Earlier quoted context omitted.
GPL is antithetical to open source? Odd take
There is a permissionless (MIT) vs permissioned (GPL) difference that is at the heart of the debate of what society thinks open source should mean
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Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
211–220 of 366 posts
Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#212That's what I've been predicting and scared of: LLMs learn from online Q&A platforms, but people already stop posting questions and receiving answers. The sole knowledge sources will get poisoned with inaccurate LLM generated data, and therefore the entropy available to LLMs will become damped by the LLMs itselves (in a negative feedback loop)
Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I wish... Some commenters follow up with "Why do you think Y won't work for you?"
Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#214I think this is just the future though. Why ask other people if LLMs can just retrieve, read, and train on official documentations
Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This being HN, I'd love to hear from one of the many IRC channel mods who literally typed (I'd guess copy/pasted) this kind of text into their chat room topics and auto-responders. If you're out there-- how does it feel to know that what you meant as a efficient course-correction for newcomers was instead a social shaming that cut so deep that the message you wrote is still burned verbatim into their memory after all…
I think a lot of unpaid online discussion forum moderation volunteers get psychic profit from power tripping.
Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#216Earlier 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 problem is that SO is not a Q&A site although it calls itself that (which is admittedly misleading). It is a community edited knowledgebase, basically a wiki, where the content is Q&As. It just so happens that one method of contributing to the site is by writing questions for other people to write answers to.
If you ask a question (i.e., add content to the wiki) that is not in scope, then of course it will get removed.
Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 hav…
thank you for bringing the default SO reasons why these are not the case, but first off >Often these are students asking for someone to solve their homework problems. I don't think I've been in any class since elementary school in which I did not have foundational knowledge, I'm talking "I just realized there must be a technical discipline that handles this issue and I can't google my way to it level of questions." I…
> I don't think I've been in any class since elementary school in which I did not have foundational knowledge
> If I'm a student, I have a textbook and the ability to read
You are such an outlier that I don't think you have the awareness to make any useful observations on this topic. Quite a lot of students in the US are now starting to lack the ability to read, horrifyingly (and it was never 100%), and using ChatGPT to do homework is common.
Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
This being HN, I'd love to hear from one of the many IRC channel mods who literally typed (I'd guess copy/pasted) this kind of text into their chat room topics and auto-responders. If you're out there-- how does it feel to know that what you meant as a efficient course-correction for newcomers was instead a social shaming that cut so deep that the message you wrote is still burned verbatim into their memory after all…
I think a lot of unpaid online discussion forum moderation volunteers get psychic profit from power tripping.
Give a man a little power.
Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#219I think this is just the future though. Why ask other people if LLMs can just retrieve, read, and train on official documentations
Official documentations are not always complete. It depends on the diligence of who wrote them and how good they are at writing. Customers and users will always send mails or open tickets to ask this and that about the docs afterwards. Can't rely on just learning or retrieving from the docs. Clarifications by some dev or someone who found a solution/workaround will always be required.
Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#220For 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
Discord stores trillions of messages. If they haven’t figured out how to make a slop generator out of it yet, I’m sure it’s coming soon.