What is bikeshedding supposed to mean here?

It comes from C. Northcote Parkinson's work, where he calls it "The Law of Triviality". The idea is that people clog up decision-making by introducing a swarm of issues that have little relative impact or importance for the project at hand, leading to a massive misallocation of attention. His example is a $10 million construction project for a Nuclear Reactor where as much time is spent debating the materials to be used for a $3000 bike shed as on the actual reactor buildout. The law of triviality says "the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum [of money] involved."

Source: C. Northcote Parkinson, "Parkinson's Law and Other Studies in Administration" (1957)

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dpark 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Thanks. I know what bikeshedding is. I’m asking what cyandees specifically means. The normal definition of bikeshedding doesn’t seem to make any sense in his sentence.

I’m assuming he’s using it to mean “cruft” or “low value features” but maybe there’s some meaning I’m missing.

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RGS1811 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Funny enough, I didn't know, but your comment made me look it up, then I tracked down a PDF of the book, read the relevant section, and wrote my reply. So, even if I didn't help you out, you helped me lol.

	▲	dpark 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It’s a good term. :) I originally heard it in the context of picking paint color for the bike shed, which is probably more on point for software engineers, most of whom would not be involved in any discussion around building a nuclear reactor.

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tolciho 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

LLM increase the range of things bikesheddable, so some folks will try to have a LLM design a nuclear reactor and manage the coffee budget in addition to the traditional bikeshed design complications. Whether this is an improvement or more engines of what passes for civilization catching on fire, well…

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dpark an hour ago | parent [-]

I don’t understand how LLMs make more stuff “bike sheddable”. What LLMs do is allow people to contribute low value garbage to all areas, but we have a word for that and it’s not “bike shedding”. It’s “slop”.

	▲	cyanydeez 40 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		bike shedding is slop; you're arguing with some anchored semantics where culture, terms, etc are fluid. Can only assume english might not be your first language.

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9x39 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's a low-effort drive-by comment, but I read it as tourists prompting about an issue they don't really know about.

People will recognize a glimmer of something they can attach to, prompt and get a few pages of junk about this narrow topic, and then contribute it in a way that further reduces the signal-noise ratio of the discussion or project.

Like, dude, we have the same tools. We can get the same slop from the tap at any time.