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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

#251

Post by pessimizer »

kertoip_1 wrote: post #248
rkncland wrote: post #26

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?

> You come to SO for answers, why would you care that someone is teaching some LLM on them later?

This doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. The people who would be concerned are the ones who are providing answers. They are not coming to SO solely to get answers.

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

#252

Post by emptiestplace »

neither_color wrote: post #194
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…

Naively asking it for code for anything remotely complex is foolish, but if you do know what you're doing and understand how to manage context, it's a ridiculously potent force multiplier. I rarely ask it for anything without specifying which libraries I want to use, and if I'm not sure which library I want, I'll ask it about options and review before proceeding.

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

#253

Post by oblio »

mondrian wrote: post #243
jsemrau wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Curious about this statement, do you mind expanding?

I'm also curious. For folks who've been around, the semantic web, which was all about data annotation, failed horribly. Nobody wants to do it.

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

#254

Post by oblio »

finolex1 wrote: post #141
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.

There is still publicly available code and documentation to draw from. As models get smarter and bootstrapped on top of older models, they should need less and less training data. In theory, just providing the grammar for a new programming language should be enough for a sufficiently smart LLM to answer problems in that language. Unlike freeform writing tasks, coding also has a strong feedback loop (i.e. does the cod…

> sufficiently smart LLM

Cousin of the sufficiently smart compiler? :-p

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

#255

Post by kachapopopow »

nfw2 wrote: post #249
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.

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 t…

Experienced the same thing with a library that has no documentation and takes advantage of c++23(latest) features.

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

#256

Post by TaylorAlexander »

nfw2 wrote: post #249
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.

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 t…

Well Gemini completely hallucinated command line switches on a recent question I asked it about the program “john the ripper”.

We absolutely need public sources of truth at the very least until we can build systems that actually reason based on a combination of first principles and experience, and even then we need sources of truth for experience.

You simply cannot create solutions to new problems if your data gets too old to encompass the new subject matter. We have so systems which can adequately determine fact from fiction, and new human experiences will always need to be documented for machines to understand them.

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

#257

Post by joshdavham »

verdverm wrote: post #197
klabb3 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I've always wondered why GH didn't incorporate chat

I've been wondering the same thing recently. It's really inefficient for me to communicate with my fellow maintainers through Github discussions, issues and pull request conversations so my go-to has been private discord conversations. This is actually kind of inefficent since most open source repos will always have a bigger community on github vs on discord (not to mention that it's a hassle when some maintainers are Chinese and don't have access to Discord...)

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

#258

Post by amenhotep »

milesvp wrote: post #237
cjauvin wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that LLMs are precisely that: marvelous engines to explore "what you don't know that you don't know", about anything.

I’m not sure how to take you comment, but I feel the same(?) way. I love that I can use LLMs to explore topics that I don’t know well enough to find the right language to get hits on. I used to be able to do this with google, after a few queries, and skimming to page 5 hits, I’d eventually find the one phrase that cracks open the topic. I haven’t been able to do that with google for at least 10 years. I do it regular…

They are extraordinarily useful for this! "Blah blah blah high level naive description of what I want to know about, what is the term of art for this?"

Then equipped with the right term it's way easier to find reliable information about what you need.

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

#259

Post by fullstackwife »

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.

The answer is already known, and it is a multi billion dollars business: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41680116

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

#260

Post by zmmmmm »

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.

It may be an interesting side effect that people stop so gratuitously inventing random new software languages and frameowrks because the LLMs don't know about it. I know I'm already leaning towards tech that the LLM can work well with, simply because being able to ask the LLM to solve 90% of the problem outweighs any marginal advantage using a slightly better language or framework offers. Fro example, I dislike Python as a language pretty intensely, but I can't deny that the LLMs are significantly better in Python than many other languages.
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