211–220 of 268 posts
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That was in 2021. https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/06/02/prosus-acquires-stack-... Joel left in 2019 https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/1111267189133316097 Jeff left in 2012 https://blog.codinghorror.com/farewell-stack-exchange/ I'm not sure that it is fair to say that the original founders sold it for that amount.
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This, along with recent Reddit goings-on has made me realize a major risk with the current structure of online communication. Take either Reddit or Stack Exchange as examples. They build a platform, and users contribute their time, thought, energy, and knowledge to build a community on that platform. Those companies can then gatekeep and restrict access to all that the community built, when all they did is provide th…
The core problem making it so difficult for this to ever actually happen is that it is 2023 and I guess you only just today somehow came to this realization as if it were new or unexpected or not something people had been saying for the past 25 years of us watching these online platforms abuse their positions of power and slowly turn the screws on people. Over the past quarter of a century of people trying to create…
I was saying to someone yesterday that "enshittification" is a sub-optimal coinage for something that really shouldn't need a new term, and which focuses attention on symptoms rather than root causes. If you give someone a power of attorney over your assets, you'll likely find that they start behaving less well towards you. Or if you give up agency, others will treat you like less of an agent. But what matters is not their behavior at the end but your decisions before that point.
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Because despite claims to the contrary most of these sites/projects aren't created for altruistic reasons, they were created to make money (at some point). Cashing out is typically part of the long term plan. In the case of Stack Overflow, I think the reason for the data dumps was two-fold: one of the original founders (who left long ago) came across as at least idealistic and wanting to do the right thing. The other…
Wow I read the text for that link you posted in a very different way than I intended.
Experts Exchange was well known for showing up in search results but not providing the answers without paying. Many people hated it and wanted search engines to implement some sort of deny list to filter it out automatically.
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Time to adopt Nostr as future-proof path.
How does nostr handle determined activists with establishment backing? What if a nostr user posts information an activist wants censored and the activist goes around threatening relays, their hosting providers, anyone connected to people operating the relay?
Assuming the scenario where a user is basically chased away from major western relays, he can still continue writing new texts with his private key. As long as some relay located somewhere (e.g. China, Panama, Moon, ..) accepts his texts, then others will still be able to read and know it was from that specific person.
There are other ways to censor a person/nostr: 1) Block the whole traffic related to nostr relays at provider level inside a country. 2) Make illegal to use nostr since it is "unregulated communication media". 3) spam the network with hideous/horrible content, and then market the protocal as "darknet" only used by criminals or mentally ill people.
Any of these tactics are used often. The thing about nostr is that texts don't live just on relays and anyone can easily archive them. This means that history by specific users can be kept and safeguarded for the future. That is mostly the reason why I like it so much. We only know detailed history thanks to the records that survived until our days. Any closed platform eventually closes down their data (e.g. reddit, stackoverflow, twitter, etc) but in practice this is the same as denying access to our collective online history. Nostr will survive woketivism or any other *isms.
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This is LLMs destroying the web we used to know. I would be willing to bet that the driving force behind the decision was to make it less trivial for LLMs to say "the data was already there under an open license, so we legally undercut stack overflow".
The fact that everyone is hoarding data because they think there is a gold rush afoot is obvious. Everyone with loads of data is clamping down, hoping they can get a cut of those AI VC dollars. Except for Wikipedia at least. But let's be real about the morality here: Stack Overflow is a badge-powered mechanical Turk. It uses 100% unpaid labor to go and search Google for answers and post them on SO, providing a "servi…
This is what makes SO valuable for me. Every year it seems like "trust but verify" requires a little more emphasis on the verify part, so it's extremely valuable when I run into a true expert where I know I can take their input at face value and rely on it.
I think the winners of the AI gold rush will be the ones that figure out how to help users assess the trust they should be putting in the information being surfaced. The problem I see with the current ChatGPT, etc. systems is that they seem to treat visibility and popularity as credibility and expertise when that's not the case. In my experience, the real experts don't say anything unless they can add to the conversation and there's never a lack of low quality information from uninformed participants.
For example, via ChatGPT...
Q: How do I protect against the scrub of death with ZFS?
A: The term "scrub of death" is commonly used to refer to a situation in ZFS where a data scrub operation can lead to catastrophic data loss due to undetected errors or issues. While ZFS is designed to provide data integrity and protection, it is still important to take certain precautions to minimize the risk of encountering such a situation. Here are some steps you can take to protect against the scrub of death with ZFS:
Except it's not a real thing [1]. For bonus fun, read the comment right after Ahrens'.
