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Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

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Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#71

Post by duxup »

pbourke wrote: post #42
duxup wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entitled "special" people are a problem everywhere. Dev's who are labeled as high performers get greenfield projects that can be pumped out quickly / look good ... someone else does the maintenance, they get all the flack for an obvious bug that wasn't fixed even if they didn't make it. The random executive who is thought to be highly successful who jumps from department to department spreading his fingerprint long e…

As time goes on, I more and more have the feeling that maintenance is 95% of the value in any software system. A well-designed system at launch is not sufficient to provide sustained value, but competent ongoing maintenance is. Phrased another way, you can sustain value by maintaining a badly designed system but not by not maintaining a well-designed system. Ideally systems are well designed and well maintained but w…

When I worked tech support I got to know the "maintenance devs" pretty well. It was amazing how I'd end up on calls with the non-maintenance teams and they would insist X, Y, Z couldn't happen and no man ... maintenance devs knew it both could and was happening and would explain how and why.

God bless those other non maintenance devs, they were good, but man they could take an RFC and turn it on its head sometimes.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#72

Post by dotnet00 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #55
laichzeit0 wrote: post #31

Some of my most recent ChatGPT interactions: 34.223.203.0/28 what is the end ip of this range? Write python code to strip out characters that are not alphanumeric or spaces How do make FastAPI not return nulls in the response model when values don't exist? Rewrite this javascript to python Braindead stuff that I would normally lookup on StackOverflow but ChatGPT gives me the actual answer instead of me having to sift…

[flagged]

A programmer's job is to solve problems, not waste time on doing 'mechanical' tasks, especially if a tool can handle them.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#73

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #40

Looking at that graph though, what it tells me is that stackoverflow was entirely unaffected by ChatGPT, and the giant spike is just humanity collectively jumping on ChatGPT in addition to folks using Stackoverflow in exactly the same way as before? Same for that "answers over time" graph: that's literally what you'd expect for a knowledge base. There has to be an initial trend upwards as the site starts to accumulat…

This is a good point. With the infinite number of uses outside of programming, you wouldn’t expect to see SO interest correlate with GPT. And if it’s not negative that’s a win.

SO has accessibility problems for beginners and a meta game for more advanced users. But there is no evidence of a death spiral here.

If anything… GPT could help SO by relieving the massive number of basic questions that GPT actually can answer.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#74

Post by Gollapalli »

valine wrote: post #33
gostsamo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can generalize it to every market where the proxy owns the relationship with the client and captures the generated value. UI or whatever, if ChatGPT kills Stack Overflow, we will be in a situation where the shared knowledge will be at the level of 2021 and everything later will be with declining quality due to lack of data. I'd say that it is in OpenAI's interest to pay for SO and Redit so that they don't kill th…

You’re assuming the bulk of ChatGPT’s coding knowledge comes from stack overflow. I suspect training directly on code bases and documentation is more important.

No, ChatGPT isn’t AI in that sense. It can fire back documentation at you, but a lot of what it does is just look at the word it’s spit out, and pick the next word or snippet that looks right. Same thing with code. It just spits out what it’s trained to interpolate the next snippet to be.

Anything involving genuine reasoning needs to be done by a human. It’s a great documentation parser. A step up in search engines. But a thinking machine it is not (yet).

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#75

Post by adamgordonbell »

chucksmash wrote: post #47
adamgordonbell wrote: post #2

An interesting thing to me about SO is how their focus on being Dev Centric ultimately led to some problematic internal culture issues. This came up in a podcast episode I did and then turned up on twitter. At one point in 2013/2014, an exec asked me if any of the developers had ever treated me badly because I was a woman. My honest reply at the time was “not because I’m a woman, but they definitely have treated me b…

corecursive.com is your podcast?

Yes! Please excuse the self plug. I find these culture issues interesting and didn't mean to highjack the thread.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#76

Post by aCoreyJ »

DrBazza wrote: post #18

ML works well, when it is only trained on correct data. ML trained on all the things ever written about programming is going to get things wrong quite a lot of the time, and you'll only have the context of its reply to you, for you to figure out whether the ML answer is correct. And of course, ML always wants to please you with an answer. SO, on the other hand has accepted answers, and upvoted answers that are easier…

ML you can actually give context and a very specific question but SO you have to search and hopefully find a similar enough question that has an answer that isn't extremely outdated

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#77

Post by _ea1k »

SamBorick wrote: post #30

Do y'all really use ChatGPT for coding questions? Every time I have tried, the answer I get is entirely wrong, and I end up going back to either first party documentation, or Stack Exchange.

It really depends on what you are doing, in my experience. I often ask for code when I know there will be a decent amount of difficult to remember boilerplate. It will do a decent enough job to save some typing and get me a framework to work within.

It is pretty good at writing little DTOs based upon a sample JSON too.

But harder questions for poorly documented libraries will exhibit a lot of the same challenges as Googling.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#78

Post by speedgoose »

SamBorick wrote: post #30

Do y'all really use ChatGPT for coding questions? Every time I have tried, the answer I get is entirely wrong, and I end up going back to either first party documentation, or Stack Exchange.

Yes, but I use ChatGPT4 which is much better than ChatGPT 3.5. In my experience it's correct often enough to ask it first.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#79

Post by Maximus9000 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #55
laichzeit0 wrote: post #31

Some of my most recent ChatGPT interactions: 34.223.203.0/28 what is the end ip of this range? Write python code to strip out characters that are not alphanumeric or spaces How do make FastAPI not return nulls in the response model when values don't exist? Rewrite this javascript to python Braindead stuff that I would normally lookup on StackOverflow but ChatGPT gives me the actual answer instead of me having to sift…

[flagged]

People do stuff for money - they don't always enjoy it. This is a story as old as time. It reminds me of the Bob Dylan song "Hurricane":

> Rubin could take a man out with just one punch

> But he never did like to talk about it all that much

> "It's my work" he'd say, "and I do it for pay

> And when it's over I'd just as soon go on my way"

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#80

Post by bluetomcat »

duxup wrote: post #24
discors wrote: post #16

From my experience, interacting with stack overflow and other software related sister communities has always left a bitter taste in my mouth. Ignoring the elephant in the room that I do use SO everyday with some success, but it’s mostly replaced by ChatGPT. The ridiculous (IMHO) moderation under the guise of “we have only one purpose” often didn’t even align with that goal. The writing was on the wall. So many questi…

ChatGPT at least seems like it is trying to help me. The meta games going on in SO are a whole lot more of a mess and ChatGPT is more than happy to hear my question a 3rd time and spit out the same answer as before but change a few things. SO, not so much.

The SO community culture rewards precise, concise and direct answers to simple and popular questions like "how do you subtract 2 dates in Python". In the first years, those were the low-hanging fruit and a source of big reputation points for some people. Unpopular questions regarding an obscure bug in the user's code or perhaps a misunderstanding of the OP aren't seen as "pretty" - they require answerers to understand the context of the particular problem and will not gain them many reputation points, even if they provide a useful answer to the OP.
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