101–110 of 366 posts
It’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.
Stackoverflow mods and power users being arseholes reduces the use of Stackoverflow. ChatGPT is just the first viable alternative.
Easy to keep saying this, but SO was useful because it wasn't wild west.
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The first time that I asked a question on #cpp @Freenode was a unique experience for my younger self. My message contained greetings and the question in the same message. I was banned immediately and the response from the mods was: - do not greet; we don't have time for that bullshit - do not use natural language questions; submit a test case and we will understand what you mean through your code - do not abbreviate…
That contradiction is funny, tho: > - do not greet; we don't have time for that bullshit and > do not abbreviate words (you have abbreviated "you" as "u"); if you do not have time to type the words, we do not have time to read them So they have apparently enough time to read full words, it seems!
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Because it’s a marginal effect on your earning power and it’s a nice thing to do.
The management of these walled gardens will keep saying that to your face as they sell your contributions. Meanwhile your family gets nothing.
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I thought plagarizing was producing new work substantially copied from prior work, regardless who owns the copyright? I thought this because self-plagarizing exists.
Well, if we could not reproduce with changes, what others have written and we have learned, it is unlikely we could make real progress. There are many more concepts, like fair use, meaningful changes, and other legalese; as well as how people use the term "plagiarize" differently. I never heard of this "self-plagarizing" concept, it seems like something fringe that would not be enforceable other than in the court of…
It's a core issue in academia and other areas where the output is heavily the written word.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism#Self-plagiarism
[1] https://ori.hhs.gov/self-plagiarism
[2] https://www.aje.com/arc/self-plagiarism-how-to-define-it-and...
Eventually, large language models will be the end of open source. That's ok, just accept it. Large language models are used to aggregate and interpolate intellectual property. This is performed with no acknowledgement of authorship or lineage, with no attribution or citation. In effect, the intellectual property used to train such models becomes anonymous common property. The social rewards (e.g., credit, respect) th…
The cost of contributions falls dramatically, eg, $100 is 200M tokens of GPT-3.5; so you’re talking enough to spend 10,000 tokens developing each line of a 20kloc project (amortized).
That’s a moderate project for a single donation and an afternoon of managing a workflow framework.
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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…
I can see how frustrating it might be, but the overall idea of SO is "no duplicates". They don't want to have 1000 questions which are exactly the same but with slightly different phrasing. It can be problematic for total newcomers, but at the same time it makes it more useful for professionals: instead of having 1000 questions how to X with 1 reply, you have one canonical question with 20 replies sorted by upvotes a…
Since there's no way to appeal duplicate close votes on SO until you have a pretty large amount of rep, this kinda creates a problem where there's a "silent mass" of duplicate questions that aren't really duplicates.
A basic example is this question: https://stackoverflow.com/q/27957454 , which is about disabling PRs on GitHub on the surface. The body text however reveals that the poster is instead asking how they can set up branch permissions and get certain accounts to bypass them.
I can already assure you that just by basic searching, this question will pop up first when you look up disabling PRs, and the accepted answer answers the question body (which means that it's almost certain a different question has been closed as a duplicate of this one), rather than the question title. You could give a more informative answer (which kinda happened here), but this is technically off-topic to the question being closed.
That's where SO gets it's bad rep for inaccurate duplicate closing from.
The authors claim that LLM are reducing public knowledge sharing and that the effect is not merely displacing duplicate, low-quality, or beginner-level content. However their claim is weak and the effect is not quite as sensational as they make it sound. First, they only present Figure 3 and not regression results for their suggested tests of LLMs being substitutes of bad quality posts. In contrast, they report tests…
People are electing to not freely share information on public forums like they used to. They are retreating into discord and other services where they can put down motes and raise the draw bridges. And who can blame them? So many forums and social media sites and forums are engaging in increasingly hostile design and monetization processes, AI/LLM’s are crawling everywhere vacuuming up everything then putting them behind paywalls and ruining the original sources’ abilities to be found in search, algorithms designed to create engagement foster vitriol and controversy, the list goes on. HN is a rare exception these days.
So what happens? A bunch of people with niche interests or knowledge sets congregate into private communities and only talk to each other. Which makes it harder for new people to join. It’s a sad state of affairs if you ask me.
It’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'm sorry but the funny thing is, the only people I've ever seen complain about SO are people who don't know how to search.
Whatever they’re doing, it isn’t working.
Blame mods. Blame AI. Blame askers… whatever man.
That is a sinking ship.
If you don’t see people complain about SO, it’s because they aren’t using it, not because they’re using the search.
Pretty hard to argue at this point that the problem is with the users being too shit to use the platform.
That’s some high level BS.
It’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.