Oh look, another blog post that should have been a comment. No slop blogs either, loser.
5 Claude Code skills I use every single day
With "Them" I wasn't sure if you meant the AI companies, some dude I didn't recognize in the avatar, scammers, coworkers, etc...
Couldn't they have used an example aimed at a broader audience?
I'm in IT but even I barely know what Redis or Memcached is about (never used either).
This doesn’t even need to be a website at all. This is pure slop designed in a pig lab for HN trough.
It does, because it allows for quickly sharing a prepared response instead of saying the same thing over and over. It also works because the kind of person this link gets sent to is already used to trusting random websites over their human interactions.
A basic search tells me they're both ways to speed up applications/projects through memory management and storing of the memory/data in RAM. So the person in the article is asking a co-worker their opinion on which tool they should use for optimization/performance in their project, which is why an LLM response is less helpful than his co-worker's actual thoughts: comparisons of technical tools at a high or feature level are pretty easy to find and the decision of which to use often boils down to project specific variables, so what the author is asking of the co-worker relies on the co-worker's knowledge of their specific project.
I could also probably explain this just fine to non-tech people. It wouldn't be the most complete or technically accurate explanation, but it would be fine.
Most people write based on their experience and culture.
And the doctors at the hospital where I work still call us the "IT people".
Sadly the answer to save time in these cases sometimes is to use AI. Sometimes the emails being sent weren't even AI generated. Just emails from managers/directors who don't respect peoples time enough and think we care about their long essays of nothing. You kinda have to check the emails to make sure this isn't the one time something important was being said, so that's where the quick AI summarization comes in.
I 100% write long texts in Slack. I always try to provide as much context as possible when reaching out to someone with a question or request.
Introducing AI made markdown tags for conversations so others can only see what the wanty
Could even add a "Autistism" filter, preventing conversation digressing, filtering out only points that stay on topic and only the <summary>, that way.
Is that equivalent to the already popular <rant>?
It doesn't foster conversion and I personally find it kind of a hostile/disrespectful communication style. It's much harder to have a proper back and forth with a firehouse than it is a few sentences at a time.
It declares authority "these are the facts" rather than "let's discuss ideas" and if you haven't fully earned that authority it honestly just kind of smells of insecurity.
If there's something in the middle of a wall of text that invalidates something much further down, trying to communicate the problem becomes a pain in the butt. It's just not a good method for discovery.
Just have a LLM that "knows you well" in all your position argue by points and values assigned to the points with the LLM of the opposition.
If value alignment exists, a actual conversation may be engaged.
Sending me a message saying "Hi, I'm getting a Frobnizzle not found error" is a waste of both our time. Explain what you're doing so that I can reproduce it, even if it takes a few paragraphs. Maybe send me your user ID so I can check our logs. I don't care if you're declaring "these are the facts" because the facts are what I need to help you.
If it's a massive wall of text with a defensive tone during a discussion, yeah, sure, that's bad. Do you work somewhere where that's common?
I think some people just prefer a more conversational format.
The classic "Hi" message never gets old... no wait, sorry, it was always old.
Sometimes, a back-and-forth is not needed, and the entire response is necessary for someone to understand to interact with.
This is when I open up a text editor, draft it, and paste that into Slack.
It is actually quite easy to communicate a problem in the middle of a wall of text. You simply refer to the phrase and then explain why it doesn’t hold. It is also fine to simply present your perspective to people without invitations to “discuss ideas.” You can open a discussion if you want, but if I’m telling you something then you can rest assured that those are the things I believe to be true, and if I am uncertain about any conclusions I will include caveats to indicate uncertainty. You have free will and are perfectly capable of taking or leaving anything being said to you.
Not at all.
1. Someone is coming to me with the question. They're doing so because either the question is about my area of ownership and I have that authority or because I'm a subject-matter expert and I have that authority.
2. I don't know what the other person knows around the edges of the domain that the question is in, I don't know if they understand the constraints of the domain nor do I know what constraints their specific problem has.
3. Often the answers to any actually decent question at work are fairly nuanced, and to understand the nuance you need at least a level set of context.
It's a lot more dismissive and rude to answer with excessive brevity if you treat the question in good faith. For simple questions, sure I don't need to write an essay. Some questions I answer with "Got 10 minutes so we can chat about this?" because it just needs a conversation. Or I answer with questions of my own. But if the question is well-formed, answering it starts with providing the necessary context to understand my answer so we're on an even playing field and we can effectively communicate ideas.
