llm/3a862c31-848e-4e32-be93-99402d2b43b6/batch-0-21fa8762-76ce-4974-9d16-ad9c7c03d7b5-input.json
You are a comment classifier. Given a list of topics and a batch of comments, assign each comment to up to 3 of the most relevant topics.
TOPICS (use these 1-based indices):
1. Bugs Having Users at Scale
2. Automation Impact on Workers
3. Workplace Politics vs Technical Skills
4. Google's UX Quality Criticism
5. LLM-Assisted Writing Detection
6. Career Advancement and Networking
7. Clarity vs Cleverness in Code
8. User-Focused Engineering Culture
9. Innovation Tokens and Boring Technology
10. Abstraction and Complexity Management
11. Silent Resistance in Debates
12. Glue Work Recognition
13. Performance Optimization Strategies
14. Engineer-Customer Communication Barriers
15. Time vs Money Tradeoffs
16. Psychological Safety in Teams
17. Process and Bureaucracy Critique
18. Code Plagiarism Ethics
19. Big Tech Organizational Dysfunction
20. Goodhart's Law and Metrics Gaming
COMMENTS TO CLASSIFY:
[
{
"id": "46489702",
"text": "> At scale, even your bugs have users.\n\nFirst place I worked right out of college had a big training seminar for new hires. One day we were told the story of how they’d improved load times from around 5min to 30seconds, this improvement was in the mid 90s. The negative responses from clients were instant. The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turning on their computers, and spending the next 10min chatting and drinking coffee the software was ready before they’d even stood up from their desk!\n\nThe moral of the story, and the quote, isn’t that you shouldn’t improve things. Instead it’s a reminder that the software you’re building doesn’t exist in a PRD or a test suite. It’s a system that people will interact with out there in the world. Habits with form, workarounds will be developed, bugs will be leaned for actual use cases.\n\nThis makes it critically important that you, the software engineer, understand the purpose a"
}
,
{
"id": "46490683",
"text": "> The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turning on their computers, and spending the next 10min chatting and drinking coffee\n\nOne of my early tasks as a junior engineer involved some automation work in a warehouse. It got assigned to me, the junior, because it involved a lot of time working in the warehouse instead of at a comfortable desk.\n\nI assumed I’d be welcomed and appreciated for helping make their work more efficient, but the reality was not that simple. The more efficient I made the technical part of the job, the more time they had to spend doing the manual labor part of the job to keep up. So the more I reduced cycle times, the less time they had to sit around and chat.\n\nMind you, the original process was extremely slow and non-parallel so they had a lot of time to wait. The job was still very easy. I spent weeks doing it myself to test and optimize and to this day it’s the easiest manual labor job I’ve eve"
}
,
{
"id": "46496734",
"text": "The more efficient I made the technical part of the job, the more time they had to spend doing the manual labor part of the job to keep up.\n\nImagine you like writing code, and someone automates that part of the job so you have to spend more of your time reviewing PRs and writing specs..."
}
,
{
"id": "46497637",
"text": "I don’t even have to imagine it, you just described my job now that we have LLMs."
}
,
{
"id": "46497992",
"text": "I believe that was the point"
}
,
{
"id": "46498005",
"text": "Reading it back now it does seem pretty obvious. That’s what I get for commenting right after waking up!"
}
,
{
"id": "46498011",
"text": "All good, it's a Monday morning"
}
,
{
"id": "46496797",
"text": "efficiency is the enemy of employment, no?"
}
,
{
"id": "46497323",
"text": "The amount of work expands to fill the available labour. All other things being equal, at least. Which they aren't, but it's a usefully wrong model."
}
,
{
"id": "46497915",
"text": "There’s many praises to sing about efficiency, (and I don’t take your 1 liner as a position against it). That said, efficiency, job creation, and underemployment overlap quite a bit.\n\nThere’s far more scientists, programmers, and doctors today than farmers and stablehands.\n\nAt the same time, people who lost manufacturing jobs to automation and outsourcing, did not get jobs with equivalent pay and growth.\n\nHuman brains do not get retrained very easily, and so every technological revolution is a boon to those who grasp it, and a challenge for those who invested their time in skills no longer in demand."
}
,
{
"id": "46493773",
"text": "One of my work involved automating some process which was very manual and tedious, took a lot of time and there was dedicated employee for that process. After I did the project, it turned out that this job wasn't necessary anymore and that employee was fired. I felt uneasy about the whole situation."
}
,
{
"id": "46495553",
"text": "In Norway there's laws for that, but other places do it even without them. You just retrain the person to do something else. He might take a job of a temp that was hoping to get a fast contract (instead of a few weeks at a time during trial period). Other than that, it's good for the person (not losing job) but also for the company - you get a tried person with good work ethics that comes on time. It's not zero cost to find somebody like that."
