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What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

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Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#361

Post by inigyou »

Grombobulous wrote: post #343
NewsaHackO wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why people use AI so heavily. Because no matter how bad or ill formed a question is, it wo answer it the most "caring" way possible, and never berate you for it being a stupid question, common sense, etc (as long as it is about some forbidden topic of course)

On top of that, the AI will take a plain no-context error message and give it a college try to figure it out. A lot of times it will be right. On SO that experience is going to be “we closed this because you didn’t form a good question.” And of course, that’s true, but it demonstrates the wide gulf in user experience between the two platforms.

If SO wants to be good, it will encourage a back-and-forth: "are you trying X?" but it doesn't want to be good. Private equity doesn't understand going concerns.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#362

Post by [deleted] »

luckydata wrote: post #357
SoftTalker wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the LLM will confidently give you a wrong answer and then waste three hours of your time going down tangential rabbit holes trying to sort it out. I never had an account, never asked or answered a question on SO, but found the answer I needed there plenty of times and got on with my work.

meh, in my experience good quality LLMs are significantly more correct than Stack Overflow ever was and have access to your code and machine to help you diagnose issues.

[deleted]

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#363

Post by lysium »

xeromal wrote: post #308
Dragas wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During the last decade that I've been asking/answering questions I only ever had 1 question locked as offtopic, and it was when they introduced question types. The several questions which I did report as invalid/offtopic/etc. were just error messages thrown by compiler without any substance of what you are supposed to look at to even determine how to help the author. I'm genuinely confused whether people just parrote…

I went to my old SO account and found these questions that were closed. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6067227/what-is-a-good-w... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8968434/i-am-having-trou... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20154313/how-can-i-gener... As someone who was a budding programmer, I felt like my questions were decent attempts at laying out my problem but they were closed anyways.

At the second you got an interesting answer, though

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#364

Post by SoftTalker »

luckydata wrote: post #357
SoftTalker wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the LLM will confidently give you a wrong answer and then waste three hours of your time going down tangential rabbit holes trying to sort it out. I never had an account, never asked or answered a question on SO, but found the answer I needed there plenty of times and got on with my work.

meh, in my experience good quality LLMs are significantly more correct than Stack Overflow ever was and have access to your code and machine to help you diagnose issues.

It's about 50:50 for me. Often times they completely fuck things up and then want to rewrite rather than correct the original issues. That leads to debugging their rewritten code and an afternoon down the drain.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#365

Post by chuckadams »

godwinson__4-8 wrote: post #347
chuckadams wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Taking personal offense to someone insulting your question is something you should learn to get over. I did get over it when I stopped bothering with SO. Sorry, but a community whose ethos is "you need a thick skin to belong" is not one most people even want to belong to.

Yes. And this is exactly my point. The path of least resistance is often preferred. Maybe in most cases this makes sense. But it can also lead to one wading in slop. Just beware an operating principle based on what "most people" want. Nearly all human societies that I am aware of bake in a caution to this impulse into their grounding philosophies. Because humans have always ultimately recognized that while seductive…

And this kind of superior attitude over the unwashed masses is precisely what kept me away.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#366

Post by inigyou »

AStrangeMorrow wrote: post #244
duchenne wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a long-time user of stackoverflow with 16k points, and even I got all my questions of the last five years downvoted into oblivion.

I know, I am in the same range of points and still asking questions has always been a bit scary. I remember spending 2h writing a question for what I thought was a complex c++/compiler issue. 10s of thousands of lines proprietary codebase, so I couldn’t include everything obviously, but also couldn’t create a “minimal working example” to reproduce the issue. So I included as many things is I could to try to get point…

Skill issue to the second paragraph. You can always create a minimal example. I've done it many times. Some of them are quite long.

Start by copying your whole file with the problem into a new file. Delete each part. See if the problem occurs. If not, Ctrl-Z and try deleting the next part. Be extremely aggressive in deleting. Also try refactoring things to be simpler if deleting doesn't work.

In C++, inline #includes not from the standard library by copy-pasting the file contents. At each step, make sure the problem still occurs. Repeat the iterative deletion process.

You should now have a fairly short source file which exhibits the problem. Rename all proprietary identifiers to foo, bar, baz, frob. Submit question to SO.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#367

Post by inigyou »

DrSiemer wrote: post #290
duchenne wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a long-time user of stackoverflow with 16k points, and even I got all my questions of the last five years downvoted into oblivion.

The one advantage of actually trying to use SO was that the fear of asking a question usually made me do so much research that I'd solve my issue in the process of fully describing it. That did also make the community lose out on the answer though.

You can write a self-answered question.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#368

Post by inigyou »

gs17 wrote: post #303
danparsonson wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They used to publish a regular torrent of everything, not sure if they still do that? Maybe you could grab yourself a copy for posterity.

It's still possible to get a dump from the Settings page, just with a checkbox that says "if you use this for AI training we might ban you".

You can automate it with browser automation tools.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#369

Post by inigyou »

znpy wrote: post #134
lynndotpy wrote: post #24

Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality. I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in t…

> but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in this manner. i got stung by exactly this. i saw some of my early questions rewritten because some idiot mod that had not touched grass in a while thought that some words were better suited for stackoverflow. and don't get me wrong: i'm not talking about profanity, n-word or racial slurs, deroga…

Ending a question with "thanks" is explicitly forbidden because it is noise.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#370

Post by inigyou »

nolok wrote: post #152
morningsam wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That basic idea is what made SO attractive in the first place, compared to forums where you had to scroll through pages and pages of in-jokes and tangents and animated-GIF signatures just to try and see if there is an answer. Where they went wrong, in my opinion, is in the implementation details. It's mostly death by a thousand cuts: Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers…

The entire gamification was great in the beginning but ended up working against them rather than for. It should have evolved into something else.

Same on Reddit. Every gamification triggers Goodhart's Law and has a lifespan.
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