Sometimes just providing the context about an issue is itself enough to warrant a few paragraphs, let alone a few sentences.
Obviously, it's best to express a problem, its options, and its recommended solution(s) in as few words as possible, but it's unwarranted to hold an absolute position that every discussion must be an inefficient exchange of mere sentences at a time.
I'd rather have an outline-style essay given to me in one go for me to digest and research async rather than be subjected to a barrage of back-and-forth pings. That's the real disrespect of other people's time.
Validating their ego and effort and social position can fulfill their social desires regardless of an answer that dismisses, say, buzzword soup as both inappropriate to the current context and incoherent to people who know what those words mean.
I remember being advised to do this ~20 years ago when I was going to be answering questions from a group of people. I was told that it's good practice to say something like "that's a great question" every time someone asks anything, as a form of social lubrication, to encourage others to ask questions. I can't say whether it works, and it was advice for a spoken context rather than written, but I don't know how to finish this sentence.
When I go to research lectures, I sometimes hear that in response to audience questions, although not especially consistently. Some speakers do this more than others, I don't think anyone does it all the time.
The next question (which is a great one, from what I understand) is: Why do LLMs use these phrases so much if humans rarely use them in written form? Maybe a fair portion of training data comes from lecture transcripts, where such responses are common when responding to direct questions? And/or system prompts are just instructed to be like that?
As far as I understand, it's due to RLHF. The reviewers the AI companies use don't necessarily know what kind of question is a good one, so when the LLM answers "That's a good question!", they tend to rate the answer higher because they like being flattered. Proxy models that are themselves trained on RLHF inherit this pattern. Similar effects contribute to sycophancy.[1]
That's a great question! => I can tell you understood what I explained and used that understanding to reach the next step of reasoning just like I did.
And then, somehow, he kept turning the dumb question into a deep and insightful one.
So I've adopted that technique but if I say "that's a great question" think for a while and come up with nothing, it's probably a moronic question. I'm not perfect.
It covers a variety of times people might use it. Sometimes it's genuine, other times it's flattery. Some people use it all the time (and in the episode they talk about calling someone on it). One guest says it's a bridge, to go from the question asked to the question you want to answer instead.
I don't see it in this transcript, but I also thought I remembered hearing/reading that it can be a sign the speaker doesn't know the answer offhand, and needs to consider the question to formulate their answer. I think I'd classify that as a genuine usage: the question is something the speaker hasn't considered before, and thinks is worthy of consideration.
[1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/thats-a-great-question-rebr...
With that said, I don't disagree with the article. Don't use more word when few work.
But this should not be an excuse applicable to an LLM.
Long form writing itself isn't a problem, it's the empty fake long form we have now.
Either you have to give the AI the points you want to convey, then just put those points in a message. Or you don't have anything to convey, then don't post a message.
I don't see why anyone would want a slopified version of whatever it was that I had to say.
Lots of people lack confidence around their writing, and many people (particularly in tech) are not english native speakers. I can definitely see both of those groups getting use out of AI assistance in writing.
That being said, I sometimes use AI to see if I've missed anything, but the last thing I'll give up to our future AI overloads is writing text, as I enjoy it.
Not to single out OP or anything, but the more we do things on our own, the more likely we are to build our confidence. Relying on something or someone to hold our hand risks slowing down personal growth.
So I probably wouldn't argue against this in all cases, except where someone is just outsourcing all their thought to the model(s), that feels much worse to me.
I am neither (a native speaker), but you learn and gain confidence by doing. Also, I think flattening the beauty of language (however imperfect) into LLM-speak is a huge loss. Everyone sounds the same and boring through an LLM.
In my case I just use AI to fix typos and save people time if I repeated myself in a message.
You’re foaming at the mouth a bit about AI here rather than reading what I said. I don’t see how shortened or fixed grammar is slop. The article argues the opposite.
> Pasting a massive AI-generated response into a chat or email where a human would write one sentence. It destroys the medium itself. Nobody writes essays in Slack. It's only possible because of AI copy-paste.
> It's like calling someone and asking "What time is the meeting?" and they read you a 10-page analysis of calendar management best practices. You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document.
It’s hard to take the site seriously if the author themself isn’t able to write
> It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness.
