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The Fall of Stack Overflow

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Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#721

Post by alex_lav »

honzabe wrote: post #294
alex_lav wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're mostly right in your experience. I have spent quite a bit of time trying to get ChatGPT to be a worthwhile piece of my workflow, and I guess sometimes it is, but most of the time the basic code or config or content I try to generate, it gets very fundamental things incorrect. It feels like it's mostly just hype these days.

Can you please specify whether you use (paid) GPT-4? Would you kindly provide links to a few examples of very fundamental things incorrect? My experience - the free version made up a lot of things but still felt very useful - enough to want to upgrade to the paid version. With the paid version, I notice very rarely that it hallucinates. It does make errors but it can correct them when I provide feedback. It is possib…

> Can you please specify whether you use (paid) GPT-4?

Paid.

> Would you kindly provide links to a few examples of very fundamental things incorrect?

No, definitely not.

> I notice very rarely that it hallucinates.

Unsure of what "hallucinates" means in this case. Some examples of things I've used it for: docker configuration, small blocks of code, generating a cover letter, proofreading a document, YAML validation, questions about various software SDKs. The outcome is usually somewhere on the spectrum of "not even close/not even valid output" to "kind of close but not close enough to warrant a paid service". When I ask for a simple paragraph and I get a response that isn't grammatically correct/doesn't include punctuation, I'm not sure what I'm paying for.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#722

Post by politelemon »

whynotmaybe wrote: post #22
BatFastard wrote: post #4

They were and are an excellent resource. Is it inevitable that traffic would decrease as questions are answered? Has traffic gone somewhere else? Has AI replaced it?

For me, a few months ago, when I had a question, I used to google/bing it and try to find my solution between 2-3 different SO answers (even the questions themselves were often helpful). Now, AI kinda replaced for me, it's copilot first, then ChatGPT if copilot is not enough, then google/bing if ChatGPT is not enough and maybe finally SO. Conservative figure from my side would be 15-25% less stackoverflow in a regula…

I feel SO missed a trick here by not creating a Copilot like integration first.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#723

Post by BeetleB »

sznio wrote: post #373
droopyEyelids wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried to use it?

I did. It's painfully slow. I can Google the question, click one of the top results, skip to the relevant part and read it faster than GPT can generate two sentences. You also have to build an elaborate prompt instead of throwing two/three keywords into it. It doesn't help that GPT is insistent on replying in the three paragraph format, meaning that the first 30-40 words it creates are just trash to be ignored. I fou…

> I can Google the question, click one of the top results, skip to the relevant part and read it faster than GPT can generate two sentences.

Ironically, this is why people like me prefer LLMs (when they're accurate). With Google, about 50% of the times the top SO hit is not answering my question. So I have to click 5-10 SO links, parse each one to see if:

1. The question being asked is relevant to my problem.

2. The answer actually answers it.

I may be able to do it quickly, but it is a tedious burden on my brain. While GPT doesn't always work, the nice thing about it is that when it does work, it has taken care of this burden for me.

Also, GPT's pretty much memorized a lot of the answers. I once asked it an obscure question involving openpyxl. It gave a perfectly working answer. I wondered: Did it reason it and generate the code, or is there a SO post with the exact same answer? So I Googled it, and sure enough, there was an SO question with the same code!

Except GPT's solution was superior in one tiny respect: The SO answer had some profanity in the code (in a commented line). GPT removed the profanity :-)

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#724

Post by BeetleB »

Tao3300 wrote: post #285
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even though StackOverflow in the common use case has been taken over by ChatGPT Claim asserted without evidence.

Anecdata: I've started asking Bing these questions instead of SO. E.g., it recently gave me a very helpful answer for debugging a Spring issue and cited its sources. What it didn't do was present me with a whole lot of moderation cruft. I can ask for recommendations for tools and libraries, which IIRC SO disallows. I also don't have to pray my question will get enough vote attention or worry that I posted it at the w…

> I can ask for recommendations for tools and libraries, which IIRC SO disallows.