I don't understand why SO doesn't lean into that. Anyone can train an LLM on the raw data, but SO has the information needed to do a better job of ranking the quality of the inputs, so wouldn't they be able to build an LLM that's significantly better than anyone else with the same raw data? Understanding the quality and reliability of an answer is far more important to me than getting an answer.
What's more frustrating than getting an answer on a programming question and taking hours to figure out that it was complete BS and doesn't work as described?
I don't know much about LLMs, but, if I were SO, I'd be figuring out how to lock down the ranking information as quickly as possible because that's where the value is. The ranking and acceptance of answers, alongside tags, overall user rank, participation frequency, etc. should mean that SO has a significant advantage when it comes to ranking and weighting the input data, right?
I want the input from subject matter experts to count the most and SO has the best data set to provide that. I don't see the point of locking down the content when the real value is in the ranking. It's odd that SO doesn't see that considering the entire network is modelled on that idea. Maybe they do and there are bigger changes coming down the pipe.
I think the real debates are going to come in the future if SO releases a paid LLM product that's trained on community contributed content and rankings.
1. https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/ars-walkthrough-using-...
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That was in 2021. https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/06/02/prosus-acquires-stack-... Joel left in 2019 https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/1111267189133316097 Jeff left in 2012 https://blog.codinghorror.com/farewell-stack-exchange/ I'm not sure that it is fair to say that the original founders sold it for that amount.
It's possible that they had equity in the company after they left.
To that end, with their various rounds of funding ( https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stack-overflow/compa... ), they likely had very little say in any of it after that series E ( https://stackoverflow.co/company/press/archive/series-e ) which is after Jeff and Joel had left and likely diluted any value they had substantially.
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Surely, normal people get exhausted and burned out with how many accounts they need to create on all the platforms, just to stay in touch with everyone in their circle of friends. It was already crazy for me in the 90s days of Instant Messaging, and pidgin was a Godsend to consolidate all those accounts and friends-list into one interface. Surely normal people hate on the sheer volume of apps they need to install on…
> normal Internet social life I guess I'm abnormal? They only way I contact any friends/family is text message or email. I've never used Facebook, Instagram, or whatever other platforms people use to "keep up with a normal Internet social life". Yet, I have a plethora of friends and don't feel like I have any problem keeping up with family. Maybe people don't really need these platforms.
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Time to adopt Nostr as future-proof path.
Without movement on this [1] I can't see adoption. [1] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr/issues/97
Nostr community is about true freedom to write just about anything.
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>Email is a great example where most people wouldn't be interested in a version of email that only let's you email other @gmail.com users. Having a email address that can contact anyone, a phone number that can ring any other phone number etc instead of being locked into a single corporation network is a clear value add that people care about. That is only because those technologies predate those companies. Normal pe…
Surely, normal people get exhausted and burned out with how many accounts they need to create on all the platforms, just to stay in touch with everyone in their circle of friends. It was already crazy for me in the 90s days of Instant Messaging, and pidgin was a Godsend to consolidate all those accounts and friends-list into one interface. Surely normal people hate on the sheer volume of apps they need to install on…
Now I have all those different (web or not) applications, that never support all my devices. Most application steal a crazy amount of data, consumes bandwidth as if free on the way, while assuming they are alone and can consume all the resources of the computer they are running on. And they all have different UI (dark) patterns, and bugs and this and that.
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Without movement on this [1] I can't see adoption. [1] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr/issues/97
So, so much decentralized tech never gets adoption due to a lack of an identity management layer that nobody wants to build because it can’t be perfectly decentralized and have the account recovery features that 99% of regular folks need. This is an example where perfect is the enemy, nemesis even, of good. Someone should build an identity system that is optionally centralized or federated (if you like your key custo…
If you want to shitpost with friends and strangers than exists no realistic purpose for identity management since the main goal is to remain anonymous and true anonymity comes by default on nostr.
In case you do want to protect your identity in that case protect your keys. In case you missed the last few months, there are browser extensions that do not grant access to private keys, similar to metamask and other crypto wallets.
All of that are battle-proven technologies with several years of practice and success in keeping private keys private. You should know that, the question is why don't you know that, or more frankly why won't you know that.