41–50 of 298 posts
If I were the semi benevolent dictator of the world, I'd make a law that said: all middle managers up to the CEO must spend 20% of their time doing entry level work in the company. Same with politicians. If you are insulated from what your company does, or constituents do, you can't effectively wield the power granted to you. Which leads me to an even more unpopular "authoritarian" opinion: the richest people are the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn. More people needs to understand this. It's fine being a small(ish) business that turns a profit and provides a service that's beneficial to society. You don't need to be a billion dollar company to be important or do great work. DHH talked about this 15 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY
> You don't need to be a billion dollar company to be important or do great work. And importantly: because you are a billion dollar company doesn't mean you bring good to the world. At all.
I have a hard time feeling sorry for Stack Overflow. They had most developers in the world visiting frequently. They have detailed information on exactly which languages, libraries, toolchains, and platforms those developers use and their pain points. All of their content is given to them for free by volunteers. All of their moderation is done for them for free by volunteers. The only thing they have to serve is text…
Stack overflow and AI can coexist. AI doesn't enforce rules on how a question has to be asked or downvote you. It will be helpful for stack overflow to have AI. The author wants a pur8st approach, i think it having a purist approach doesn't work because AI fills some gaps.
> In May I wrote about Stack Overflow's business, which lost $42 million over 6 months and had just laid off 10% of its employees. Since then, the company's fiscal year-end results came out. Despite growing revenue, it lost $84 million over the year ending on March 31, 2023. Thank god Wikipedia isn’t run like Stack Overflow. As an end user, they have pretty much the same value proposition: user generated answers to m…
> their median user is a junior dev who really just needs to serialize a Java object and isn’t going to pay or put up with any LLM-generated nonsense. (Un?)Ironically, one of my main uses of ChatGPT is to replace StackOverflow (it's great at turning vague guesses about what I want into fast ideas, and when it's wrong it's still less wrong than the combination of SO content and the search engines connected to it); and…
I'm pretty sure it's the main usage of almost all the programmers who use ChatGPT.
Slightly OT, but it's counter-productive to start a blog / an article with a well known quote that's been used and re-used ad nauseam. It makes the reader suspicious that they're not going to read something truly original, and tells them the author may have a thing for authority.
I think it's best not to use quotes at all, but if you must, find quotes that are 1/ new and 2/ counter-intuitive, or at least funny.
The above quote, in addition to being famous, isn't counter-intuitive; it's an interesting reformulation of a simple observation: of course people don't usually saw off the branch they're sitting on, even if it means ignoring some facts.
Tell me something I don't know.
[flagged]
The problem is that ChatGPT used SO data for training, and now they are eating the SO revenue. Its the equivalent of being shot by your own gun so I understand SO leadership panicking
> In May I wrote about Stack Overflow's business, which lost $42 million over 6 months and had just laid off 10% of its employees. Since then, the company's fiscal year-end results came out. Despite growing revenue, it lost $84 million over the year ending on March 31, 2023. Thank god Wikipedia isn’t run like Stack Overflow. As an end user, they have pretty much the same value proposition: user generated answers to m…
> Any question could easily include a Reddit-style discussion tab to facilitate discussion. This exists in the form of chat, and extended comment discussions migrate there. That being said, any question that requires extensive discussion is likely not a very good fit for SO because it's probably ambiguous, unclear or otherwise hard to answer exactly.
> In May I wrote about Stack Overflow's business, which lost $42 million over 6 months and had just laid off 10% of its employees. Since then, the company's fiscal year-end results came out. Despite growing revenue, it lost $84 million over the year ending on March 31, 2023. Thank god Wikipedia isn’t run like Stack Overflow. As an end user, they have pretty much the same value proposition: user generated answers to m…
> Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn. More people needs to understand this. It's fine being a small(ish) business that turns a profit and provides a service that's beneficial to society. You don't need to be a billion dollar company to be important or do great work. DHH talked about this 15 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY
If there were legal and regulatory pressure that crushed and broke down these behemoths (e.g. a FTC and judges that believed that predatory pricing was real and prosecuted accordingly) the VC model would break and this stuff would stop happening.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I mostly agree with your point, I want to point out that on a financial level Wikipedia is really not that well handled. They keep increasing expenses into project that are not core to the experience, or that will never see the light of day (like when they had two different teams working on two different new text editor for the site). I have a belief that they're caught in a very bureaucratic "we need to use yo…
You're giving them money, for your own reasons, when it's well established that they don't need your donations for their core mission. They spend it on things other than their core mission. Isn't this just a problem which you have created yourself? Just stop giving them money, give it to some other project which is also doing something valuable but which needs it more. If it ever turns out the Wikipedia needs your mo…