Bing Chat almost always is useless for me with these kinds of queries. A few days ago I asked for a tool that monitors to see if a website is up. I told it I needed the tool to be something I'd run locally - not an online service and not something I need to sign up for.

It gave me 3-4 online services.

I reminded it about my constraint.

It gave me 3-4 more online services.

I reminded it about my constraint.

It said it didn't want to talk to me any more.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#725

Post by cassepipe »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #581
cassepipe wrote: post #571

Well, I must be the only one left to think Stack Overflow is great then. Sure, you may encounter the occasional rough moderator but having to correspond with random people on the internet in writing as my daily job, I can't blame them. If you don't have a rep, it's up to you to gain some by crafting the best question, linking to the relevant docs, transcribing screenshots, correcting typos etc. The only issue with SO…

Those rough moderators would close off discussions for the most trivial reasons, yet SO still allowed those discussions to be indexed by Google (despite rel="nofollow" having been a thing since 2005 or so). Presumably this was because SO still wanted the Google juice. It was irritating as hell to have the top several Google links go to SO discussions that had been shut down by the moderators. > I can't blame them I'm…

Except the moderators are unpaid and they don't hurt much more than egos ?

Also Stack Overflow is not supposed to be a public service unlike police (is supposed to be), so the moderators are not accountable to you, only to the site guidelines (which you appeal to I guess)

Given the value it gives to society, it should be turned into a public service before some rich prick takes it over and turns into a cow to be milked or a self-aggrandizing venture.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#727

Post by kerkeslager »

Eisenstein wrote: post #712
kerkeslager wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You're saying your problem is (X) people don't answer questions, but have you considered that your problem is actually (Y) that your tone is condescending and dismissive?" You realize that it's dismissive and condescending to ignore the problem I'm describing and respond with an assumption that I'm unaware of the tone of my post, right? Pot, meet kettle.

I'm not ignoring anything, and this conversation has gotten strangely emotional for people responding to me. I joined this thread when it had a few comments and explained what an XY problem was. I don't use stackexchange and I am a little bewildered why people are accusing me of being condescending.

> I don't use stackexchange and I am a little bewildered why people are accusing me of being condescending.

Because you're propagating the idea that you (or anyone asking questions) knows better what a person asking needs than the person asking does. Telling people you know what they need better than they do is pretty close to the definition of condescending.

People are emotional because nearly everyone who asks a question on the internet has to deal with people telling them "You don't actually want an answer to your question, you want an answer to this other question." By boosting the signal of the horrible XY problem idea, you're contributing to that problem.

I'm not saying this kind of miscommunication never happens, but the opposite is actually far more common.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#728

Post by prmoustache »

stavros wrote: post #405
OJFord wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then consider using DDG & '!w term', or some other method (searching Wikipedia, extension, I think Firefox has something engine-agnostic built-in) instead?

Oh I do use DDG. I think it might suffer from the same problem, actually, since now I'm wondering why I see Wikipedia results very far down in Google when I don't really use Google.

The comment above mention using !w in your search to look only in wikipedia since you say it is nearly always what you are looking for.

I would say at this point you could just use wikipedia as your default search engine.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#729

Post by stavros »

prmoustache wrote: post #728
stavros wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I do use DDG. I think it might suffer from the same problem, actually, since now I'm wondering why I see Wikipedia results very far down in Google when I don't really use Google.

The comment above mention using !w in your search to look only in wikipedia since you say it is nearly always what you are looking for. I would say at this point you could just use wikipedia as your default search engine.

Yeah, I do do that for those things, but when I don't, I've noticed a decline in quality.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#730

Post by wiz21c »

daveguy wrote: post #717
wiz21c wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

funny, I just rented an introductory book about signal processing and was (re) amazed to see how much the information is well explained, with tons of example, and a real plan to guide you in the ton of knowledge you have to master. I for one welcome back our new library overlords.

Come on now... Don't hold out... Citation?

Understanding Digital Signal Processing, 3rd edition

Published by Pearson (January 14, 2022) © 2021

    Richard G. Lyons
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