These are particular sentences I find questionable. Would you write that way? I certainly wouldn't.
GPTZero is by no means perfect, but it agreed this was likely generated.
Well English is a foreign language for me, but yes I probably would, and then I'd get called out for being an AI haha
>Worse: it's a conversation killer. There's nothing to respond to. Your wall of text suppresses dialogue. They can't reply, can't push back, can't clarify. It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness.
This is slop. What it's saying is not even true, it's just punchy.
> It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness.
The source code is without a doubt AI (it's got a comment for the "<!-- Canonical URL -->"), so I guess one would have to assume they prepared the entire document beforehand, then fed it to Claude and instructed it to use that copy exactly.
...or they prompted "make me a site which tersely criticizes people who post AI slop on Slack, use the term slop grenade and style the site like nohello.net"
Eventually you just get a sense for these things.
Genuine AIDS. It'd be hilarious if it wasn't so terrifying and didn't happen with such regularity.
Heres a sentence you will never have an ai say
Made it much easier to read and you could just reply with:
> bullet point
response
which made life much easier
I think we've all worked with someone who (I imagine subconsciously) feels the need to make things longer without actually adding more information in there, and it just makes everyone's day a little harder.
What is interesting is that some people don't understand this - even some clever devs.
For instance, on the ffmpeg mailing list a few weeks ago, one of the lead devs from Germany, spammed a proposal with AI slop. Someone else asked the question why he expects others to read the slop and "engage" with this or that developer. That was a great question. The interesting thing is that the original developer who succumbed to slop, did not even understand why AI slop spam is problematic to other people. AI already changes how people work and also think. That is a big problem. I used to semi-jokingly say that AI slop is the beginning of skynet, but as I watch real people succumb to the AI slop, they actively (!) become dumber and don't understand why AI slop wastes the time of other people.
I am not at all saying that AI is completely useless, though the current hype is annoying to no ends. But some individual humans don't understand the problem at all anymore. Personally I do not want to "interact" with AI slop at all. It just wastes my time.
If someone sends me an AI generated email, chat message, or message substantially influenced by AI[1], one of two not mutually exclusive things will happen:
1. I ask them not to use AI as I want to hear from a human colleague about their human thoughts, not a robot;
2. The message gets deleted.
I try as best I can to teach and mentor others. I am more than happy to work through spelling mistakes, poor grammar, and misused words because at the end of the day I'm talking to a human colleague.
Sometimes my messages get pretty long and detailed I will admit, though it's for a reason: context, nuance and technical details are important. If you're just going to offload your brain to a robot, I'm not going to waste my time feeding that robot with you in the middle as a conduit.
[1] It is very easy to tell in in-person conversations: the authority with which a person talks about a particular topic via text communication, does not propagate into a verbal in-person conversation.
Show some love for the layman, we are all laymen in areas we don't know about.
That's AI writing done right, and it's very different from this other guy I work with who does the whole slop grenade thing.
Thank you kindly for sharing
Even among native speakers, literacy is way down. AI could help with that… if people actually do the work.
That’s the real problem, not AI: no one wants to do the work. That is purely a PEBKAC situation.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48219992#48221497
The point is, you don't have to outsource your thinking to use AI, if it's a good AI tool. But most AI companies are coming from a hyper-scaling mindset where addicting the user to the product is the same as substituting hard thinking for easy dopamine hits. The most ridiculous benchmark I have seen in AI is the tendency to say the longer an agent can work and some minimal accuracy is a good thing. That just means you have 30 steps to find an error in instead of 3, and you are much more likely to just abdicate thought instead of the hard work of proofing 30 steps yourself. AI companies and evaluators are losing the point.
It's a matter of having good taste. But AI education will help.
I imagine this is the kind of thing you see at a large company where a good chunk of people are just coasting by doing nothing, Nelson Big Head style.
Meetings are 55 minutes of speculating about what AI will be able to do in a few years. Then if you are lucky the last 5 minutes can be used to discuss a real issue.
I can reply. I can push back. I can clarify. I am not helpless.
I don't even have an issue with it being AI-generated. However, the content is delivered so fast and monotone that it's impossible to listen to, and every episode is 40 minutes or more, every day.
A brief daily summary, perhaps using the creator's real voice (via ElevenLabs or similar; the creator has a real podcast on the same site), would be so much more valuable.
Because nothing feels more like wasting my time than talking to an answering machine that is working against me. It's exhausting and demotivating.
