Mastodawn

Less about tools that boost productivity, more about tools that reduce total workload.

Paul Cantrell May 22, 2024

Specific line of thought to illustrate my general point:

Consider an LLM that helps manage email correspondence. It writes emails! It summarizes emails! Less reading! Less typing! More messages faster! Productivity boost!! Except:

- You have to babysit the LLM, guide it and check it to make sure it’s accurately preserving human intent (which is, after all, the whole point of communication…right??). That’s new work, and likely cancels out the slim time savings of reduced reading and typing.

2/

Paul Cantrell May 22, 2024

- But it's an LLM, so it’s still often wildly, convincingly incorrect. Miscommunication increases. Miscommunication has costs. Miscommunication generates new work. Which now gets done faster! And generates yet more work!

- IT staff has to administer the LLM, support the LLM, evaluate vendors, yada yada.

- People have to maintain the LLM itself, and the infra that supports it. Those costs are •large•.

3/

Paul Cantrell May 22, 2024

And if by some magic all of this actually spins up and gets working, then (1) the barrier to communication decreases (why not just send another email if it’s automated?), (2) individual communication load increases (because you can answer emails at a faster rate), and (3) the net efficiency of communication decreases (because of everything in the previous two posts).

Sound and fury, signifying nothing.

4/

Paul Cantrell May 22, 2024

I severely doubt many real orgs measure actual desired large-scale outcomes well enough to spot that net efficiency decrease. All this is going to look like increased productivity. Will •be• increased productivity in the ways that most folks actually measure it.

But here, with the bird’s-eye view of a hypothetical, it’s clear: the total amount of work happening to achieve the same ends has •increased•.

5/

Paul Cantrell May 22, 2024

I said “reduce total workload.” What are some thing that accomplish •that•?

“Do we really have the problem we think we have?”

“There’s a simpler way.”

“Work from home!”

“Hmm, I’m going to think about my reader, and edit for clarity and emotional impact before sending this email.”

“We’re willing to pay for experience / expertise.”

“Things are going well. Head home for the day!”

“Maybe we don’t need to do this thing anymore. We can just choose not to have this problem.”

/6

Paul Cantrell May 22, 2024

A lot of things that get billed as a productivity boost sound suspiciously to me like recipes for reducing operational slack and thus “going solid:” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Cook_(safety_researcher)#%22Going_solid%22

/7

Richard Cook (safety researcher) - Wikipedia

Paul Cantrell May 22, 2024

As both a software developer and a teacher, I’m increasingly interested in figuring out which costly things are avoidable, or can be simplified, or •just don’t matter•…and then doing less of them.

Breathing room can be a form of efficiency too. And it’s a more humane one.

Less about tools that boost productivity, more about tools that reduce total workload.

/end

@inthehands So much this! 💯

These LLM tools just lack so much context!

- What is actually important for the person that receive the email?
- What is actually important in this wall of text in the current context?

I've actually just done an experiment that shows this (with Chat LMSys):

https://chat.lmsys.org/

Some details in the next posts...

1/3 (wow, a thread within a thread🤯)

Chat with Open Large Language Models

@inthehands I've given it the following prompt:

"Please summarize the following text in max 4 sentences:"

and then I've given it the pure text of the following blog post:
https://blog.rust-lang.org/2024/05/17/enabling-rust-lld-on-linux.html

There is a summary at the end of the actual blog post (that's what makes this experiment so interesting!), _which is not part of the prompt_.

Please see the image below:

2/3

Faster linking times on nightly on Linux using `rust-lld` | Rust Blog

Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

@inthehands ...and now have a look at the #AI summary below by GPT4o and Gemini 1.5.

While it perfectly got it right (this time!), the most crucial bit on how to disable this new linker is not present in the summary (see image below).

This is why context and details matter, which #LLMs will always miss!

Writing requires #empathy - an #LLM lacks it.

3/3

JJ Celery May 22, 2024

@inthehands to throw my 2 cents in: having "slack" or "breathing room" also can lead to situations where people start looking for, or just noticing outliers, and solving interesting but not urgent problems.

These problems would have become urgent if not spotted earlier, but slack lets them become non-threatning.

I have personally lost count of the amount of times I prevented a serious problem by having the luxury of reading logs leisurely for a little while longer.

Paul Cantrell May 23, 2024

@jjcelery
Yes. Pushing for efficiency tends to focus people on the urgent at the expense of the important.

