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Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

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Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#651

Post by imcritic »

cpa wrote: post #641
scirob wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone tried building a modern Stack Overflow that's actually designed for AI-first developers? The core idea: question gets asked → immediately shows answers from 3 different AI models. Users get instant value. Then humans show up to verify, break it down, or add production context. But flip the reputation system: instead of reputation for answers, you get it for catching what's wrong or verifying what works. "T…

Am I reading an AI trying to trick me into becoming its subordinate?

Yeah, they didn't even bother to suggest paying you with tokens for the job well done! The audacity!

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#652

Post by inejge »

omneity wrote: post #231
johnfn wrote: post #210

Some comments: - This is a really remarkable graph. I just didn't realize how thoroughly it was over for SO. It stuns me as much as when Encyclopædia Britannica stopped selling print versions a mere 9 years after the publication of Wikipedia, but at an even faster timescale. - I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor mode…

Thinking from first principles, a large part of the content on stack overflow comes from the practical experience and battle scars worn by developers sharing them with others and cross-curating approaches. Privacy concerns notwithstanding, one could argue having LLMs with us every step of the way - coding agents, debugging, devops tools etc. It will be this shared interlocutor with vast swaths of experiential knowled…

> Privacy concerns notwithstanding, one could argue having LLMs with us every step of the way - coding agents, debugging, devops tools etc.

That might work until an LLM encounters a question it's programmed to regard as suspicious for whatever reason. I recently wanted to exercise an SMTP server I've been configuring, and wanted to do it by an expect script, which I don't do regularly. Instead of digging through the docs, I asked Google's Gemini (whatever's the current free version) to write a bare bones script for an SMTP conversation.

It flatly refused.

The explanation was along the lines "it could be used for spamming, so I can't do that, Dave." I understand the motivation, and can even sympathize a bit, but what are the options for someone who has a legitimate need for an answer? I know how to get one by other means; what's the end game when it's LLMs all the way down? I certainly don't wish to live in such a world.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#653

Post by imcritic »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #642
scirob wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone tried building a modern Stack Overflow that's actually designed for AI-first developers? The core idea: question gets asked → immediately shows answers from 3 different AI models. Users get instant value. Then humans show up to verify, break it down, or add production context. But flip the reputation system: instead of reputation for answers, you get it for catching what's wrong or verifying what works. "T…

I think this could be really cool, but the tricky thing would be knowing when to use it instead of just asking the question directly to whichever AI. It’s hard to know that you’ll benefit from the extra context and some human input unless you already have a pretty good idea about the topic.

Presumably over time said AI could figure out if your question had already been answered and in that case would just redirect you too the old thread instead.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#654

Post by foobarbecue »

zahlman wrote: post #489
js8 wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think PP means it's more in the tone and passive-aggressive behavior ("closed as duplicate") than somebody explicitly articulating that. It's a paradox of poor communication that you cannot prove with certainty that there is an intent behind it. There is always the argument that the receiver should have known better (and bother checking local news at Alpha Centauri).

There is nothing "passive-aggressive" about closing a question as a duplicate. It is explicitly understood to be doing a favour to the OP: an already-existing answer to a common question is provided instantly .

I will say that I had questions erroneously closed as duplicates several times, but I always understood this as an honest mistake. I can see how the asker could find that frustrating and might feel attacked... but that's just normal friction of human interaction.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#655

Post by j45 »

scirob wrote: post #622
0xfaded wrote: post #225

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…

Has anyone tried building a modern Stack Overflow that's actually designed for AI-first developers? The core idea: question gets asked → immediately shows answers from 3 different AI models. Users get instant value. Then humans show up to verify, break it down, or add production context. But flip the reputation system: instead of reputation for answers, you get it for catching what's wrong or verifying what works. "T…

AI is generally setup to return the "best" answer as defined as the most common answer, not the rightest, or most efficient or effective answer, unless the underlying data leans that way.