Most ai generated messages or docs are unnecessarily verbose and just reading the prompt would suffice. I don't really get why some people seem to think that it's somehow better to have their bullet point prompt as a huge text.
It just wastes my time. And probably only makes it look like it took more effort than it actually did (it may be the exact opposite).
In that case, there is nothing beneficial about the prompt, but the answer could be boiled down to a useful recommendation (from an AI, not a person).
hmm.. Wheel of Time? never got into those books personally
Probably people who have never wanted to put the required thinking effort in a simple, structured response to a question, and now think that "a lot of words" magically solves that skill issue.
I don't just mean the readers.
The generators of slop often think this is useful.
Things have changed.
Our intuition has not.
The question before is now is now is whether the letter contains any quotable quotes that have survived 400 years other than his critique of style.
I think you've hit on why people would do this in a work environment. It's a low-effort way of looking like they're engaged at work and know what they're talking about.
Because they want to mislead you.
Simple: It looks like you did more work.
Before everyone had ChatGPT, a long document meant that someone sat at their computer and invested more effort than someone rattling off a list of partially formed bullet points. In the process of writing the doc they usually refined the idea.
Now anyone can dump the bullet points into ChatGPT and get and expand them into a document which gives the illusion of being well thought out. They can now occupy the same space as everyone who was doing a lot of work in the past, but without having to do the work.
1. Find companies which require or reward employees for generating bullshit, fluff, or unreliable signals for actual work that isn't measured well.
2. Offer those employees convenient BS-as-a-Service.
3. Convince the corporation to subsidize the new bullshit-production method as a business expense.
I hope this results in the overloaded collapse of the underlying bullshit mechanics... but I don't particularly expect it.
5. Approach them to buy your convenient anti-BS-as-a-Service optimizer.
Rinse, repeat.
people that I like to be nice to have done this to me. I dont have a good response that wont trigger them.
They chose to do this cz its easy. I now have to choose : read that garbage and make sense and ask questions or reject it asking for your opinions not claude's.
Former leads to more walls of text. Latter makes me come across as not-nice and get broad stroke painted as an AI hater (which I'm not). Not many where I work will voice any of their discontent about anything AI. Its the hotness.
The irony of that article having an AI smell is not lost on me
If I wanted a generic opinion... I wouldn't bother you.
ps. register slopgrenade.com too
Even a real person calling me on my phone to talk 5min about its company without allowing me to interrupt feels like a kind of grenade. Obviously I could interrupt the impolite way but that's beside the point.
Tip 1: Starting off by denigrating folks who do this is not a way to make people change. More often than not, it amplifies the behavior you don't like.
Tip 2: It helps to indicate you understand the perspective of why people do it before asking others to change. Reading your comment, I really doubt you understand their perspective.
People listen to those willing to understand them.
Generates entire websites with AI Slop. Instead of sending a single text mail with three links and the words please make that certificate.
No. He wastes the time of all personnel. Wastes energy. And hides the important message in a wall of text (I was the only person which recognized, that he requires the certificate…it was hidden in a side box).
Right now we re-implementing every frogging tool which was ever developed by more experienced people.
Excuse the long letter, I hadn’t the time to write a short one.Every time someone uses answer like this it shows that he doesn't even want to discuss something with you and possibly knows nothing about the question asked. So the answer it self could potentionally be bogus or straightforward lie. It's just rude. It's even more rude that when someone tells you to google answer instead.
1. Do NOT answer right away. If they wait, there is a good chance the next message is "Oh wait, I figured it out" (e.g. they googled it finally)
2. Send them a google link w/ the search term showing the first result.
While the site makes a good point, they miss the most important point, IMO, which is inferable by the example of a good response. The good response is better principally because it contains business-contextual information, which AI can never provide without proper prompting (and if you know to provide that, you prob don't need the AI answer):
"We need pub/sub for the notifications feature."
But I really agree with use AI to make your communication sharper. I think a lot of us, especially in corporate settings could use the help
Use AI as part of the research process, to help understand a concept or problem. Use it to format data, or as a part of the design or brainstorming process. Use it to build manageable portions of code that you can read and understand before committing. But if the output doesn't go through your brain somehow before you unleash it on the world, that's really no different from a seventh-grader Googling the subject of his homework and then cutting and pasting the entire text of the first result, headers and all, and turning it in.