ShadSterling May 23, 2024

@inthehands @jjcelery (this is also how capitalism prevents “productive” members of society from contributing to society with anything but their undervalued labor)

John Gordon May 23, 2024

@jjcelery @inthehands It’s hard to preserve that capacity, not least because there is a cohort of people who like to be always very busy.

JJ Celery May 23, 2024

@jgordon @inthehands there's often a big difference between busy and productive

John Gordon May 23, 2024

@jjcelery @inthehands Yes, they want to be busy. Productive is nice too. There are people who want 80h weeks even if they complain about it. People are weird.

Nils Ballmann May 23, 2024

@jjcelery @inthehands @fasterthanlime exactly! Today... for the first time in... ever, I sat in front a tail -f, opened a bag of chips – like for watching a TV show – and learned things about the container I'm running. I stopped and started it multiple times in various stages to get a feeling how it behaves in it's future production environment.

I learned that it doesn't like to have its persistent data on an NFS. Well... too bad, that's not gonna change. I found a few coupling issues and de-coupled them.

Today was a good day.

pejacoby May 26, 2024

@jjcelery @inthehands so much this - so often given time to focus the “big” problem becomes on close and steady inspection a “small” problem with a few steps to resolve. And that frees up more “slack” time to evaluate the next thing

JJ Celery May 27, 2024

@pejacoby @inthehands A large problem is really three medium problems in a trench coat. Each of those is really three small problems in a trench coat. Each small problem is three racoons in a trenchcoat.

To summarise: each large problem is actually 27 racoons and 10 trench coats. That's why you need a lot of time and snacks to deal with it.

Paul Cantrell May 27, 2024

@jjcelery @pejacoby

Accurate. I wrote about this once: https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/111388010488223175

Paul Cantrell (@[email protected])

The number of problems is rising fast, and all the problems have problems. All you can see is problems. You have forgotten what your original problem was. You have forgotten what your business does. You have forgotten your own name. Now you are a software company. Time is not a flat line; it is a hall of mirrors, and all you can see is the endless infinity of your own hubris, your own human fallibility, now reified, grown mighty, and turned upon you, devouring all. Time to build more software.

Hachyderm.io

JJ Celery May 27, 2024

@inthehands @pejacoby I, who is now a software company, concur.

Paul Cantrell May 27, 2024

@jjcelery @pejacoby
I is also a software company now, even just from having a personal web site, and I has mixed feelings about it.

JJ Celery May 27, 2024

@inthehands @pejacoby let's combine our efforts.

I'll feel bad about it every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and you take the rest, deal?

Paul Cantrell May 27, 2024

@jjcelery @pejacoby
Deal. So glad to have help sharing the load!

pejacoby May 27, 2024

@inthehands @jjcelery I’ll pick up leap day just so there’s no 4-year-overflow issue..

JJ Celery May 28, 2024

@pejacoby @inthehands

JJ Celery May 28, 2024

@pejacoby @inthehands (also there's no leap day in my calendar, only a second joker day)

Dominic White May 23, 2024

@inthehands that’s a super interesting perspective I hadn’t thought about. I particularly like the “going solid” concept.

GinevraCat May 23, 2024

@inthehands So much this! At the high school I teach at, if you complain about workload / suffer stress / miss deadlines etc, the general administrative response is to allocate you to an online course on "efficient time management".
Thus adding yet another burden on your time. It's the budgeting in poverty problem - my problem is not how I budget my time, it's the fact that I need more time!

(Not in my department, though. My HOD understands this.)

Paul Cantrell May 23, 2024

@GinevraCat
My spouse works at an elementary school, and it’s a similar story. The way the district abuses her time is horrifying.

Helen LH May 23, 2024

@inthehands The concept of Buffer time in Star Trek Lower decks demonstrated this perfectly!

Chris Johnson May 22, 2024

@inthehands "Reducing operational slack" sounds to me just like "increasing fragility, reducing resilience and agility". *shrug*

Hein Ragas May 23, 2024

@inthehands But that is the exact goal: to extract as much value of as few workers as possible with _no_ slack -- because if there is slack, you're not extracting every last drop of value.
This quarter's numbers are important, we'll worry about next quarter's in three months.

Pyperkub May 22, 2024

@inthehands Yeah, during a particularly bad CA budget year I was introduced to the tech concept of:

Do less with less.

