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grvdrm commented on AI and the ironies of automation – Part 2   ufried.com/blog/ironies_o... · Posted by u/BinaryIgor
caughtinthought · 14 hours ago
Basically every AWS migration is this example
grvdrm · 4 hours ago
Yup.

And Excel to, well, not-Excel in my experience.

grvdrm commented on AI and the ironies of automation – Part 2   ufried.com/blog/ironies_o... · Posted by u/BinaryIgor
all2 · a day ago
Thoughtfulness is sometimes increased by touch time. I've seen various examples of this over time; teachers who must collate and calculate grades manually showed improved outcomes for their students, test techs who handle hardware becoming acutely aware of the many failure modes of the hardware, and so on.
grvdrm · 4 hours ago
Said another way: extra touch might mean more accountable thinking.

Higher touch: "I am responsbile for creating this report. It better be right" Automated touch: "I sent you the report, it's right because it's automated"

Mistakes possible either way. But I like higher-touch in many situations.

Curious if you have links to examples you mention?

grvdrm commented on AI and the ironies of automation – Part 2   ufried.com/blog/ironies_o... · Posted by u/BinaryIgor
nuancebydefault · a day ago
The article discusses basically 2 new problems with using agentic AI:

- When one of the agents does something wrong, a human operator needs to be able to intervene quickly and needs to provide the agent with expert instructions. However since experts do not execute the bare tasks anymore, they forget parts of their expertise quickly. This means the experts need constant training, hence they will have little time left to oversee the agent's work.

- Experts must become managers of agentic systems, a role which they are not familiar with, hence they are not feeling at home in their job. This problem is harder to be determined as a problem by people managers (of the experts) since they don't experience that problem often first hand.

Indeed the irony is that AI provides efficiency gains, which as they become more widely adopted, become more problematic because they outfit the necessary human in the loop.

I think this all means that automation is not taking away everyone's job, as it makes things more complicated and hence humans can still compete.

grvdrm · a day ago
Your first problem doesn’t feel new at all. Reminded me of a situation several years ago. What was previous Excel report was automated into PowerBI. Great right? Time saved. Etc.

But the report was very wrong for months. Maybe longer. And since it was automated, the instinct to check and validate was gone. And tracking down the problem required extra work that hadn’t been part of the Excel flow

I use this example in all of my automation conversations to remind people to be thoughtful about where and when they automate.

grvdrm commented on The highest quality codebase   gricha.dev/blog/the-highe... · Posted by u/Gricha
GuB-42 · 4 days ago
It is something I noticed when talking to LLMs, if they don't get it right the first time, they probably never will, and if you really insist, the quality starts to degrade.

It is not unlike people, the difference being that if you ask someone the same thing 200 times, he will probably going to tell you to go fuck yourself, or, if unable to, turn to malicious compliance. These AIs will always be diligent. Or, a human may use the opportunity to educate himself, but again, LLMs don't learn by doing, they have a distinct training phase that involves ingesting pretty much everything humanity has produced, your little conversation will not have a significant effect, if at all.

grvdrm · 4 days ago
I use a new chat/etc every time that happens. Try to improve my prompt to get a better result. Sometimes works, but that multiple chat rather than laborious long chat approach annoys me less.
grvdrm commented on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban   reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/chirau
ropable · 5 days ago
I fully support this legislation, and government regulation around this topic. Given the current (2025) state of the social media landscape, I believe that the positives of restricting access to them for teenagers well outweighs any potential harms.

As the parent of a teenager affected by this ban (plus one who has aged past it): I wish that it had been in place 8-10 years ago, before either of my kids got smartphones. We tried to be reasonably conservative in their introduction to devices and social media, on the rationale that it would do them no harm to delay using those for a couple of years through their early brain development. The real difficulty turned out to be the network effect of their peers having access to social media, which increased the social pressure (and corresponding social exclusion) to be online. Not having access to Snapchat/Discord/etc. at that point meant that they were effectively out-group, which is a Big Deal for a teenager.

We ended up allowing them onto social media platforms earlier than we'd have liked but imposed other controls (time and space restrictions, an expectation of parental audits, etc.) These controls were imperfect, and the usual issues occurred. My assessment is that it was a net negative for the mental health of one child and neutral for the other.