This is not true in the least bit. The page even included an example of calling someone to ask when a meeting was instead of asking an AI assistant to check their calendar. There is a reason why so much of company support can be done using AI or via people following a flowchart. People do not know how to solve problems by themselves.
In this person's communication culture, they are saying "I don't know, but here's my attempt to help."
For me, it really comes down to is whether or not I believe the responder is acting in good faith. If you can't assume good faith, the shape of the response isn't the actual problem.
Of course, my opinion of them is also related to how often their interpreted answer or conversational contribution is "I don't know", and how often they choose to interject with that when it's not necessary. I suppose the latter is cultural too; perhaps I should be clearer in open forums whether I expect them to answer.
> I'd prefer
This is exactly my point. To some people, direct communication, especially "no", is extremely rude. To some people, a head bob (easily confused for a "yes" in other cultures) merely means acknowledgement, or "maybe". To some people, extended silence indicates deep consideration or respect.
Globalization resulted in a need to tolerate these differences, and in my experience, trying to "fix" them is considered rude (I suppose that's also a cultural norm!). I just think it's interesting to observe that there is such immediate intolerance of this new behavior. Of course I understand it, and I don't even entirely disagree, I just think it's worth reflecting on, there are probably so many ways of considering it.
Maybe there are some universal conventions we can accept.
These stories are not about people who are from indirect cultures being frustrating to the direct person. They are about people who paste stuff into claude and unnecessary large wall of text - written in direct style.
I realized the same obliviousness on my part made some of my people feel like I was 'good old boys club' because I was more relatable to other white guys into sports (I used American sports analogies up to that point because that was how the management I rose up with talked). I felt awful for making people feeling bad/stressed/in an out group.
And while different regional cultures may tend one way or the other, one will find direct and indirect personality types everywhere.
depending on the receiver, different and even opposing things are inconsiderate.
There are cultures that believe the number of chromosomes you are born with determines your autonomy in society. I think most people on here would reject that framing, even if they're met with the same excuse.
How you politely communicate that you don't have anything to add? That varies by culture. That LLM content is not a useful response? That does not vary by culture.
I've already used up the tokens, why donate money to Anthropic?
Today there might be people who can't extract enough juice from LLMs, so it is not entirely useless to say "I was able to extract this info from a LLM, because I am good at it and you seem to struggle", instead of throwing "just ask Claude!".
At least with "I don't know" the asker can move on to someone who might know faster.
Different reward function, but the same behaviour emerges.
The idea is that you generate fake llm transcripts using your classical training data. E.g. look at some training data, generate q/a transcripts. Generate radom questions, RAG against your whole dataset and look for relevant stuff, if there is nothing there, train a "I don't know." reply.
A moderately sized LLM operating some tools to access more information behind the scenes, perform tests and correct its own errors can write transcripts simulating a much larger and smarter llm.
IMO they were right, I changed my approach to those kind of questions, and since that I try to answer like "A quick search in Google says that the CEO is Mark Zuckerberg (link to the search)". In StackOverflow I tried to go "As it says in the <a href='manual.html#section'>manual</a>, the params for that function are A, B and C, blah, blah...", so a mild RTFM. And now I do the same quoting the LLM paragraph that gave me the key info. It is like you say "this is how you can figure it out on your own the next time", and feels less aggressive than "go figure that on your own".
Also, LLM's answers can be good if the prompts are good, so can still be helpful.
Turning up to a potluck with a bag of garbage you got for free in the dumpster on the way says "I don't care, and I'm so dumb I think you're too dumb to know this is trash".
And friendlies don’t use countermeasures.
> If you encounter a slop grenade, share this page
Culture is cultured, it isn't the wilds, and requires pruning.
A lmgtfy link can be useful, even if rude.
It's teaching someone to fish.
Sharing an LLM output is simultaneously pretentious and unhelpful. To the OP's point, some might not consider it rude, but I'd rather someone be rude and helpful, rather than pretentious and unhelpful.
tl;dr -- No, it's much, much worse than an lmgtfy link
But, if done properly (e.g. vetting that the top link is actually useful, after basically using the same words in the query that you were being asked), it's a genuine reminder that google exists, can be useful, and should often be consulted before you bother someone else.
It's a teaching moment.
Prompting AI and regurgitating the slop is more akin to googling and cutting and pasting the answer. Instead of making the statement "you can do better next time" it's pretending you are an oracle with supreme super-secret knowledge.
