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Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms

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Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms

#191

Post by jneagu »

ocular-rockular wrote: post #187
jneagu wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am very curious to see how this is going to impact STEM education. Such a big part of an engineer's education happens informally by asking peers, teachers, and strangers questions. Different groups are more or less likely to do that consistently (e.g. https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/jmbe.00100-21 ), and it can impact their progress. I've learned most from publicly asking "dumb" questions.

It won't. If you look at advanced engineering/mathematics material online it is abysmal in quality of actually "explaining" the content. Most of the learning and understanding of intricacies happens via dialogue with professors/mentors/colleagues/etc. That said, when that is not available, LLMs do an excellent job or rubber ducky-ing complicated topics.

To your latter point - that’s where I think most of the value of LLMs in education is. They can explain code beyond the educational content that’s already available out there. They are pretty decent at finding and explaining code errors. Someone who’s ramping up their coding skills can make a lot of progress with those two features alone.

Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms

#192

Post by Izkata »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #56
jeremyjh wrote: post #36

Earlier 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…

> 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.

This may have been allowed in like the first year while figuring out what kind of moderation worked, but it hasn't been as least since I started using it in like 2011. They just kept slipping through the cracks because so many questions are constantly being posted.

Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms

#193

Post by verdverm »

baq wrote: post #115
verdverm wrote: post #64

For 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 sa…

2022: Discord is not indexed by search engines, it sucks 2024: Discord is not indexed by AI slop generators, it's great

It's more that Discord is replacing Slack as the place where community happens. Less about about indexing, which still sucks even in Discord search. Slack/Salesforce threw a lot of small projects under the bus, post-acquisition, with the reductions to history from message count to 90 days

Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms

#194

Post by neither_color »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #120

The problem is eventually what are LLMs going’s to draw from? They’re not creating new information, just regurgitating and combining existing info. That’s why they perform so poorly on code for which there aren’t many many publicly available samples, SO/reddit answers etc.

I find that it sloppily goes back and forth between old and new methods, and as your LLM spaghetti code grows it becomes incapable of precision adding functions without breaking existing logic. All those tech demos of it instantly creating a whole app with one or a few prompts are junk. If you don't know what you're doing then as you keep adding features it WILL constantly switch up the way you make api calls(here's a file with 3 native fetch functions, let's install and use axios for no reason), the way you handle state, change your css library, etc.

{/* rest of your functions here*} - DELETED

After a while it's only safe for doing tedious things like loops and switches.

So I guess our jobs are safe for a little while longer

Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms

#195

Post by verdverm »

tomrod wrote: post #105
verdverm wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're one of today's lucky 10,000! https://xkcd.com/1053/ 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...

Reproducing sections is useful in academic publishing. I saw it while reading 100s of papers during my PhD.

(1) If you are reading your entrypoint into an area of research, or a group, it is useful context on first encounter

(2) If you are not, then you can easily skip it

(3) Citing, instead of reproducing sections like background work, means you have to go look up other papers, meaning a paper can no longer stand on its own.

Self-plagiarism is an opinion among a subset of academics, not something widely discussed or debated. Are there bad apples, sure. Is there a systemic issue, I don't think so.

Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms

#196

Post by chairmansteve »

Vegenoid wrote: post #139
herval wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The flipside to this is you can’t get answers to anything _recent_, since the models are trained years behind in content. My feelig is it’s getting increasingly difficult to figure out issues on the latest version of libraries & tools, as the only options are private Discords (which aren’t even googleable)

I think that knowledge hoarding may come back with a vengeance with the threat people feel from LLMs and offshoring.

Yep. For SO, the incentive was a high reputation. But now an LLM is stealing your work, what's the point?

Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms

#197

Post by verdverm »

klabb3 wrote: post #179
joshdavham wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> many of my questions about open source projects have moved to GitHub and Discord Exact same experience here. Plus, being able to talk to maintainers directly has been great!

No doubt that discord has struck a good balance. Much better than GitHub imo. Both for maintainers to get a soft understanding of their users, and equally beneficial for users who can interact casually without being shamed for filing an issue the wrong way. There’s some weird blind spot with techies who are unable to see the appeal. UX matters in a “the medium is the message”-kind of way. Also, GitHub is only margina…

Chat is an important medium, especially as new generations of developers enter the field (they are more chat native). It certainly offers a more comfortable, or appropriate place, to ask beginner questions, or have quick back-n-forths, than GitHub issues/discussions offers. I've always wondered why GH didn't incorporate chat, seems like a big missed opportunity.

Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms

#198

Post by chii »

PhilipRoman wrote: post #55
melenaboija wrote: post #38

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 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…

> Q: how do I do thing X in C?

SO does suck, but i've found that if you clarify in the question what you want, and pre-empt the Y instead of X type answers, you will get some results.

Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms

#199

Post by TacticalCoder »

tlogan wrote: post #67
melenaboija wrote: post #38

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.

What you mention has been serious from day one indeed.

But to me the worst issue is it's now "Dead Overflow": most answers are completely, totally and utterly outdated. And seen that they made the mistake of having the concept of an "accepted answer" (which should never have existed), it only makes the issue worse.

If it's a question about things that don't change often, like algorithms, then it's OK. But for anything "tech", technical rot is a very real thing.

To me SO has both outdated and inaccurate answers.

Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms

#200

Post by drawnwren »

zmgsabst wrote: post #100
delichon wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've gotten answers from OpenAI that were technically correct but quite horrible in the longer term. I've gotten the same kinds of answers on Stack Overflow, but there other people are eager to add the necessary feedback. I got the same feedback from an LLM but only because in that case I knew enough to ask for it. Maybe we can get this multi-headed advantage back from LLMs by applying a team of divergent AIs to the…

You can usually even ask the same LLM: - do a task - criticize your job on that task - redo that task based on criticism I find giving the LLM a process greatly improves the results.

The papers I've read have shown LLM critics to be quite bad at their work. If you give an LLM a few known good and bad results, I think you'll see the LLM is just as likely to make good results bad as it is to make bad results good.
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