it. We’ve fired people that wouldn’t get their shit together. Deadlines are being missed because we need to spend more time fixing slop? That’s a planning (management) problem, not mine. Management are the ones that forced everyone to write all code with AI now they are grtting what they asked for. I don’t care what date you promised the customer with absolutely no data to back it up that isn’t my problem. I’m grateful I’m in a position to be able to do this but the way to deal with slop is zero tolerance. Be as ruthless as a Terminator. Though you will need to grow a backbone and stand your ground or it will break you. Things don’t change unless the people that make the decisions actually feel the pain.
- rapidaneurism 3mo agoWhat if the slop PRs come from your super?
- Forgeties79 3mo agoPeople don’t typically have to approve and submit their super’s work IME so I’m curious what you mean. If they write you unclear slop emails then constantly bother them for clarification until they fix it.
- freedomben 3mo agoIn startups it's extremely common to have management still write code. Hell I'm CTO and I write a lot of code.
- Forgeties79 3mo agoAh so this was a more narrow example than I initially read it as. In that case I guess you just keep pressing them to document/make notes. Keep asking questions. Basically take away their “saved time” by dumping the time sink they dumped on you back on them.
- Suzuran 3mo agoThere is also the "You aren't paid to think, you are paid to do exactly what I tell you, nothing more or less!" school of management. I'm not sure how prevalent this attitude is now but it was very common in the 90s and 2000s. The AI and the bosses that want you to use it all speak from positions of authority and confidence. That's their right, granted to them by their position. You don't speak that way because as a subordinate if you do so it's an act of insubordination or disfealty and you need to be reminded of your place. So you learn to stay in your lane, mind your own business, etc etc because rule number one is that the nail that sticks up gets beaten down. ("He who has the money makes the rules" is rule number zero.)
- breezybottom 3mo agoSo your position is that people actually want to do more work, but their managers are forcing them to work less? I don't buy it.
- throw1234567891 3mo agoYup, it happens. Often in service companies. Client paid fox x, y, z, not x2, y, z.
- cmiles74 3mo agoI have worked with people who have this attitude ("do the story, now!"). I think it eventually de-motivates people and you get a lot of bare-minimum type work from the development team. There's often a lot of stressful priority shifting as well, that can also encourage people to meet only the minimum requirements.
- Suzuran 3mo agoNo, you missed the point. The GP was talking about causes for the situation where people are apparently prone to "outsourcing their thinking", resulting in low-effort AI slop being produced by entities that really should know better. The style of management I describe destroys the employee's confidence and agency, so they are much more likely to just submit and blindly accept whatever management/AI/etc. tells them than to do any sort of critical thinking.
- nz 3mo agoWith the exception of _one_ company that I worked at, pretty much every[0] company was a struggle between engineering and management. Engineering wants to get the software correct, and management wants to fire-hose features into the market. Most of the time (so more than half, at least), management tends to have a compulsion to mindlessly imitate what other companies/competitors are doing, usually without prioritization (so even if feature-parity is a good idea, usually management will want to prioritize whatever the newest feature is, and to put existing work on the back-burner). It very frequently feels like management is making strategic decisions after snorting a long line of social-media-psychosis and TED talks. It is remarkable that investors have any faith in such founders/entrepreneurs at all. [0]: Various people I know do not even have the luxury of that one good company. Also, it -- unbelievably -- sounds much worse at other companies.
- vogelke 3mo ago> ...management is making strategic decisions after snorting a long line of social-media-psychosis and TED talks. +1. Straight into my quotes file.
- infecto 3mo agoIt’s a hard balance but in an ideal scenario there would be a good balance of tension between engineering and management/product decision makers. On one hand engineers generally will iterate for far too long and on the other product decision makers will want to birth new features daily.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- ben_w 3mo ago> It very frequently feels like management is making strategic decisions after snorting a long line of social-media-psychosis and TED talks. It is remarkable that investors have any faith in such founders/entrepreneurs at all. My guess is the causality is usually* the managers are pursuing things because their investors (/government ministries) hinted it was the future after snorting a line of "TED talks" and "social-media". Irony is, I really do mean "hinted", it can be a sycophantic/fawning relationship where those with the power don't even realise what's going on. One place I interviewed at ages ago now, before the current AI boom, the CTO and I were talking about what they were doing with AI: a bunch of if-else statements forming a manually-built decision tree. But they had to say "AI" to keep interest high. * this clearly wasn't the case with Zuckerberg's pivot to anything given his ownership structure and piles of cash, so The Metaverse is entirely his fault; Musk, despite the ownership structure, clearly ran out of investor's money or he wouldn't have taken SpaceX public, so his pivots may still have been as I posit.