I realise that HN is primarily a US forum and skews small-government and free-speech-absolutist. I'm not interested in getting in a debate with anyone about this - my view is that most social media is a net negative with a disproportionate harm to the mental health of non-fully-developed teenage brains. This represents a powerful collective-action failure that is unrealistic to expect individuals to manage, so it's up to government to step in. All boundaries are arbitrary, so the age of 16 (plus this set of apps) seems like a reasonable set of restrictions to me. I am unmoved by the various "slippery slope" arguments I've read here: all rules are mutable, and if we see a problem/overreach later - we'll deal with it in the same way, by consensus and change.

grvdrm · 4 days ago
Did you also find the intro negative for your own mental health in the sense that you had to bother thinking at all about it?

Feels like a huge component to me as a parent. What do I now need to know and do and react to, and how does my behavior affect the mental health of my kids.

grvdrm commented on Show HN: Kraa – Writing App for Everything   kraa.io/about... · Posted by u/levmiseri
embedding-shape · 10 days ago
- Click "Start Writing"

- Start typing, nothing happens

- Editor apparently didn't focus, I try clicking anywhere on the page to give text editor focus

- Editor doesn't focus when you click on it?

For being an experience "all about writing", I sure don't understand how to get started? I click in the middle of the page, but nothing is focusing? Using Firefox 145.0.1.

grvdrm · 10 days ago
Using Safari (OSX). No problems.
grvdrm commented on A series of vignettes from my childhood and early career   jasonscheirer.com/weblog/... · Posted by u/absqueued
everlier · 13 days ago
I was, for a long time, scared of my future due to the low/no-code, automation, LLMs, outsourcing, etc. Until, at some point, I realised something simple - the risk factor for my job is not determined by how good new tools are, but only by how lazy people are about learning and adopting them. And here history gives another lesson - we never learn, eternal cycle of mistakes will continue.
grvdrm · 13 days ago
Incredible comment. I live on biz side of insurance but use tech/automation skills all the time. My industry should have solved so many problems so many years ago.

But it didn't because of exactly what you said: "how lazy people are about learning and adopting them"

grvdrm commented on 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads   flowtwo.io/post/on-10-yea... · Posted by u/thejoeflow
grvdrm · 13 days ago
Recommendation: use Hemingway (hemingwayapp.com) or something similar.

That apps spots problems I often don't see in first drafts. Weakeners like adverbs/passive voice. Complicated sentences. Fancy words over simple words. Etc. Stuff that makes writing harder to read.

Not perfect here at all! Always practicing. But more and more use helps me spot problems in first drafts, or avoid them altogether.

grvdrm commented on 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads   flowtwo.io/post/on-10-yea... · Posted by u/thejoeflow
riazrizvi · 14 days ago
Writing a blog is like talking in the town square. Except because it’s digital, we seem to forget how communication works. If you just start talking in the town square, you’re standing alone talking. Sure a person who passes by might pause, but the odds you’re saying something really relevant to them are low, so they’ll move on.

The whole question of how you get in front of the right people and tweak your message based on their reactions, and then setup a routine so you have a dependable performance-audience, all seem to be lost on many folks.

grvdrm · 13 days ago
> Writing a blog is like talking in the town square. Except because it’s digital, we seem to forget how communication works. If you just start talking in the town square, you’re standing alone talking. Sure a person who passes by might pause, but the odds you’re saying something really relevant to them are low, so they’ll move on.

An optimist take on your statement is this: we need MORE folks writing/talking in town square. More chances to encounter something valuable (to you).

Otherwise, I first read your statement the other way: too many people communicating into the ether with no audience and no feedback. But I suppose I prefer people practice that communication somehow rather than not...

Is your point that people do not understand how to present themselves and a point of view (on anything) in front of anyone? Work presentation to executive. Writing a coherent email. Running a meeting. Etc.

grvdrm commented on 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads   flowtwo.io/post/on-10-yea... · Posted by u/thejoeflow
a_bonobo · 14 days ago
Related, I think people have stopped.... reacting on the internet? I've been part of the X/Twitter to Bluesky migration and people often mention how 'quiet' Bluesky is.

I think that's not due to algorithmic intervention of product design etc., I think people are just tired. The novelty of shouting at strangers on the internet has worn off - how many internet fights have we gotten into that did nothing in the end except waste time? It's only worse with a coin flip's chance of the other person being an LLM. We're all tired.

grvdrm · 13 days ago
Participating? Or reacting? The internet I look seems plenty full of reactions despite the migrations you mention.

Maybe to YT or Threads instead.

I like Bsky but I don't think the userbase supports much large-scale communication (not a bad thing, frankly)

u/grvdrm

KarmaCake day395January 13, 2018View Original