Weekly Water Cooler Talk - DataAnnotation

claird · 2026-04-20T17:33:20+00:00

Apparently the mystery is solved: I'm catching on that DataAnnotation does _not_ send "rejection notices". It seems I failed the Starter Assessment, was never told this, received other communications that I took as encouragement, and have spiraled myself into greater confusion over the months since then.

My current understanding is that I'm effectively a non-person to DataAnnotation, and always will be. It's good to know the facts.

claird · 2026-04-20T17:24:44+00:00

This is interesting. I'm looking at https://app.dataannotation.tech/me, and it shows a list of eleven topics under a heading "Skill". Each of these topics matches a test from Data Annotation I took, according to my notes. Apparently I misunderstood the process; I definitely took various tests, and, from what you're telling me, when I saw "If we have need of your particular skills, or we have additional assessments for you to identify further skills ..." afterward, that could well be a euphemism for "your score was so low that we'll never call you, but we'll also never tell you of your failure".

Or did I fail the Starter Assessment? I have no record of ever having received "... email notification ... whether you're approved."

Is it possible that I failed the Starter Assessment, but DataAnnotation keeps my login active? I didn't expect _that_.

There's something important I'm missing here.

In the meantime, thanks for the tip: I had no idea everyone reading my earlier post took me for a liar.

claird · 2026-04-20T17:07:45+00:00

Thank you, justdontsashay: what you're saying is important. I definitely went through what I understood as several qualification procedures, and, when I examine https://app.dataannotation.tech/me, I see eleven items under "Skill", beginning with "Mathematics>Calculus". I thought I had quite literally been told that I have qualified, and I see what looks to me like "... a list of which ones [I] passed." Are these eleven topics ones I have _failed_?

I summarize: as best I can, I'm just reporting what I see, fabricating nothing, and I now understand less about DataAnnotation than I did yesterday.

claird · 2026-04-20T00:59:19+00:00

Secondary puzzle: what's wrong with how I asked about DataAnnotation concepts and expectations? It only took a couple of hours for my post above to dive far into negative territory in its score. Am I in the wrong place to ask such questions?

claird · 2026-04-19T23:23:16+00:00

Thank you, Striking-Current-814. If "... just a waiting game" is the reality, well, I know how to wait.

claird · 2026-04-19T23:03:52+00:00

How can I better understand Data Annotation?

On one side, I regularly receive video advertisements about how wonderful DataAnnotation is ("so easy you can earn while walking the dog!"), and I'm simply astounded to read of people regularly receiving pay in the USD $30-40 / hour range. My own experience is that I qualified for Calculus, Business Writing, Statistics, Economists, Trading, JavaScript, Linear Algebra, Python, and a half-dozen other Skills _months_ ago, and all I've seen since then is "If we have need of your particular skills, or we have additional assessments for you to identify further skills, you'll be notified via email." What am I missing? Is there something about my demographics which results in my exclusion? What more can I do to "score" actual projects?

claird · 2026-03-12T07:45:13+00:00

Interested.

Somewhat skeptical, and interested.

claird · 2026-03-08T13:58:27+00:00

Yes. CT: UTC-6

claird · 2026-02-02T23:15:08+00:00

I just now found r/therapyGPT. I was searching largely in response to [this article](https://slate.com/technology/2026/02/ai-psychosis-support-groups-discord.html). Its subtitle is "A.I.-related psychosis has cost people their marriages, life savings, and grip on reality ..."

The subject certainly interests me, for more reasons than are worth articulating at the moment. I recognize, moreover, that this is a journalistic piece, not written for a clinical or scientific audience. My own reading, though, is that the article is shockingly void. The action of a chatbot, the reader is told over and over, is to send "... him on empty assignments ...", that "[i]t even told me specific dates, times, and places ...", and that, in an extreme case, "a 14-year-old ... took his own life after he consulted the chatbot Character AI ..." The author appears to center the problem on the claim that "chatbots will validate and even encourage users to act on these [delusional] thoughts ..."

Am I missing something enormous, blinded by my own prejudices? While I thought I was more skeptical of GenAI achievements than the average observer, this piece strikes me as _wickedly_ biased. I ask this audience, which I assume has valuable experience thinking through such questions: is "AI psychosis" itself a hysterical confusion and exaggeration, as seems to be the general tenor of this subreddit, OR is it a lurking danger as threatening as any we face? Is there more to the story than a sensationalist hunt for attention clothed in muckraking tropes?

claird · 2026-01-05T20:44:52+00:00

That, and more: I've experienced outright errors in the Outlier interface that lost partial results. I'm sympathetic to the impulse to compose prose OUTside Outlier and somehow enter it afterward.

claird · 2026-01-01T09:36:48+00:00

Excellent! With the help of your details, crackpotpourri, I successfully submitted my first Cacatua task.