It's why AI based web search isn't behaving like google based search. People clicking on the best results really was a signal for google on what solution was being sought. Generally, I don't know that LLMs are covering this type of feedback loop.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#656

Post by QuesnayJr »

zahlman wrote: post #515
znpy wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems Just to add another personal data point: i started posting in on StackOverflow well before llms were a thing and moderation instantly turned ne off and i immediately stopped posting. Moderators used to edit my posts and reword what i wrote, which is unacceptable. My posts were absolutely peaceful and not inflammatory. Moderation…

> Moderators used to edit my posts and reword what i wrote, which is unacceptable. My posts were absolutely peaceful and not inflammatory. 99.9% probability the people who made those edits a) were not moderators ; b) were acting completely in accordance with established policy (please read: "Why do clear, accurate, appropriately detailed posts still get edited?" https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/403176 ) Why d…

The tone of this answer explains everything why people fled SO as soon as they possibly could.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#657

Post by specproc »

ijidak wrote: post #601
nprateem wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely the fundamental difference is one asks actual humans who know what's right vs statistical models that are right by accident.

Providing context to ask a Stack Overflow question was time-consuming. In the time it takes to properly format and ask a question on Stack Overflow, an engineer can iterate through multiple bad LLM responses and eventually get to the right one. The stats tell the uncomfortable truth. LLMs are a better overall experience than Stack Overflow, even after accounting for inaccurate answers from the LLM. Don't forget, huma…

What I'm appreciating here is the quality of the _best_ human responses on SO.

There are always a number of ways to solve a problem. A good SO response gives both a path forward, and an explanation why, in the context of other possible options, this is the way to do things.

LLMs do not automatically think of performance, maintainability, edge cases etc when providing a response, in no small part because they do not think.

An LLM will write you a regex HTML parser.[0]

The stats look bleak for SO. Perhaps there's a better "experience" with LLMs, but my point is that this is to our detriment as a community.

[^0]: He comes, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#658

Post by noduerme »

0xfaded wrote: post #225

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…

That's pretty nice ;)

I once wrote this humdinger, that's still on my mostly dead personal website from 2010... one of my proudest bits of code besides my poker hand evaluator ;)

The question was, how do you generate a unique number for any two positive integers, where x!=y, such that f(x,y) = f(y,x) but the resulting combined id would not be generated by any other pair of integers. What I came up with was a way to generate a unique key from any set of positive integers which is valid no matter the order, but which doesn't key to any other set.

My idea was to take the radius of a circle that intersected the integer pair in cartesian space. That alone doesn't guarantee the circle won't intersect any other integer pairs... so I had to add to it the phase multiple of sine and cosine which is the same at those two points on the arc. That works out to:

(x^2+y^2)+(sin(atan(x/y))*cos(atan(x/y)))

And means that it doesn't matter which order you feed x and y in, it will generate a unique float for the pair. It reduces to:

x^2+y^2+( (x/y) / (x^2+y^2) )

To add another dimension, just add it to the process and key it to one of the first...

x^2+y^2+z^2+( (x/y) / (x^2+y^2) )+( (x/z) / (x^2+z^2) )

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#659

Post by eterm »

culi wrote: post #447
csomar wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You had me looking through my history. Here is an example from 12 years ago: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15626760/does-an-idle-my... Granted when I look at that question today, it doesn't make much sense. But 12 years-back me didn't know much better. Let's just say the community was quite hostile to people trying to figure stuff out and learn.

Yeah I can definitely see why this might feel hostile to a newbie. But SO explicitly intended to highlight really good well-formed and specific questions. Stuff that other people would be asking and stuff that wouldn't meander too much. It's simply not meant to be a forum for these kinds of questions. I think Reddit would've been a better fit for you

That is a specific question.

Any more specific and I suspect it would have been closed as too specific to their environment / setup instead.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#660

Post by noduerme »

imcritic wrote: post #650
noduerme wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, so it wasn't bad enough to spot bad human answers as an expert on Stack Overflow... now humans should spend their time spotting bad AI answers? How about a model where you ask a human and no AI input is allowed, to make sure that everyone has everyone else's full attention?

Why disallow AI input? Is it that poor? Surely it isn't.

The entire purpose of answering questions as an "expert" on S.O. is/was to help educate people who were trying to learn how to solve problems mostly on their own. The goal isn't to solve the immediate problem, it's to teach people how to think about the problem so that they can solve it themselves the next time. The use of AI to solve problems for you completely undermines that ethos of doing it yourself with the minimum amount of targeted, careful questions possible.
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