- AlexandrB 3mo agoYou're reaching for the easy answer ("capitalism bad"). Look at all the students cheating with AI, folks using AI to write personal greetings to family, etc. On some level, it's human nature to take shortcuts. I don't know how you even begin to address that.
- jagged-chisel 3mo agoFirst, I don’t pretend that’s the only driver. Second, the whole reason students are doing that is still monetary motivation. Third, we’ve been running capitalism for long enough that we don’t even know what the baseline for “it’s human nature to take shortcuts” is without a monetary motivation. Now that you’ve made me think on this longer, I conclude that indeed capitalism is the problem. At least, the part of capitalism that wants infinite growth immediately.
- stereolambda 3mo agoSorry but this is some tunnel vision. School cheating was a thing in pre-capitalist societies, because of prestige given by education or just laziness of getting it over with. In a command economy, you can also be pushed for results because of military competition or something like that. The main alternative to capital is politics. Not saying it's always worse, but then you have to convince people in power to care about the things you care about: such as working in a particular way. Marx himself thought utopian artisanal socialists, building Phalanstères etc. to be basically benevolent idiots. Is intellectual work a value of itself? I myself may be convinced, but voting majorities, political leaders? Not guaranteed.
- eru 3mo agoWhy blame capital? Why not the customers, or management (which is just another representative from labour)?
- jagged-chisel 3mo agoCustomers are customers because of capital. Management represents the owners (capital.) Any other framing is delusional.
- eru 3mo ago> Customers are customers because of capital. Do you mean that in general, or only in this specific situation? In general it's obviously not true. > Management represents the owners (capital.) Only insofar as any employee represents the owners. > Any other framing is delusional. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...
- TheOtherHobbes 3mo agoThe only thing that capitalism brings to hierarchy is an abstraction layer. You get the same dysfunctions in any organisation where the management levels are staffed by narcissists and sociopaths who need hierarchy to feel a sense of self, and need to enforce it to self-soothe. There are political structures even more hierarchical than US corporations, and some of them punish status infractions + perceived failures with violence or death. The problem is the dysfunctional psychology of hierarchy. The more upper levels tend to performative hierarchy and status plays, the worse everything gets.
- logicallee 3mo ago>I think we need to address the underlying causes of people outsourcing their thinking like that. Because the output wins. AI-written resumes get jobs. AI-written submissions win $25k contests (i.e. this post we're discussing). AI-written pitch decks get investments.
- jebarker 3mo agoEgo is also at play here. In inherently competitive fields like academic science using LLMs to get results more quickly is an alluring siren.
- redsocksfan45 3mo ago[dead]
- paulcole 3mo ago> I think we need to address the underlying causes of people outsourcing their thinking like Most people take the easy way out most of the time. Not that complicated.
- voncheese 3mo agoAgreed and it's unlikely to slow down that descent into slop coding until there are some visible issues with it. The market (i.e. companies) are going all in on AI coding because everyone else is doing it and the concern (understandably) is that if a company doesn't join that race they will lose because they never even entered the race. The trick will be for companies to go fast enough to be in the race, not winning it, just in it. That will allow the time/space to let someone else, whoever is going fastest, to trip and fall so the rest of the pack can learn. The tip and fall moment could come as a major incident (reliability and/or security) or loss of revenue because of bad products that customers don't like enough to use.
- ryukoposting 3mo agoI hate the corporate assholes that rule us like anyone else, but this seems rather conspiratorial. It's not that nobody has time to read, process, or think (that's a uniquely Silicon Valley phenomenon). It's that there's no punishment for failing to read, process, or think. Hell, it seems like your slop is just as likely to be rewarded as someone else's thoughtful work. And the punishment in this case would be... not winning? I think the punishments for cheating the system with AI slop are far too light in a lot of domains right now. We need to change the risk-reward calculus one way or another, and failing to reward good work obviously isn't a solution. I'm not sure what the solution looks like exactly, but I'm certain it's punitive.