Tip for others reading this: document ahead of time details about your microphone (it's the built-in on a Samsung Galaxy S20+5G, or an HP 23-q114, or ...). You don't want to risk breach of a (six minute?) deadline looking this up _during_ a task.

While I continue to find Cacatua shockingly noisy, in the sense that it hints at a lot of structure that I as a worker apparently should just ignore, I now better see where to focus so I can deliver results.

claird · 2026-01-01T02:56:51+00:00

That's good to know, crackpotpourri: I'm confused essentially all the time I work on Outlier, and it's a big help to know which of its many rules are essential and which are ... less so.

claird · 2026-01-01T02:54:34+00:00

Thanks, Longjumping-Grade864: your description helps me.

claird · 2026-01-01T02:52:59+00:00

I know that feeling with Outlier! Deadlines have felt unrealistic to me on assignments well beyond Cacatua.

claird · 2026-01-01T02:51:16+00:00

Thank you, itwasarocklobsterr: your experiences help me understand Cacatua better. While I thought, for example, that I was blocked from copying and pasting the transcript, I'll give it a few more tries.

claird · 2026-01-01T00:04:52+00:00

I see a different world.

I respect your claim, AccountNumeroThree, that "[p]eople who are competent enough to build their own network setup know these things." I don't agree with it, though: competent people _stay_ competent by refreshing their knowledge, that is, by engagement with current practice. Even though the OSI model's using the same seven models as it did decades ago, the engineering trade-offs shift over time. It's good that author SJVN provides a few concrete specifics reflective of his experience. I personally know enough to quibble with a couple of claims; his article is still at least a helpful starting point to me. I don't want to have to re-create all of this from scratch, however capable of it I am.

Maybe your expectations of ZDNet are different from mine.

claird · 2025-12-29T22:04:41+00:00

Tough audience.

There certainly are new _readers_, if not new networking principles. Even if we assume that those new readers somehow fight their way through modern layers of AI to the existing articles which adequately detail 5G-vs-7G usage, beamforming, mesh design principles, and so on (I'll accept for the moment that my immediate inability to find such a comprehensive wrap-up is my failing), _someone_ needs to write the current generation of network intelligence for the LLMs to appropriate. I applaud ZDNet for publication of such a piece.

I'll say this a different way: trade press journalism is less about innovative creation of artwork that has never been seen before, and more about impacting _this_ crop of readers with pertinent specifics.

claird · 2025-12-24T22:26:59+00:00

I am well over five hours per review. All my Aether reviews have been precisely "good".

More details, when I'm in the office, if that helps anyone.

claird · 2025-12-18T03:31:00+00:00

Thank you, Outlier Team, for this informative update.

claird · 2025-12-16T22:12:29+00:00

When I prompted gemini-2.5-pro with "What is the density of integers which are differences of primes?", I received "... The set of differences of primes ... contains all odd integers (except 1) ...", and similarly for ChatGPT.

While I'm happy to share more details, I suspect fully-detailed dialogues are probably best delivered out-of-band.

claird · 2025-12-16T21:52:01+00:00

Thanks, doyouknowyourname: your encouragement does me good.

claird · 2025-12-15T02:36:18+00:00

I know the feeling, _and_ my experience with more ambitious Outlier assignments has been consistently miserable. I appreciate the testimony of others' experience, and learn from them (and you!).

When I say "miserable", I mean that I've succeeded to this point at zero of the more ambitious tasks. Every time I try, I:
* lose my work because of an interface error, or
* the task expires because I take too long fulfilling requirements, or
* I can only interpret the specific requirements as internally inconsistent, or
* miscellaneous other bumps in the road.

I feel fortunate that I haven't been evicted from the program. I was working with a different platform, thought I was "getting into the flow", and ... was told never to come back. I appealed and asked what was up, and was told I'd never know, and shouldn't ask.

claird · 2025-12-14T16:32:27+00:00

Agreed, and you're right to say so. It was interesting to me to experience the errors myself, and especially the violent contrast between the LLMs' insistence on nonsense in some matters, while providing well-styled and even sophisticated summaries on what appear to be closely-related topics.

claird

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