I suppose if it fools the querent, it's all good. But, for example, if I ask you a question because I want your opinion, and I receive AI slop in return, I have just been informed that you don't even value your own opinion.
If I really asked a stupid enough question to merit lmgtfy snark, I'd appreciate the snark. If you're not even confident enough in your own opinion to snark at me, you've just taught me something, but it's probably not a lesson that will do you any long-term good.
It's still a bad attempt at help. Objectively net-zero utility at best.
If it's really just "culture" but they genuinely want to help, then they can in fact be coached. If they're only interested in appearances, well, I agree training isn't going to help.
You know all those support sites for various products (Microsoft, etc) where people ask questions, and lots of folks eagerly give answers that really aren't helpful?
Throwing AI grenades generally falls into the same category.
I don't mind an AI generated answer as long as it's on point, concise, and answers my problem. If I have to read a wall of text in search of the answer, it's useless.
There's a reason I've blocked those types of "answer" sites from my Kagi search results. Kagi is awesome that way.
And of course I notice the people posting the massive slop screed don't seem to have thought critically about it at all. After all, if they had time to read it thinking critically, they probably would have had time to write it.
I wish that was the case for people with insincere communication practices. On the contrary, they seem to embody the sociopath stereotype that ultimately climbs ladders.
> Worse: it's a conversation killer. There's nothing to respond to. Your wall of text suppresses dialogue. They can't reply, can't push back, can't clarify. It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness.
Conversational norms simply do not allow me to give grace or bridge the gap. It would be so, so rude for me to infer that they meant to say "I don't know" if it turns out that it really was a detailed answer they expected me to read in full. I respect that the people who do this probably mean well, but there's some conversations I just can't have with people who respond this way, in the same way that there's some conversations I can't have with people who aren't comfortable exploring contested hypotheticals.
The bait: here is a ton of text
The historical implication: because there is a lot of it, I put a lot of thought and effort into writing it
The new normal: there is ZERO signal about the magnitude of human thought and effort that went into something on the basis of its length
... and what really pisses people off about that: when AIstas intentionally abuse that social contract to their benefit.
E.g. people who pass AI content off as their own, people who don't read their own genai before pasting to you, everyone on LinkedIn
The consultant mindset set this trend before AI made it all worse.
Really? That must be some ancient history, because I've seen rambling walls of text on the internet derided for decades. I always appreciated the Feynmanian respect for economy of time over traditional formats, where if authors said their piece but still had space they'd damn well fill it.
(Of course, slide all the way down that slippery slope and you'll just hit Twitter.)
There's a way to tell if this is actually the case: can you find the members of this culture that like getting slopgrenaded? A communication culture needs both speakers and listeners. I see the speakers, I have yet to see the listeners. I could just be missing them though.
In the case that the listeners are greatly outnumbered by the speakers what you have isn't just a culture you exist outside of, you have a common faux pas. One of many, many rude and inconsiderate acts that are nonetheless common, like sticking gum under a table or catcalling. Something about the environment prompts antisocial behavior, and shame is one way to shift the environment and reduce the behavior. There are almost certainly more effective ways to change the environment and curb the behavior, but establishing a consensus on whether the behavior is acceptable or not for those in the know is an important step.
In case it was unclear I'm on the "it's not acceptable" side. Do share if you've observed someone appreciative of being grenaded in the wild, though.
Partly, I admit, I just tend to be wary of shame as a tool. "Someone said something I dislike" has a long history of being abused. Conversely, even something like your gum example, one can point at concrete harms like littering and forcing others to clean up after you.
If you take the scripture for holy, then the holy scripture talking back to you making you a prophet, will condemn other fiction as blasphemy.
Head over to Reddit and look for the obvious AI-generated engagement bait. There are usually a bunch of people earnestly responding without even realising they aren’t talking to a real person. Sure, some of those are also bots, but a huge number of them are real people too.
Average people aren’t good at noticing this stuff. They might not deliberately seek it out, but when they are exposed to it they like it enough to voluntarily spend their time on it.
> In the case that the listeners are greatly outnumbered by the speakers
I think it’s quite likely that the people who appreciate receiving slop outnumber the people who don’t.
“I don’t know” would be so much more productive and respectful than “here, this may be useful or completely useless, figure it out on your own time. Took me 30 seconds to produce…”
A bit asymmetrical by time, signal to noise, and frankly, bs metrics.
