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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

#321

Post by dogleash »

Abecid wrote: post #214

I think this is just the future though. Why ask other people if LLMs can just retrieve, read, and train on official documentations

If people are withdrawing from writing secondary documentation, why wouldn't they also withdraw from writing official documentation?

And don't say they wouldn't, we've already watched business decisions be made to pull back on spending to produce official documentation as the availability of the internet grew to the point vendors understood that everyone has always-online internet connections.

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

#322

Post by indigo945 »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #318
indigo945 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are types of people who will just take until no more can be given which is a type of evil, which is why you need to vet people beforehand but an LLM is simply a programmatic implementation of taking. Your first argument largely rests on this, but isn't the fact that so many LLM-created answers get posted actually proof of the opposite? The LLM is, after all, "giving" here - and it's not like those answers are…

Why would you trust Amazon ? At least the USSR's ideology claimed to represent the worker's interest, and so once that stopped happening in practice, the system collapsed. (And they were already in the age of computers, trying to do some of the first cybernetics.)

I would not dare say I trust Amazon; however, our lived experience of ordering from there entails neither death nor slavery.

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

#324

Post by wccrawford »

luckylion wrote: post #163
wccrawford wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A one week ban on the first message is clearly gatekeeping. What a bunch of jerks. A 1 hour ban would have been a lot more appropriate, and escalate from there if the person can't follow the rules. Don't even get me started about how dumb rule 2 is, though. And rule 3 doesn't even work for normal English as many things are abbreviated, e.g. this example. And of course, you didn't greet and wait, you just put a pleasa…

> And of course, you didn't greet and wait, you just put a pleasantry in the same message. Jeez. I'm pretty sure that "rule" was more aimed towards "just ask your question" rather than "greet, make smalltalk, then ask your question". I have similar rules, though I don't communicate them as aggressively, and don't ban people for breaking them, I just don't reply to greetings coming from people I know aren't looking to…

He did send the question. In the same message. It's just that he was polite about it. He didn't send a greeting and wait for a response before continuing.

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

#325

Post by thebigspacefuck »

I’ve recently gone back to search/stack overflow and it’s amazing. I search a few words and find exactly what I’m looking for in milliseconds. Relevant documentation comes up as well. I scan the results and know immediately if it’s what I need.

With ChatGPT I’m waiting seconds or even 10+ seconds for a response, it can be 100% wrong and I then have to readjust my question or point out how it’s wrong which takes me a while.

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

#326

Post by chrsig »

luckylion wrote: post #163
wccrawford wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A one week ban on the first message is clearly gatekeeping. What a bunch of jerks. A 1 hour ban would have been a lot more appropriate, and escalate from there if the person can't follow the rules. Don't even get me started about how dumb rule 2 is, though. And rule 3 doesn't even work for normal English as many things are abbreviated, e.g. this example. And of course, you didn't greet and wait, you just put a pleasa…

> And of course, you didn't greet and wait, you just put a pleasantry in the same message. Jeez. I'm pretty sure that "rule" was more aimed towards "just ask your question" rather than "greet, make smalltalk, then ask your question". I have similar rules, though I don't communicate them as aggressively, and don't ban people for breaking them, I just don't reply to greetings coming from people I know aren't looking to…

> I just don't reply to greetings coming from people I know aren't looking to talk to me to ask me how I've been.

Yep, it's in there with "please use the public channel rather than DMs".

Some nettiquite, please.

Of course, in the process of typing out their question, they usually find the answer on their own.

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

#327

Post by BlueTemplar »

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.

"New generations" being "younger than 45" ?

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

#328

Post by nicolas_t »

noirscape wrote: post #107
jakub_g wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see how frustrating it might be, but the overall idea of SO is "no duplicates". They don't want to have 1000 questions which are exactly the same but with slightly different phrasing. It can be problematic for total newcomers, but at the same time it makes it more useful for professionals: instead of having 1000 questions how to X with 1 reply, you have one canonical question with 20 replies sorted by upvotes a…

The problem SO tends to run into is when you have a question that seems like it answers another question on the surface (ie. because the question title is bad) and then a very different question is closed with the dupe reason pointing to that question because the close titles are similar. Since there's no way to appeal duplicate close votes on SO until you have a pretty large amount of rep, this kinda creates a probl…

The other problem is that you'll get a duplicate but the duplicate question's answers are all outdated.

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

#329

Post by zahlman »

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.

This is on top of an existing long-term trend (since 2014 or so) of increasing frustration at the quality and nature of questions (failure to adhere to site guidelines, nor indeed to put effort into understanding how the site is intended to work).

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

#330

Post by insane_dreamer »

fullstackwife wrote: post #259
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

That's a separate issue. That discussion is about training the model's responses through fairly standard RL (human-generated in this case), not providing it with a new corpus of data from which to draw its responses.
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