}
,
{
"id": "46496196",
"text": "A lot of places in the US are not, in my experience, that intelligent about hiring people.\n\nOr, say rather, the externalities of the cost of hiring are not imposed on the people choosing to fire, directly, so they can say they \"improved efficiency\" by firing someone, and then the people trying to find reliable labor do not experience any improvement that might have been available by migrating the person."
}
,
{
"id": "46498004",
"text": "Why do the laws exist if its better for (almost) everyone involved? Without the laws why would people not do it that way if its the better approach?"
}
,
{
"id": "46495565",
"text": "Yeah the bar for competent is surprising hard to hit. A human being that shows up on time and it's reliable, doesn't have a problem with drugs or alcohol, or has a sick family member and just needs an advance. Good help is hard to find!"
}
,
{
"id": "46497348",
"text": "If you're only getting those kind of candidates, then your job offer isn't attractive enough."
}
,
{
"id": "46496608",
"text": "I understand the rest, but an otherwise capable person with a sick family member does not clear the bar for competent? Saddening if that’s where we are as a society."
}
,
{
"id": "46496996",
"text": "I think the key part of that sentence was \"...and just needs an advance\", implying that they're going to take the job, ask for a cash advance for a (possibly fictional) sick family member, and immediately quit."
}
,
{
"id": "46496678",
"text": "It’s hard for some people to understand that situation until they are in it. Unfortunately.\n\nTotally agree with you."
}
,
{
"id": "46494033",
"text": "And they will have to go find another job instead. It feels weird but this is how we raise living standards - removing human labor from production (or, in other words, increasing the amount produced per human)\n\nAutomation is a game of diffuse societal benefit at the expense of a few workers. Well, I guess owners also benefit but in the long term that extra profit is competed away."
}
,
{
"id": "46495010",
"text": "That's a highly idealized view that I hope we can agree doesn't completely jive with what we see in society today. If a small number of shareholders reap all the profits, the vast majority of the benefit from automation flows to them, and it's even possible for the lives of average people to get worse as automation increases, as average people then have less leverage over those who own the companies."
}
,
{
"id": "46495325",
"text": "Inflation adjusted incomes are up in the US across the board. The affordability problem is largely the price of housing because it's illegal to build."
}
,
{
"id": "46497389",
"text": "Incomes are up, but the expenses are up as well, especially with the upcoming changes in healthcare for people on the ACA.\n\nAlso any comparison of wage growth vs corporate profit growth over the last 30 years shows that wages have not kept pace with the increase in productivity.\n\nSo incomes are only just barely keeping up, when they should be booming."
}
,
{
"id": "46495947",
"text": "How can inflation adjusted income be up and there still be an affordability crisis?"
}
,
{
"id": "46497313",
"text": "Household income is more than just wages. Household income can go up while wages remain stagnant or shrinking because other pieces of the pie are increasing (e.g. work benefits, investments, money from the government). https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2016/09/sources-of-household..."
}
,
{
"id": "46496899",
"text": "Housing is not part of the inflation calculation. There IS a housing inflation crisis."
}
,
{
"id": "46496120",
"text": "The price of housing can rise even faster than incomes.\n\nHousing is only a part of the basket used to measure inflation. Housing's price rose faster than the weighted basket average, some other goods and services rose slower or even fell."
}
,
{
"id": "46496824",
"text": "Accommodation costs are the first part of any sensible measure of inflation. If you're not factoring in housing then you're fudging the figures."
}
,
{
"id": "46497128",
"text": "Many people don’t see housing inflation - if you bought a house in 2020 and house prices were up 80% since then it doesn’t affect your housing costs, especially in the US where mortgage rates are fixed for length of term even if interest rates sky rocket."
}
,
{
"id": "46496764",
"text": "Housing, schooling, healthcare, daycare, food.\n\nSamsung TV purchasing power has skyrocketed, though, so there's that."
}
,
{
"id": "46496057",
"text": "Inflation also corrodes your savings and investments."
}
,
{
"id": "46497254",
"text": "Yet more and more people are struggling to afford even basic necessities and one can only dream of the luxury of the 50's when a single working class person was able to pay and cover for housing, car, family and even have enough for leisure. Where has all the economic surplus gone? Right...to the bourgeois, the capital owning class that exceedingly extract more and more of the wealth generated by the society."
}
,
{
"id": "46495484",
"text": "because the developing world is producing a lot of things except the housing."
}
,
{
"id": "46496124",
"text": "They also don't produce haircuts."
