People should just share their conversations with the LLMs online no?
This would blogging 5.0. Or web 7.0.
Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
61–70 of 366 posts
Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it’s a marginal effect on your earning power and it’s a nice thing to do.
"It's a nice thing to do" never seems to sway online platforms to treat their users better. This kind of asymmetry seems to only ever go one way.
As a mid-core SO user (4 digit reputation), I never felt like I needed them to treat me better. I always feel that while I'm contributing a bit, I get so much more value out of SO than what I've put in, and am grateful for it being there. It might also have something to do with me being old enough to remember the original expertsexchange, as well as those MSDN support documentation CDs. I'm much happier now.
Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is more about a drop in questions, than a drop in answers.
I mean part of the reason to not ask about stuff on SO, there are several types of questions that one might like to ask - such as: I don't know the first thing about this thing, help me get to where I know the first thing. This is not allowed any more. I want to know the pros and cons of various things compared. this is not allowed. I have quality questions regarding an approach that I know how to do, but I want to k…
The first one especially is not interesting except to the person asking the question, who wants to be spoon-fed answers instead of making any effort of his own to acquire foundational knowledge. Often these are students asking for someone to solve their homework problems.
Pro/Con questions are too likely to involve opinion and degenerate into flamewars. Some could be answered factually, but mostly are not. Others have no clear answers.
Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#64For me, many of my questions about open source projects have moved to GitHub and Discord, so there is platform migration besides LLMs. I also tend to start with Gemini for more general programming things, because it will (1) answer in the terms of my problem instead of me having to visit multiple pages to piece it together, or (2) what it's wrong, I often get better jump off points when searching. Either way, LLMs save me time instead of having to click through to SO multiple times because the title is close but the content as an important difference
Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#65It's a losing battle to try and maintain walled gardens for these corpuses of human-generated text that have become valuable to train LLMs. The horse has probably already bolted. I see this as a temporary problem however because LLMs are transitional. At some point it won't be necessary to train an LLM on the entirety of Reddit plus everything else ever written because there are obvious limits to statistical models l…
> You may have read hundres of books in your life, maybe even thousands. You haven't read a million. You don't need to. Sometimes online forums are the only place where you can find solutions for niche situations and edge cases. Tricks which would have been very difficult to figure out on your own. LLMs can train on the official documentation of tools l/libraries but they can't experiment and figure out solutions to…
"LLMs can train on the official documentation of tools l/libraries but they can't experiment and figure out solutions to weird problems"
LLMs train on way more than just the official documentation: they train on the code itself, the unit tests for that code (which, for well written projects, cover all sorts of undocumented edge-based) and - for popular projects - thousands of examples of that library being used (and unit tested) "in the wild".
This is why LLMs are so effective at helping figure out edge-cases for widely used libraries.
The best coding LLMs are also trained on additional custom examples written by humans who were paid to build proprietary training data for those LLMs.
I suspect they are increasingly trained on artificially created examples which have been validated (to a certain extent) through executing that code before adding it to the training data. That's a unique advantage for code - it's a lot harder to "verify" non-code generated prose since you can't execute that and see if you get an error.
Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#66It’s been a relief to find a platform where I can ask questions without the fear of being humiliated Half joking, but I am pretty tired of SO pedantry.
I haven't really found stackoverflow to be that humiliating (compared to some IRC rooms or forums), basic questions get asked and answered all the time. But the worst part is when you want to do something off the beaten path. Q: how do I do thing X in C? A: Why do you need to know this? The C standard doesn't say anything about X. The answer will depend on your compiler and platform. Are you sure you want to do X ins…
I find that this is mainly a problem in languages that attract "practical"/"best tool for the job" Philistines. Not going to name names right now but I had never really experienced this until I started using languages from a certain Washington based software company.
Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#67It’s been a relief to find a platform where I can ask questions without the fear of being humiliated Half joking, but I am pretty tired of SO pedantry.
The main issue with Stack Overflow (and similar public Q&A platforms) is that many contributors do not know what they do not know, leading to inaccurate answers.
Additionally, these platforms tend to attract a fair amount of spam (self promotion etc) which can make it very hard to find high-quality responses.
Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#68It's a losing battle to try and maintain walled gardens for these corpuses of human-generated text that have become valuable to train LLMs. The horse has probably already bolted. I see this as a temporary problem however because LLMs are transitional. At some point it won't be necessary to train an LLM on the entirety of Reddit plus everything else ever written because there are obvious limits to statistical models l…
Just to add to your point, consider a book like "Finite and Infinite" games. I think I can "recreate" the knowledge and main thesis in the book by my readings from other areas.
'Listening to different spiritual gurus saying the same thing using different words' is like 'watching the same coloured glass pieces getting rearranged to form new patterns in kaleidoscope'
Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#69Stackoverflow mods and power users being arseholes reduces the use of Stackoverflow. ChatGPT is just the first viable alternative.
ChatGPT plagiarizes the anwers of those whom you call "arseholes". How is using Stackoverflow in read-only mode different from using ChatGPT? Except of course that reading Stackoverflow directly has better retention rates, better explanations and more in-depth discussions. (My view is that moderators can be annoying but the issue is overblown.)
Plagiarizing means violating copyright, loosely speaking. When you, as a human, use SO, you assign your rights to the content to SO. That company is licensing the content to 3rd parties, including those who want to train their LLMs.
What I find is that the LLMs are not spitting out SO text word for word, as one would when plagiarizing. Rather, the LLM uses the context and words of my question when answering, making the response specific and cohesive (by piecing together answers from across questions).
Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#70Stackoverflow mods and power users being arseholes reduces the use of Stackoverflow. ChatGPT is just the first viable alternative.
>Stackoverflow mods and power users being arseholes reduces the use of Stackoverflow While they are certainly not perfect, they willingly spend their own spare time to help other peoples for free. I disagree with calling them arseholes.
A lot of people comment on online forums for free and are arseholes there too. Not in this thread so far that I've read, to be clear, but it certainly happens. How would you qualify the difference?