Skip to content

Comment on I am a SOTA 0-shot classifier of your slop

Comments

I really hope this is sarcasm. It's very copypasta-esque, cringy, and holier-than-thou judgemental.

I agree. My first thought when reading the post: "who do you think you are??" Oh right, you're the guy who... learned to read early? That's... great, congrats?

If you are reading this, you were most likely sent here after you shared a document with me and I viewed it unfavorably.

"Did this peasant just talk to My Majesty? Ew, how dare they, I view their document unfavorably."

Alternately, perhaps I really like you and think you have potential, so I am sending you this message prematurely so that you don’t accidentally trigger a peeve of mine.

"Yeah, I like that one, he's funny, I'll keep him as a pet. But don't you dare send me AI slop, you peasant!"

My life is busy. I have children, a demanding job, and personal aspirations. When I want information to help you, enable you, or supervise you, I want it in the most efficient format possible.

"Look at me, I'm the busiest. Don't have time for nothing, can't you see? Ungrateful peasants, I enable them by the thousand, only to be sent AI slop."

I’ll cut you a break. I will hold my nose despite all the text smells because I genuinely want to see your best work in the best light possible.

"Ugh, fine, I'll have a look at your slop, you filthy slave. But that's solely because I always see everyone in the best light possible."

Can you explain what your product actually does? I looked at the Crowdbotics website, but it just seems like it's designed for nontechnical C-suite and EVP types.

There is a description at the top of the site:

Crowdbotics uses AI to analyze your code base across three layers of abstraction, giving developers, architects, and business stakeholders the insights they need to modernize and maintain legacy code.

FWIW the site will be undergoing major changes soon which should help more clearly explain it.

Well, that's my point. I see some JSON screenshots with highlighting, but nothing really that corresponds with what my own brown- and grayfield experience leads me to look for, and not really anything very persuasive toward the interpretability of what is on offer, so that I can evaluate the quality of the tool's "judgment." But I suppose that just goes to clarify the case for the redesign you mentioned!

Not that you're asking, but what would really convince me would be being able to point a cut-down version of the tool, presumably in a BYOAPI fashion, at one of my own old stale repos like https://github.com/aaron-em/same-encoder, and see what kind of a modernization plan it comes up with and how that compares with my own. A toy problem to be sure, but what better field for evaluation? Think of it like a take-home interview, perhaps.

Feel free to email me, dan at crowdbotics dot com. I'm on vacation this week but could run your repo next week. Right now we're targeting older languages like COBOL and Java but it does work well with newer languages like JS since there's a lot of it in the training data.

Oh, okay, that makes a lot more sense, in an application where engineers are scarce already and getting more so, and where the kind of "deep time" it takes for a safe, well-understood refactor of a complex running system probably also isn't much on offer. Good grief, I couldn't seriously imagine taking on a refactor of a mature COBOL application especially, what with how those tend to grow in place over decades - it's ambitious as anything and I respect it! Enjoy your vacation.

holier-than-thou judgemental

Unfortunately that's rewarded a lot these days. It's basically the same thing as rage bait.

You can capitalize on fear of AI by throwing the word slop around, getting people angry, and getting those sweet clicks.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.