And it's a bad culture. Yes, there are good and bad cultures. Cultural relativism has its limitations.
Its also usually the dickhead nobody likes that does it as well.
Wittgenstein termed precisely this sort of practice a “language game”.
With the rest of his work (Philosophical Investigations in particular) it is a hugely useful lens through which to view and significantly better understand the use and function of language in all its forms.
Given that language is becoming a ubiquitous UI and UX and glue for just about everything, I highly recommend it, and as a work of philosophy it is much more accessible to laypeople not of the field than some other important works in the area.
In this case, the notion that the slop grenade is intended to communicate "I don't know, but here's my attempt to help" is as far as we know entirely a fiction, possibly a favorable interpretation GP uses not to let themselves be annoyed. In reality, the intent could be any number of things or nothing in particular.
It seems more likely to me that these slop grenades are attempts at appearing to a third party to have weighed in on important decisions. It's a deliberate technique to become more visible in order to win favor with someone who can't tell reasoned responses from useless bullshit.
This self-aggrandizing trash was a normal part of professional culture before the current LLM sewage torrent, but tactlessly used LLMs are so awful at writing that it's never been so transparent before.
- A way to convince others of your position.
- A way to demonstrate that you did research (because experience is worthless)
- A way to soften harsh feedback.
At first I found this very dysfunctional but now I don't mind too much. It beats being ignored and/or offending someone.
" It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness" hello GPT
"Use AI to make things clearer, not longer. Let it sharpen your thinking, not replace it." holy slop goddamn
And on the subject of weapons, consider the example of a delayed-action fuze. They're designed to penetrate through the outer defenses of a target, before the warhead detonates deep inside. What might this look like in written form?
Well, you'd start by getting on the reader's side, with shared loathing against some outgroup. Get them to let their guard down. And then at the end:
>Use AI to make things clearer, not longer. Let it sharpen your thinking, not replace it.
You, yes you, the very clever and sophisticated person reading this who is exasperated by slop-grenades, should use AI more. You should use AI to "sharpen your thinking". You use AI, but in a good way. Not like those rubes, who use AI in a bad way.
Use AI. Use AI. Use AI.
Bang!
To me, a lot of these responses aren't made in good faith; instead, they come from bots that are some kind of training experiment. (Like when a bot responds to one of my HN posts.)
Even if the response isn't a bot, if it's just someone copying and pasting AI, how can someone reasonably think that just shuffling a comment into AI is adding any value?
That said, I want to make it clear that if people are going to regurgitate LLM results either way, I'd rather get the longer slop than trust a concise "Use Redis" conclusion from a system that doesn't think the way we wish/assume it does.
Ultimately we're using a statistical language algorithm to predict what kinds of words usually come next in a short story we've constructed.
* If you train it for short outputs (or stories where a fictional computer character has short dialogue) you're prioritizing text from places where someone answered without explaining.
* If you run its output through a hidden "summarize yourself" path, you're adding additional potential for error and dropping details you could have used to detect it.
After some thought I was better able to explain the not-so-obvious. It is all about respecting the time of the reader.
Some people don't respect the reader since they think they are important. Notably with the Ep*tein files, we have this clique of wealthy people, with few of them able to string two sentences together. Writing standards were those of an eight year old at best.
Personally I write fairly long form because I don't have ideas that I can express in glorified grunts. However, this LLM stuff is encroaching on my turf, since the likes of the guy I used to struggle with can now churn out better English than I can. That is the problem for those of us from the pre-internet, pre-grammar-checking age when written communication mattered.
I could easily write essays in Slack if I wanted to. The reason why I don't has nothing to do with whether I'm capable of it or not.
I get that the solution is in there but it's like you didn't really help me if I have to go through and read something myself. Just tell me your conclusion if I'm asking you the human. Context is a 7 page word doc output or pdf.
Did you slop grenade the slop grenade warning?
This morning I asked Claude to find why locale = empty string slipped into some of our customers records. Of course it's something I used to do myself but it did it in less than a minute. I couldn't match that speed, ever. Then I verified the analysis and the suggested fix. Finally I pasted Claude's analysis in a slack conversation, with attribution. I could have summarized what claude wrote to me, but it would be a waste of time because it was already pretty terse.
We decided to solve the problem in a different way but I think that starting with Claude's analysis was the right thing to do.