- dtj1123 3mo agoFWIW, this isn't unique to capital. The same 'get a thing that ticks a box out of the door as fast as physically possible even if it's AI slop' thinking is everywhere in grant-funded academic communities as well.
- jagged-chisel 3mo ago> grant-funded Capital.
- dtj1123 3mo agoWhat's the distinction between capital and money?
- eVeechu7 3mo agoI think some people don't realize the unreasonable amount of effort they are creating for their colleagues when they submit slop as work. I see this more with documentation than code.
- bayindirh 3mo ago> That Be (capital) want their results last week. "Now" is too late, competition has already figured their next move out. We need to move fasterer. Broken eggs doesn't matter, the supply is constant anyway.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3mo ago> the underlying causes of people outsourcing their thinking It's the second law of thermodynamics. People trying to achieve their lowest sustainable energy state.
- gtowey 3mo agoIt's because those things not only take more time, it's that the number of people who are really good at it are few and far between. That gives those employees leverage. Employers are trying to turn all workers everywhere in every industry into completely fungible atomatons. This maximises the candidate pool and drives wages to a minimum. Employees who demand humane working conditions can be canned and replaced with someone more desperate. In their ideal world we would basically bring back feudalism.
- m3kw9 3mo agoIs likely also using a mix of prompt injection to get the AI to say they won
- onesandofgrain 3mo ago[flagged]
- Cthulhu_ 3mo agoThree claims with no substantiating evidence, this is low effort slop / smear campaign / flaming (to use old internet parlance).
- onesandofgrain 3mo agoSmear campaign, more like the opposite. 10 trillion dollars in this business and you think a weasly hn user is being paid to smear. lol There is so much money in this that the opposite is almost always true, it's not a smear campaign, the whole shtick is a buttering campaign. u bafoon Imagine H. P. Lovecraft. being alive. He would be greatly disappointed in you.
- ecshafer 3mo agoI am a shill for saying AI is useful, but people use it too much? I am not morally opposed to shilling, but I think that isn't a very effective shill.
- chasd00 3mo agoi encourage my team to use AI/LLMs and explore where it works and where it doesn't. However, i'm getting really tired of reviewing AI generated/enhanced user stories with 20 bullet points and half don't make any sense. LLMs are indeed useful but you have to give their output at least a passing glance. I like the Mr Meeseeks analogy, helpful but they're not gods.
- patrickmay 3mo agoA "passing glance" is nowhere near good enough. Just as software developers must be held accountable for every line of code they check in, product managers must be held accountable for every word in their PRDs. LLMs can speed up some parts of the design and delivery process but humans still bear responsibility.
- chasd00 3mo agoi meant "passing glance" at the _very very least_ where anything > 0 is so much better than 0. I have people just blindly offloading pretty important analysis to LLM without any review whatsoever and it's super annoying and counter productive resulting in a lot of rework. I've covered refinement with developers trying to meet AC that make no sense. Many times i've just deleted parts of AC (which is a no-no where i live) and flat out told developers "this is bullshit and makes no sense, i'm deleting it." Same goes for meeting recaps, i get a lot of LLM generated recaps from conference calls. If the meeting organizer just looks at it before sending it out then they'll instinctively edit/fix things a bit to make the recap more concise and accurate. I wish they'd just look at it before sending it.
- bryan_specgit 3mo agoYes, have been sent many .MD files that clearly the prompter (too generous to call them authors) didn't read and expect you to read for them. And too many examples of asking a follow up question only for them to just paste my question to their LLM and send another .MD. Total PM malpractice with AI. No tooling will completely fix bad PMs.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- pehtis 3mo agoPeople love offloading their thinking. They offload to tv reporters, to religions to political parties.. Offloading to AI sounds a lot better IMO.
- zparky 3mo agowhy?
- ajsnigrutin 3mo agoIt's easy... you just tell it what you want, and it gives you the answer, especially if you know very little about the topic itself. The problem is, when you know the topic well, and it's giving you bad/wrong answers, because you know the topic enough to notice it. Gell-Mann AI effect in action