}
,
{
"id": "46495399",
"text": "On average, most large cap stocks (MSFT, GOOG, AAPL, etc) are owned by millions of retail investors through 401Ks, mutual funds, ETFs, and direct ownership."
}
,
{
"id": "46495615",
"text": "Median net worth at 40 years old in the US is less than 150k. Most Americans benefit very little from share prices rising, at least directly."
}
,
{
"id": "46496058",
"text": "Of the US stock market half is owned by 1%.\n\nhttps://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01122"
}
,
{
"id": "46497121",
"text": "Actually I believe this graph is half of US-owned equities and mutual funds is owned by the top 1% of Americans right? This doesn't include other extremely large holders such as sovreign wealth funds like norway/singapore or very large pension funds like the ontario teachers fund etc....\n\nThe USA is rather unique in its low pensions compared to countries in the EU or Australia (notable for its high contribution rates)."
}
,
{
"id": "46497327",
"text": "Tech founders (part of the 1%) own about 2% of the stock market.\n\nAbout 18% is owned by foreign entities."
}
,
{
"id": "46495689",
"text": "> If a small number of shareholders reap all the profits\n\nIt's not greater profits but lower costs (and prices) that matter here."
}
,
{
"id": "46495743",
"text": "Lower costs only translate into lower prices if sufficient competition is there. That is not true for many markets"
}
,
{
"id": "46495979",
"text": "That’s the big difference in China. When there is competition for everything —> prices are low. Not a lot of profits for investors, though…"
}
,
{
"id": "46496130",
"text": "Which markets do you have in mind?\n\nI'm all in favour of lowering barriers to entry, too. We need more competition.\n\nBe that from startups, from foreign companies (like from China), or from companies in other sectors branching out (eg Walmart letting you open bank accounts)."
}
,
{
"id": "46495993",
"text": "Untrue, most of the time. Even with a monopoly, there's still a demand curve.\n\nWould you rather sell one widget for $1000 or 1000 widgets for $10? Does the answer depend on costs?"
}
,
{
"id": "46496107",
"text": "The ROI for a large corporation tends to be around 10%."
}
,
{
"id": "46496151",
"text": "Everybody can be a shareholder in a publicly traded company. It's pretty easy.\n\nIf you want to spin up some conspiracy theory about elites snatching up productivity gains, you should focus on top managers.\n\n(Though honestly, it's mostly just land. The share of GDP going to capital has been roughly steady over the decade. The share going to land has increased slightly at the cost of the labour share.\n\nThe labour share itself has seen some shake up in its distribution. But that doesn't involve shareholders.)"
}
,
{
"id": "46497431",
"text": "Everyone with excess disposable income can be a shareholder in a publicly traded company.\n\nThe oligarchy of the CxOs and boards and cross-pollination has led to concentration of the rewards of companies into the their hands, compared to 40 years ago.\n\nAll the productivity gains have not gone to labor, its predominately gone to equity and then extracted via options and buy backs to avoid tax which means public service and investment has gone down.\n\nThe craziness of the USG borrowing to fund tax cuts is the ultimate example."
}
,
{
"id": "46498035",
"text": "I've not seen a correlation between automation and wealth, though there is an extremely string correlation between energy use and wealth.\n\nI don't think its automation that increases living standards. We increase living standards by consuming more energy, and that often comes along with increasing the amount of costs we externalize to someone else (like pollution or deforestation, for example)."
}
,
{
"id": "46497257",
"text": "It's narrow vs wide views. Wide views, automation and the like has improved the economies massively. But narrow views, people have lost their jobs, had to retrain and basically restart their career, and some never found another job.\n\nThis isn't just automation btw, but also just business decisions, like merging companies, outsourcing, or moving production elsewhere - e.g. a lot of western European manufacturing has moved eastwards (eastern Europe, Asia, etc). People who have a 30+ years career in that industry found themselves on the proverbial street with another 10+ years until their retirement, and due to trickery (= letting their employer go bankrupt) they didn't even get paid a decent severance fee."
}
,
{
"id": "46495016",
"text": "There have been times historically where that was true but all productivity gains have been captured by the .1% for the past few decades."
}
]
Return ONLY a JSON array with this exact structure (no other text):
[
{
"id": "comment_id_1",
"topics": [
1,
3,
5
]
}
,
{
"id": "comment_id_2",
"topics": [
2
]
}
,
...
]
Rules:
- Each comment can have 0 to 3 topics
- Use 1-based topic indices
- Only assign topics that are genuinely relevant to the comment
- If no topics match, use an empty array:
{
"id": "...",
"topics": []
}
50