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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

#221

Post by o11c »

Ekaros wrote: post #207
elicksaur wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, I find it to be a fatal flaw that LLMs can’t say, “Hey you probably don’t actually want to do it that way.”

I always wonder about that. Very often it seems that you need to be able to LLM that they are wrong. And then they happily correct themselves. But if you do not know that the answer is wrong how can you get correct answer?

Worse: if you think the LLM is wrong and try to correct it, it will happily invent something completely different (and actually wrong this time).

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

#222

Post by HPsquared »

antisthenes wrote: post #138
mycall wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought synthetic data is what is partially training the new multimodal large models, i.e. AlphaGeometry, o1, etc.

Synthetic data without some kind of external validation is garbage. E.g. you can't just synthetically generate code, something or someone needs to run it and see if it performs the functions you actually asked of it. You need to feed the LLM output into some kind of formal verification system, and only then add it back to the synthetic training dataset. Here, for example - dumb recursive training causes model collaps…

There are definitely a lot of wrong ways to do it. Doesn't mean the basic idea is unsound.

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

#223

Post by [deleted] »

imoverclocked wrote: post #171
empath75 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI companies are already paying humans to produce new data to train on and will continue to do that. There's also additional modalities -- they've already added text, video, and audio, and there's probably more possible. Right now almost all the content being fed into these AIs is stuff that humans can sense and understand, but why does it have to limit itself to that? There's probably all kinds of data types it coul…

> AI companies are already paying humans to produce new data to train on and will continue to do that. The sheer difference in scale between the domain of “here are all the people in the world that have shared data publicly until now” and “here is the relatively tiny population of people being paid to add new information to an LLM” dooms the LLM to become outdated in an information hoarding society. So, the question…

[deleted]

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

#224

Post by wizzwizz4 »

fabian2k wrote: post #135
grogenaut wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get good answers all the time on SO or used to. My problem is that I've been down voted several times for "stupid question" and also been down voted for not knowing what I was talking about in an area I'm an expert in. I had one question that was a bit odd and went against testing dogma that I had a friend post. He pulled it 30 minutes later as he was already down 30 votes. It was a thing that's not best practice i…

-30 votes would be extremely unusual on SO. That amount of votes even including upvotes in such a short time would be almost impossible. The only way you get that kind of massive voting is either if the question hits the "Hot Network Questions" or if an external site like HN with a high population of SO users links to it and drives lots of traffic. Questions with a negative score won't hit the hot network questions,…

You can get +30 from the HNQ list, but -30 is much harder, because the association bonus only gives you 101 rep, and the threshold for downvoting is 125.

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

#225

Post by d0mine »

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…

The major misunderstanding is that SO exists to help the question author first. It is not an IRC. The most value comes from googling a topic and getting existing answers on SO.

In other words, perhaps in your very specific case, your question is not XY problem but for the vast majority of visitors from google it won't be so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem

Personally, I always answered SO from at least two perspectives: how the question looks for someone coming from google and how the author might interpret it.

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

#226

Post by atomic128 »

yapyap wrote: post #84
atomic128 wrote: post #82

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…

no it won’t, it’ll just make it more niche than it already is.

LLM users are feeding their entropy into the model, and paying for the privilege.

These LLM users produce the new training data. They are being assimilated into the tool.

This is the future of "open source": Anonymous common property continuously harvested from, and distributed to, LLM users.

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

#227

Post by o11c »

fabian2k wrote: post #135
grogenaut wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get good answers all the time on SO or used to. My problem is that I've been down voted several times for "stupid question" and also been down voted for not knowing what I was talking about in an area I'm an expert in. I had one question that was a bit odd and went against testing dogma that I had a friend post. He pulled it 30 minutes later as he was already down 30 votes. It was a thing that's not best practice i…

-30 votes would be extremely unusual on SO. That amount of votes even including upvotes in such a short time would be almost impossible. The only way you get that kind of massive voting is either if the question hits the "Hot Network Questions" or if an external site like HN with a high population of SO users links to it and drives lots of traffic. Questions with a negative score won't hit the hot network questions,…

I don't think I've ever seen anything, no matter how bad, go below -5, and most don't go below -1. Once a question is downvoted:

- it's less likely that the question even gets shown

- it's less likely that people will even click on it

- it's less likely that people who think it's bad will bother to vote on it, since the votes are already doing the right thing

- if it's really bad, it will be marked for deletion before it gets that many downvotes anyway

SO has its problems but I don't even recognize half the things people complain about.

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

#228

Post by n_ary »

bee_rider wrote: post #206
n_ary wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Begin rant. I don’t want to be that guy saying this, but 99% of the top results on google from Medium related to anything technical is literally the reworded/reframed version of the official quick start guide. There are some very rare gems, but it is hard to find those among the above mentioned ocean of reworded quick starts disguised as “how to X”, “fixing Y”. Almost reminds me of the SEO junks when you search “how…

Somebody who just summarizes tutorials can write like 10 medium posts, in the time it takes an actual practitioner to do something legitimately interesting.

Well said. Most great articles I found on Medium are actually very old hence do not rank well.

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

#229

Post by teeray »

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 feel like this will be really beneficial in work environments. LLMs provide a lot of psychological safety when asking “dumb” questions that your coworkers might judge you for.

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

#230

Post by nunez »

kajaktum wrote: post #95

I have no idea where to ask questions nowadays. Stackoverflow is way "too slow" (Go to website, write a nice well formatted thread, wait for answers). But there's way faster solutions now, namely from message groups. For example, I was wondering if its okay to move my home directory to a different filesystem altogether and create a symlink from /home/. Where do I ask such questions? The freaking ZFS mailing list? SO?…

Reddit was a place until the API changes were made. Discord is another at the cost of public discoverability. Barring that, man pages and groking the sources.
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