Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zingar 47 days ago
I think there’s a weaker claim that holds true: we were able to ignore lots of content based on the superficial (and pay proper attention to work that passed this test) and now we are overwhelmed because everything meets the superficial criteria and we can’t pay proper attention to all of it.
2 comments

That's what I had in mind! The whole post is a claim that evaluating knowledge work got more expensive because cheaper measures stopped correlating well with quality.

If someone was already evaluating the work output using a metric closer to the underlying quality then it might not have been a big shift for them (other than having much more work to evaluate).

You may have benefited from using the term we already had for the cheaper measures of negative code quality: code smells.
I find misapplication of anti-smell techniques a pretty cheap indicator that I’m looking at LLM garbage. I think they’re not really usefully engaging with that stuff yet.
Yes, I agree that this is true!

You could however only do that if you were fine with unfairly judging the quality of work, as you now readily discarded quality work based on superficial proxies. Which admittedly is done in a lot of cases.