Google's 20% 'project' has become AI's 120% 'attention'

https://joe.dev/posts/new-20pct-time/

by scottdbuchanan • 1 month ago

39 25 1 month ago

joe.dev

fwip• 1 month ago

Is this more AI writing, or are my sensors just on the fritz ?

bklosky2• 1 month ago

Pangram reports 76% of this text is AI generated.

Barbing3• 1 month ago

Did I miss news about an authoritative writing analyzer?

astro-lizard• 1 month ago

Distracted by the LLM-generated style of writing. Not sure whether the author truly writes like that (unlikely) or there was heavy AI assistance in drafting this.

0xWTF2• 1 month ago

What prompt would you use to generate this? I don't see it.

dang2• 1 month ago

I have no idea about the current article, and given that the author is the person with the first commit in the Kubernetes repo (https://joe.dev/about/), he obviously has a lot of credibility.

Just generally though: what we're seeing a ton of these days is people writing something and then passing it to an LLM with a request to improve it somehow, e.g. by fixing grammar, tightening the style, etc. In such cases, the answer to your question is that the "prompt" is (1) a first draft, and (2) an instruction to edit it.

It's clear, though, that the LLMs leave far more imprints on the text than most people realize, and that although they may have asked the LLM to restrict its edits to "just" X or Y, the actual changes to the text will often go beyond that.

How this will evolve over time is anyone's guess, of course.

autoexec• 1 month ago

"Turn this outline/lose idea for an article/4 paragraphs of text into a blog post similar to these previous blog posts, but make sure that this one has a table of contents and a bunch of references"

zerobees2• 1 month ago

It reads that way and Pangram says it's AI. And my experience says that if you see an AI-related headline on HN, there's a 50%+ chance that it is AI-generated and meant mostly for clicks.

Barbing3• 1 month ago

Recent Pangram feedback on HN:

Have you tried putting known human writing into pangram? I have. I've gotten 100% AI with multiple samples of my own human writing. It has also given me 50% on things I know were 100% AI written (from my prompts).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48326698

Pangram is basically a made-up number. / I've tried it on large docs I've written well before the AI times, and that are nowhere available on the Internet (so it can't be a corpus issue) - and it is happily classifying me as 60%-80% AI.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48378226

Two of my own thoughts:

Unfortunate there's an incentive to pay to sign up to protect oneself against false accusations.

An earlier claim in this thread stated 100% from the same tool, but another commenter claims 76%, so apparently the tool is even susceptible to that failure mode.

giancarlostoro2• 1 month ago

I never worked at EA, but they had "Friday Afternoon Project" at least someone who worked for EA here in Florida told me so. The unfortunate thing about Friday Afternoon Project being its shorthand acronym or "F.A.P." not sure if that was intentional or just a "happy accident" but a coworker found one such Friday Afternoon Project and had sent me a youtube of it, it was pretty funny looking, thing of a really bare bones game concept basically. I guess it was a way for EA to let employees have some downtime.

I was always jealous of the 20% off concept, because there's so many jobs and places where I'd use that time to solve things nobody wants to "fund" within my org, sometimes there's some really dumb bug somewhere, or easy to solve for internal tooling need (I'm sure Google has had this resolved many a time internally) that could be met if I could even have two hours on a Friday to work on anything.

moomoo11• 1 month ago

20% time works when the 80% time spent is a money printer that goes brrrr

only a few companies like google had that imo. most companies cannot afford that.

giancarlostoro2• 1 month ago

The other problem is that R&D used to be taxed differently for decades, then people abused it and ruined it for everyone else, making it so only FAANG level companies can afford R&D.

0xWTF2• 1 month ago

Artists and actors could point the LLMs at programmers by developing their own apps, doing their own engineering. Do they? Who's doing it already? Tilly Norwood's creator seems like a decent start.

johnhess• 1 month ago

I worry the answer to "new surplus. who will it go to?" is a foregone conclusion. the surplus is the most surveillable technology imaginable.

apalmer• 1 month ago

The article didn't do a good job explaining the 120% attention angle, I kept reading waiting for that and it never really came. I definitely had the impression it was heavily using AI in the writing which I gave up on being against, but it just didn't explain the thesis well.

I guess the idea is AI gives you back time so you could now do the 20% but you still really can't because you have to still think about it even if the code is generated? Not even sure after reading all that text what the idea is .

alasr• 1 month ago

Regarding the the current HN post's title, I like the TFA original title ("The New 20% Time, Minus the Time") better, along its sub-title; IMHO, the current HN post's title ("Google's 20% 'project' has become AI's 120% 'attention'") is more like reflection of the HN submitter's interpretation of the content of the blog post (that I agree with partially and to a small/negligible extent ONLY).

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IMO, keeping "Google 20% Time" (mentioned in the TFA) and "R&D is two jobs, ..." (his second-last blog post, at time of writing this comment) in mind while reading this blog post, helps in reading and understanding the content of this blog post; whether we agree (or not) with the author's point-of-view is another matter.

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Btw, I also noticed AI usage on this blog post; however, I over-looked that part of the post after looking at author's past work (and I'm happy I did that and continued reading the post).

Google's 20% 'project' has become AI's 120% 'attention'

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