Darn and I was hoping we would see a new invention someone could form1 with the BATFE.

Then at the end, "Use AI to make things clearer". NO! STOP USING AI AND JUST TALK!

> Nobody writes essays in Slack

I 100% write long texts in Slack. I always try to provide as much context as possible when reaching out to someone with a question or request.

> Should we use Redis or Memcached?

Couldn't they have used an example aimed at a broader audience?

I'm in IT but even I barely know what Redis or Memcached is about (never used either).

“Worse: it's a conversation killer. There's nothing to respond to. Your wall of text suppresses dialogue. They can't reply, can't push back, can't clarify. It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness.”

I can reply. I can push back. I can clarify. I am not helpless.

> Use AI to make things clearer, not longer. Let it sharpen your thinking, not replace it.

If someone sends me an AI generated email, chat message, or message substantially influenced by AI[1], one of two not mutually exclusive things will happen:

1. I ask them not to use AI as I want to hear from a human colleague about their human thoughts, not a robot;

2. The message gets deleted.

I try as best I can to teach and mentor others. I am more than happy to work through spelling mistakes, poor grammar, and misused words because at the end of the day I'm talking to a human colleague.

Sometimes my messages get pretty long and detailed I will admit, though it's for a reason: context, nuance and technical details are important. If you're just going to offload your brain to a robot, I'm not going to waste my time feeding that robot with you in the middle as a conduit.

[1] It is very easy to tell in in-person conversations: the authority with which a person talks about a particular topic via text communication, does not propagate into a verbal in-person conversation.

I swear most executives can barely read so you're not doing your career any favors sending them more than 150 characters.

Do people actually do this in things like slack? (One of the best things about being a professor in a non lab field is that I don't have to use things like slack.) This seems like open contempt for the reader.

Replace "Them" with "Coworker" and the point of linking to the site is instantly understood (a LMGTFY-style shaming with a dash of humor to soften the blow)

With "Them" I wasn't sure if you meant the AI companies, some dude I didn't recognize in the avatar, scammers, coworkers, etc...

Obviously you need to use an AI to summarise the wall of text generated by the AI. Duh.

The best are the Jira tickets with a huge wall of AI slop requirements. Usually full of nonsense of course including implementation recommendations in the wrong language or framework. Questions for clarification met with blank stares from the author. Ah well, copy/paste into claude code and say “do this. make no mistakes” and get back to browsing HN…

Just prompt them back: "that's a lot of detail, could you please summarise as briefly as possible what differences concern our requirements specifically?"

We desperately need some cultural norms and taboos to develop around AI usage.

That’s interesting. When I use AI to help me write chat messages it’s almost always, “make this shorter,” or “clean this up”

I have begun using the acronym TL;DP (Too long didn't prompt) For when someone sends a wall of text and I didn't want to waste tokens having an agent summarize it for me when the sender could have done that for me with their own agent.

I love asking someone who sent me a Slack wall of AI text to join a huddle, then ask them deep questions about said wall of text while they struggle because they have no idea what they’re talking about. It seems to encourage folks to be a little more careful about their wall of texts in the future.

I like how the website matches the message. Short and Simple.

It's a matter of having good taste. But AI education will help.

now I know what to call it, thanks

When real people use AI slop to spam me down, I instantly know that this person does not want to communicate with me. So I stop all communication with that person.

What is interesting is that some people don't understand this - even some clever devs.

For instance, on the ffmpeg mailing list a few weeks ago, one of the lead devs from Germany, spammed a proposal with AI slop. Someone else asked the question why he expects others to read the slop and "engage" with this or that developer. That was a great question. The interesting thing is that the original developer who succumbed to slop, did not even understand why AI slop spam is problematic to other people. AI already changes how people work and also think. That is a big problem. I used to semi-jokingly say that AI slop is the beginning of skynet, but as I watch real people succumb to the AI slop, they actively (!) become dumber and don't understand why AI slop wastes the time of other people.

I am not at all saying that AI is completely useless, though the current hype is annoying to no ends. But some individual humans don't understand the problem at all anymore. Personally I do not want to "interact" with AI slop at all. It just wastes my time.

"Why it's wrong"

"You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document."

Oh look, another blog post that should have been a comment. No slop blogs either, loser.

This is slop too though, right?

> Pasting a massive AI-generated response into a chat or email where a human would write one sentence. It destroys the medium itself. Nobody writes essays in Slack. It's only possible because of AI copy-paste.

> It's like calling someone and asking "What time is the meeting?" and they read you a 10-page analysis of calendar management best practices. You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document.

It’s hard to take the site seriously if the author themself isn’t able to write