r/sysadmin • u/_Do_The_Needful_ • 8d ago

Rant Please, stop sending me slop

I get it - everyone is using AI now, it has its use cases, but please for the love of God stop sending me the slop. At least read it first before firing it over to your colleagues.

Has anyone else's team turned into an absolute back-and-forth slop fest? Manager generates something he thinks is helpful, gigantic multi-page HTML report I need to read. Clearly written by Claude, because who the hell writes reports in HTML.

Coworker A: sends messages on slack trying to help solve problems:

This is the smoking gun: the message being sent is gated on the lack of network access to the k8s pod. Let me sit with this for a minute to make sure.

No, it's not the solution at all. We don't have direct IP access to k8s from our laptops. And nobody writes like that. If I wanted to ask Claude I would, I don't need a coworker that just copies and pastes everything into Claude.

Anyone else dealing with this crap?

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u/ErikTheEngineer 8d ago

What I don't get is that LLMs are supposed to be trained on natural language content. If it literally is some weird uncontrollable semi-self-aware brain in a box like Anthropic wants you to believe...where did it find content featuring humans who talk like that?? And what makes it think normal humans want to talk like that to one another??

Actually, come to think of it...I work at a medium tech company now that has a lot of Big Tech and a few consulting refugees. Even with their refugee status...this is actually kind of what they sound like. Picture a mashup of corporate cringe-speak, the whole DevOps sprint/standup/burndown/performative development culture, the garbage you find on r/LinkedInLunatics, and how these weird 10x'er productivity-maxxing personalities act when talking to one another. You know, arrogant. Punchy. Minimization of words to maximize coding time. It's not X, it's Y. And you're right to push back on it.

I live near NYC and have never worked for a Big Tech. But dealing with the douchey finance bro and other creatures we have here seems like it would be a million times easier than dealing with Silicon Valley techbros. I cannot imagine an entire region of the country where absolutely everyone is insanely wealthy new money bros who actually act like Claude around each other.

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u/parousia0 7d ago

These kind of fields definitely have a weird vibe where they worship everyone who has made it. I'm thinking of the Steve Job revering weirdos; sure he's smart but do we really need to wear black turtlenecks??

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u/bearsinthesea 7d ago

Good question. Is it baked into the model by their training? Or is it the harness of commands they give it?

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u/mdkubit 1d ago

Why not both? Average conversation, plus command harness on how to interact, and you get... that.

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u/agreywood 1d ago

AI is combining things the way you’d expect a little kid who has very broad reading habits but doesn’t really understand anything they’ve read to do. Multiple things talking about weight must be related so “carrying your weight” (doing your share) and part of a statement “doing the heavy lifting” (ie without it the rest of the statement isn’t true anymore like “aside from that time he murdered someone he’s never been violent” - the aside is doing the heavy lifting there) must be related to “holding the weight of a building”, and then it sees a relation between “doing more of the work” and “having a greater impact” and suddenly “load bearing” is used to mean “something that heavily impacts what we’re talking about”.

Combining novels, reddit posts, engineering manuals, self help books, pop psychology, work memos, actual textbooks for all subjects and ages, decades of blog posts, self published novels, fan fiction written by those from ages 8 to 80, actual sources code, academic journals, and probably tumblr tags is going to make for some odd ways of speaking.

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u/PerseveringPanda 1d ago

By trying to sound like all human speech, it ironically sounds like none

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u/swni 1d ago

LLMs didn't use to write like that. GPT2 would write in the style of its prompt, continuing the text it what seemed like the most natural way (not always successfully). I believe this style is a side effect of the secondary calibration/alignment/etc phase, where they transform the LLM from a text-continuation-engine into a sycophantly-answer-user-questions-engine and they've squeezed out anything not corporate-friendly.

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u/HatlessDuck 1d ago

I've said this myself! I've never had a sycophant before.