391–400 of 1001 posts
I once published a method for finding the closest distance between an ellipse and a point on SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22959698/distance-from-g... I consider it the most beautiful piece of code I've ever written and perhaps my one minor contribution to human knowledge. It uses a method I invented, is just a few lines, and converges in very few iterations. People used to reach out to me all the time with…
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> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question I read an interview once with one of the founders of SO. They said the main value stackoverflow provided wasn't to the person who asked the question. It was for the person who googled it later and found the answer. This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer. They were pr…
Sad? No. A good LLM is vastly better than SO ever was. An LLM won't close your question for being off-topic in the opinion of some people but not others. It won't flame you for failing to phrase your question optimally, or argue about exactly which site it should have been posted on. It won't "close as duplicate" because a vaguely-similar question was asked 10 years ago in a completely-different context (and never re…
I was part of various forums 15 years ago where I could talk shop about many technical things, and they're all gone without any real substitute.
> People don't realize what a massive advantage Google has over everyone else in that regard. Site owners go out of their way to try to block OpenAI's crawlers, while simultaneously trying to attract Google's.
Not really. Website operators can only block live searches from LLM providers like requests made when someone asks a question on chatgpt.com, only because of the quirk that OpenAI makes the request from their server as a quick hack.
We're quickly moving past that as LLMs just make the request from your device with your browser if it has to (to click "I am not a robot").
As for scraping the internet for training data, those requests are basically impossible to block and don't have anything in common with live answer requests made to answer a prompt.
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Am I the only one that sees this as a hellscape? No longer interacting with your peers but an LLM instead? The knowledge centralized via telemetry and spying on every user’s every interaction and only available thru a enshitified subscription to a model that’s been trained on this stolen data?
How is it much different than trading say a bar for livestream? For any org if you can remove the human meatware you should otherwise you are just making a bunch of busywork to exlude people from using your service. Just through the act of existing meatware prevents other humans from joining. The reasons may be shallow or well thought out. 95+% of answers on stack overflow are written by men so for most women stack o…
Also, excluding people is nowhere near the worst sin in social spaces. Excluding people who don’t share common interests or cultural context often improves the quality of socializing. Hanging out with my friends that I’ve known for 20 years produces much more fruitful conversations than hanging out with my friends plus a dozen strangers competing for my attention.
In the past people asked questions of real people who gave answers rooted in real use. And all this was documented and available for future learning. There was also a beautiful human element to think that some other human cared about the problem.
Now people ask questions of LLMs. They churn out answers from the void, sometimes correct but not rooted in real life use and thought. The answers are then lost to the world. The learning is not shared.
LLMs have been feeding on all this human interaction and simultaneously destroying it.
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What I always appreciate about SO is the dialogue between commenters. LLMs give one answer, or bullet points around a theme, or just dump a load of code in your IDE. SO gives a debate, in which the finer points of an issue are thrashed out, with the best answers (by and large) floating to the top. SO, at its best, is numerous highly-experienced and intelligent humans trying to demonstrate how clever they are. A bit l…
The fundamental difference between asking on SO and asking an LLM is that SO is a public forum, and an LLM will be communicated with in private. This has a lot of implications, most of which surround the ability for people to review and correct bad information.
I spent the last 14 days chasing an issue with a Spark transform. Gemini and Claude were exceptionally good at giving me answers that looked perfectly reasonable: none of them worked, they were almost always completely off-road. Eventually I tried with something else, and found a question on stackoverflow, luckily with an answer. That was the game changer and eventually I was able to find the right doc in the Spark (…
You still get the same thing though? That grumpy guy is using an LLM and debugging with it. Solves the problem. AI provider fine tunes their model with this. You now have his input baked into it's response. How you think these things work? It's either a human direct input it's remembering or a RL enviroment made by a human to solve the problem you are working on. Nothing in it is "made up" it's just a resolution prob…
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Sad? No. A good LLM is vastly better than SO ever was. An LLM won't close your question for being off-topic in the opinion of some people but not others. It won't flame you for failing to phrase your question optimally, or argue about exactly which site it should have been posted on. It won't "close as duplicate" because a vaguely-similar question was asked 10 years ago in a completely-different context (and never re…
What's sad about it is that SO was yet another place for humans to interact that is now dead. I was part of various forums 15 years ago where I could talk shop about many technical things, and they're all gone without any real substitute. > People don't realize what a massive advantage Google has over everyone else in that regard. Site owners go out of their way to try to block OpenAI's crawlers, while simultaneously…
Whatever. I haven't seen a graph like that since Uber kicked the taxi industry in the yarbles. The taxi cartels had it coming, and so does SO. That sort of decline simply doesn't happen to companies that are doing a good job serving their customers.
(As for forums, are you sure they're gone? All of the ones I've participated in for many years are still online and still pretty healthy, all things considered.)
The graph is scary, but I think it's conflating two things: 1. Newbies asking badly written basic questions, barely allowed to stay, and answered by hungry users trying to farm points, never to be re-read again. This used to be the vast majority of SO questions by number. 2. Experiencied users facing a novel problem, asking questions that will be the primary search result for years to come. It's #1 that's being canib…
The reason the "experts" hung around SO was to smooth over the little things. This create a somewhat virtuous cycle, but required too much moderation and as other have pointed out, ultimately unsustainable even before the release of LLMs.
I once published a method for finding the closest distance between an ellipse and a point on SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22959698/distance-from-g... I consider it the most beautiful piece of code I've ever written and perhaps my one minor contribution to human knowledge. It uses a method I invented, is just a few lines, and converges in very few iterations. People used to reach out to me all the time with…
He didn't need to, but he gave the most comprehensive answer possible attacking the question from various angles.
He taught me the value of deeply understanding theoretical and historical aspects of computing to understand why some parts of programming exist the way they are. I'm still thankful.
If this was repeated today, an LLM would have given a surface level answer, or worse yet would've done the thinking for me obliviating the question in the first place.
I wrote a blog post about my experience at https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-and-learning
I once published a method for finding the closest distance between an ellipse and a point on SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22959698/distance-from-g... I consider it the most beautiful piece of code I've ever written and perhaps my one minor contribution to human knowledge. It uses a method I invented, is just a few lines, and converges in very few iterations. People used to reach out to me all the time with…
Why did SO decide to do that to us? to not invest in ai and then, iirc, claim our contributions their ownership. i sometimes go back to answers i gave, even when answered my own questions.
SO didn't claim contributions. They're still CC-BY-SA
https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing
AFAICT all they did is stop providing dumps. That doesn't change the license.
I was very active, In fact I'm actually upset at myself for spending so much time there. That said, I always thought I was getting fair value. They provided free hosting, I got answers and got to contribute answers for others.