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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

#241

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…

I don't understand this take.

If LLMs will be the end of open source, then they will constitute that end for exactly the reason you write:

> 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.

And if those things are true and allowed to continue, then any IP relying on copyright is equally threatened. That could of course be the case, but it's hardly unique to open source. Open source is no different, here. Or are you suggesting that non-open-source copyrighted material (code or otherwise) is protected by keeping the "source" (or equivalent) secret? Good luck making money on that blockbuster movie if you don't dare show it to anyone, or that novel if you don't dare let people read it.

> The social rewards (e.g., credit, respect) that often motivate open source work are undermined.

First of all: Those aren't the only social rewards that motivate open source work. I'd even wager they aren't the most common motivators. Those rewards seem more like the image that actors that try to social-network-ify or gamify open source work want to paint.

Second: Why would those things go away? The artistic joy that drives a portrait painter didn't go away when the camera was invented. Sure, the pure monetary drive might suffer, but that drive is perhaps the drive that's least specific to open source work.

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

#243

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.

Data annotation is a thing that will be a huge business going forward.

Curious about this statement, do you mind expanding?

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

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> do not use natural language questions That is really absurd! AFAIK, it is not possible to pose a question to a human in C++. This level of dogmatism and ignorance of human communication reminds me of a TL I worked with once who believed that their project's C codebase was "self-documenting". They would categorically reject PRs that contained comments, even "why" comments that were legitimately informative. It was a…

Self-documenting code is one of the worst ideas in programming. Like you, I've had to work with teams where my PRs would be blocked until I removed my comments. I'm not talking pointless comments like "# loop through the array" but JSdoc style comments describing why a function was needed. I will no longer work anywhere that has this kind of culture.

Hard to agree or disagree without real examples. I've worked with people who insist on writing paragraphs of stories as comments on top of some pretty obviously self-descriptive code. In those cases, the comments were indeed just clutter that would likely soon be out of date anyway. Conversely, places that need huge comments like that usually should just be refactored anyway. It's pretty rare to actually need written comments to explain what's going on when the code is written semantically and thoughtfully.

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

#245
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the major programming languages, it must be a pretty esoteric question if it does not have an answer yet. Increasingly, the free products of experts are stolen from them with the pretext that "users need to be protected". Entire open source projects are stolen by corporations and the experts are removed using the CoC wedge. Now SO answers are stolen because the experts are not trained like hotel receptionists (wh…

Hm fair point. Rudeness is actually a sign of humanity. Like that one black mirror episode

Fair but for as long rudness is not the dominant mode.

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

#246

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…

> 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!

Both of those platforms are making answers harder to find. For me, a person used to getting the correct answer in Stackoverflow right away, scrolling through endless GitHub discussions is a nightmare. Aren't we just moving backwards?

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

#247
post #229

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.

At the same time, if I coworker comes asking me for something _strange_, my first response is to gently inquire as to the direction of their efforts instead of helping them find an answer. Often enough, this ends up going back up their "call stack" to some goofy logic branch, which we then together undo, and everyone is pleased.

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

#248

Of course people reduce their free contributions to Stackoverflow. Stackoverflow is selling then out with the OpenAI API agreement and countless "AI" hype blog posts.

I don't think it's the main reason. People don't care whether someone is selling stuff they create on a platform. Big social media has been doing it for many years now e.g. Facebook and yet it's still there. You come to SO for answers, why would you care that someone is teaching some LLM on them later?

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

#249

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.

Fwiw, GPT o1 helped me figure out how a fairly complex use case of epub.js, an open-source library with pretty opaque documentation and relatively few public samples. It took a few back-and-forths to get to a working solution, but it did get there.

It makes me wonder if the AI successfully found and digested obscure sources on the internet or was just better at making sense of the esoteric documentation than me. If the latter, perhaps the need for public samples will diminish.

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

#250

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.

> The problem is eventually what are LLMs going’s to draw from? Published documentation. I'm going to make up a number but I'll defend it: 90% of the information content of stackoverflow is regurgitated from some manual somewhere. The problem is that the specific information you're looking for in the relevant documentation is often hard to find, and even when found is often hard to read. LLMs are fantastic at reading…

Knowledge gained from experience that is not included in documentation is also significant part of SO. For example "This library will not work with service Y because of X, they do not support feature Y, as I discovered when I tried to use it myself" or other empirical evidence about the behavior of software that isn't documented.
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