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Comment by dpark | Hacker News Reader

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)

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.

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.

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.

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…

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”.

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.

I hope this weird redefinition of bike shedding doesn’t take off. It’s a useful and meaningful term and repurposing it to mean AI slop is negative value.

Thankfully until this thread I’d never seen anyone use the term this way.

> Can only assume english might not be your first language.

This not-subtle insult does not add anything here.

it's not an insult. Declaring this both a fixed context and definition for any given piece of language is typically related to language learners.

An insult would suggest it's also related to autism.

“You disagree with me about the meaning of this word so clearly you have a poor grasp of the language” is absolutely an insult.

And that slop increases the range of things bikesheddable, like having free kerosene and matches available at an Arson Anonymous meeting.

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.

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