If not…well I don't know what to call this style of writing exactly but I see it all the time on LinkedIn (or some annoying startup landing page) and it's very upsetting to me.
"You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document."
"Your wall of text suppresses dialogue. They can't reply, can't push back, can't clarify. It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness."
"Let it sharpen your thinking, not replace it."
Why structure sentences like this? Maybe go read some well-written novels, a solid essay or two…or at the very least, write in a normal conversational style?
This is like people hating on em-dash because LLMs use them a lot.
Don't bore your co-workers (or others) with descriptions of your dreams, and don't throw a computer's dreams (AI chat logs) at them either.
I thought it was funny so I put a comment above saying "This is what Copilot said about my code:" and it autocompleted a line after it saying "Copilot was correct, but..."
As always, when one says something, they need to check that the public they have is interested and the public must give cues about how they receive the thing. Of course it doesn't always work well, but this could concern any topic.
Definitely don't share your AI chat with me though, I can sustain a poker face and politeness only for so long, after that I will probably need to complain, vent or practice sarcasm.
One main takeaway from the book was that "you can just look at the ratio of turn-taking duration, and which speaker/participant is spending how much time" to decide "what happened in the conversation".
The same goes for AI-generated conversations; verbose responses are the default behavior, and models are incentivised to keep that output-token ratio. Too easy to catch/notice, pretty annoying.
PS - I work in the Conversational AI space, and it is quite an effort to keep the ratio right for people to stay long enough on the phone with AI agents.
On the plus side, it gets easier with practice.
But yeah, it does.
Of course, sarcasm always works out great with people who don't already get that they are boring you to death with a long monologue...
> Don't bore your co-workers (or others) with descriptions of your dreams, and don't throw a computer's dreams (AI chat logs) at them either.
This is a great quote, thanks for sharing.
Beautiful. An ode and axiom for our new age.
But I do think such a comparison (to emphasis how unhelpful sharing tailored AI text with others is) would be useful.
And I asked why they kept saying it. I hadnt made the connection yet. I thought it was something about twitch.
THe bloke replied "Oh sorry about that I have recently acquired ChatGPT as my personal assistant"
And I just couldnt. He was basically explaining all the cool things he discussed with ChatGPT.
Why would he think anyone else cares? I dont understand.
Edit: amusing LLM bloopers may be an exception
https://www.pangram.com/history/d06c8513-9ee3-4a1d-b02f-c1ec...
This was a slop grenade btw.
2. In person, as a human, I have a bad habit of doing this myself.
It's not that you should never include any AI generated text in a conversation with other engineers, but you mostly shouldn't.
AI is a tool to help you understand/debug/review yourself, but you shouldn't be conferring authority to your AI (because it doesn't understand anything and is often wrong in the text it spews), and you shouldn't be running an AI for other people, they should run it themselves.
These days I only bother commenting if I really feel I need to get something off my chest, but I don't assume anyone gives a shit. I frequently just delete my responses. I don't generally feel anyone needs what I'm saying.
It takes a bit of self-awareness to realize that no one is interested in what you have to say, so don't bother. And, I think it takes twice as much self-awareness to realize that they certainly don't care about what a bot has to say, unless they're the ones asking.
Being concise is an art by itself and it’s a really good way to express your thinking and convince people, it just needs practice.
Touché.
You decode the signals, and stumble: ... They contain no usable intelligence, yet they are structured intelligently; there is no chance they could have arisen by chance.
The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus.
Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies.
The signal is an attack.
And it's coming from right about there.”
Also my main problem with many chat bots. Too many different aspects brought up at once. Short answers would be more eco-friendly too.
actually maybe not ⸻ a lot of people take pride in (re)posting AI generated content, their only human contribution being "I asked $AI".
Consider also (but maybe I'm projecting) that people do drive-by shitposts all the time, so they would post their slop grenade (I will use that term from now on lmao) and never see what the responses are. I've done that for years on various platforms (minus the slop) and I honestly don't know how well-known or well-received my shitposts are, I check some metrics every once in a while and numbers go up so it's not all bad I suppose.
I’ve become so cynical that I cannot read this phrasing without thinking it came from… an LLM.
This cynicism also negatively impacts human communication. This constant doubt of whether there was a thinker on the other side of the text.
The author clearly has never worked with genuine hardcore nerds infodumping.