Sometimes it's what layer 8 requires.

dogzilla May 22, 2024

@inthehands Fair points, but you seem to be comparing an LLM-based system against one with perfect efficiency, instead of the existing human-based system (which I’m certain has its own set of failings).

While it’s useful to know how an LLM system deviates from the ideal, I’d be far more interested in how it compares against the existing system. Personally, I don’t need a system to be perfect - I just need it to be better

Paul Cantrell May 22, 2024

@dogzilla
Existing systems •are• what I’m comparing against. I am assuming here, based on (1) emperical observation and (2) the underlying principles of these systems, that LLM email assistants will generally lower communication accuracy on both the transmitting and receiving side versus unmediated human-human interaction. “Worse communication but faster” is what this tech can offer.

dogzilla May 22, 2024

@inthehands Hmm. Having been on the receiving end of thousands of emails throughout my career, I’m not convinced of this. I’m not ready to believe that the “failure rate” of LLM-generated emails is higher than that of human-generated emails.

This actually sounds like it’d be a really cool study to run

filobus May 22, 2024

@dogzilla @inthehands I'm certainly wrong, but it seems problem is a bad email communication system, something it should be resolved in another way. Like, LLM help us solve problems we can't solve in another way (but maybe we should)

dogzilla May 22, 2024

@filobus @inthehands That’s a good point - maybe we can take the opportunity to leverage LLMs to build something better instead of shoehorning them into existing systems and workflows.

Sean Boots May 22, 2024

@inthehands This is such a good thread. 💯💯

Paul Cantrell May 22, 2024

@sboots
Thanks. Thoughts on this one still forming; I feel like there’s a kernel in here somewhere that I haven’t found yet.

Sean Boots May 22, 2024

@inthehands For sure! I feel like there's a lot of takeaways for public sector work (both tech- and not tech-related) that are also half formed in my head. 😅

Alex, the Hearth Fire May 29, 2024

@inthehands I'm intrigued. What kinds of problems can you just choose not to have? Assuming you're not in the kind of upper management position that profits from inventing problems.

Matthew Skelton May 23, 2024

@inthehands the whole Microsoft business proposition is basically "jobs for SysAdmins" (now with added domestic abuse vector). 🤷🏼

J H Libby May 23, 2024

@inthehands
I worked with a manager who thought an AI would be able to conduct some of the background research my office performed to understand more about our community, even to the point of asking the AI to do the same work as our overloaded staff.

As soon as it became obvious that the manager didn't want to hear that AI actually increases the need for human fact-checking and QC resources, I knew the project was doomed.

🔏 Matthias Wiesmann May 23, 2024

@inthehands The problem is you assume that the goal of e-mails is communicating information. Often the goal is social, i.e. show you care/you work/you respect the social codes/you are productive.
LLM are "good" because they are machines that handle social problems, you can type ”tell this moron project fnuble is delayed because upstairs fired Bob”, LLM translates into 5 paragraphs of corp-speak, sends e-mail, on the other end, LLM translates back into “fnuble project late, Bob was fired”.

Voline May 22, 2024

@inthehands
In economics an efficiency improvement results in either: The same output with less inputs (labor, raw materials, etc) or more output with the same inputs. Capitalism will always prefer the gains in more output.

That's a social not a technical problem. No labor-saving device has ever reduced the work day by a single hour. Only worker action.

Paul Cantrell May 22, 2024

@Voline
Agreeing with that, I’ll add that businesses are frequently terrible at serving even their •own capitalist self-interest•. It’s not even as rosy as the picture you paint: businesses will always prefer the thing that •looks• like output gains (local, as measured, as socially constructed, just cause some guy thinks so) even if it destroys actual output. Orgs just can’t seem to stop punching themselves in their face.

Voline May 22, 2024

@inthehands
Interesting, isn't it? So many examples of capitalist firms doing things that harms their ability to make profit, what we think of as their reason for being.

General Motors has factories in Michigan and Ontario. So they can see how it is cheaper for them to employ a worker in Ontario than Michigan, largely due to having to pay for private health insurance for the American, but not for the Canadian. Yet, the automaker never advocates for single-payer health care in the US. They could save billions.

Is there something else more important than profit at stake?

Paul Cantrell May 23, 2024

@Voline
I honestly think Occam’s Razor wins this question: complex systems are hard, and people are messy and incompetent.

Esme Ciredutemps May 28, 2024

@inthehands like a hammock.
Verysoon good tool.

candide.xyz May 30, 2024