I’ve been on SO like ten times altogether since ChatGPT came out. It’s so much nicer than the condescending pricks of Stack Overflow. My favourite is when some genius links a question as a duplicate of something that’s vaguely similar.
my first thought about it too
The problem is that fewer people are generating the new content for gpt to slurp up.
Free information stops working when people stop caring about creating it.
Yeah, I’ve thought about that as well. Doesn’t mean I’m gonna miss Stack Overflow specifically. Perhaps something better replaces it when AI gets poisoned by its own output too much.
I think not. The problem isn’t in service, the problem is in people.
Yup. Stopped answering questions as soon as they did that.
This question was already answered 10 years ago in a completely different version of the programming language to the one you’re using, and we know it doesn’t work anymore, in fact hasn’t for 8 years, but we’re going to close it anyway because screw you.
Also you should be doing it in Rust anyway
What do you ask ChatGPT? I rarely get a correct answer really, it’s all made-up bullshit usually.
I usually have good answers with only minimal bullshit when it comes to coding. If not, it at least points me in the right direction.
deleted by creator
But can ChatGPT downvote answers into oblivion?
No it’s the one it replies with
Guilty <-
The irony of it all is SO making deals for AI to scrape their site for machine learning but in doing so more people are using chatgpt and copilot more because it’s easier and just as accurate. AI/ML is really going to destroy these websites and yet it’s the websites signing off on their own death sentences.
What I’m still not sure of is this… When these websites die will the LLMs stagnate with no new data to use for training or will they somehow keep up with new technology and eliminate the need for certain basic questions that would originally have required human input?
The ideal result? LLMs are just early versions of much better things that come later.
The unlikely result: we develop a separate human curated internet somewhere, complete with verification that a human wrote every bit. Basically verifiable digital id and signing on everything. Maybe.
The probable result: the internet turns to shit as AIs are trained on content created by AIs.
I think they see the writing on the wall and they’re trying to make a buck while they still can.
It’s called selling out. I doubt they have any illusions about the future of these platforms, they just don’t care as long as they can cash out.
Chat GPT is wonderful as a search engine for SO. It regurgitates the answers in a format easier to incorporate into your own project.
The thing I’m worried about is a lack of new answers. You need data to train an LLM, what to do if nobody is producing it?
It already uses the docs and API references
But who writes the docs now
Ha! I have an AI for that! Gotcha!
…
On, but the AI trains now on other docs that I used an AI to write…
…
Oh shit…
I typically visit stack overflow when encountering edge cases and bugs not covered by the documentation.
If it has learned from the source code you’d be surprised how good it is at that as well.
For docs it’s better, for other stuff it’s way worse than a human.
It’s a shame so much stuff is locked up in discord these days.
yeah, discord the the true black hole of information
Do you mean trained on the source code, or having the source code in context?
Do they actually publish this data?
Closed as duplicate
Now that’s just a signal for training reinforcement
Although we have seen a small decline in traffic, in no way is it what the graph is showing (which some have incorrectly interpreted to be a 50% or 35% decrease). This year [2023], overall, we’re seeing an average of ~5% less traffic compared to 2022.
And yet they didn’t show us a rectified or accurate graph.
They’re lying
You got evidence for that bold statement, ooooor
An ML trusting a corporation, orrrr?
Is this a facts or feelings response?
Is this a trust a company to announce it’s dying response?
Says who? ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is lying to, and is also really confident about it.
Says corporations trying to protect their investment.
Is this finally the dusk of SO? It helps alot, but also suck alot.
Honestly SO fuelled the rise of the cut and paste developer. I won’t be that sad to see the end of it, and the LLMs that scraped it soon after.
You are also underestimating how sites like SO really helped a new generation of programmers learn. Anyone could search and learn things, whether to take a serious approach or just for a bit of fun.
I think you’re underestimating how badly it taught them. I see a lot of developers (when interviewing) that are unable to reason about code.
Lot’s of people learn how to cook by following recipes, but they don’t try to get work in catering or running restaurants. That requires a different level of understanding.
SO was the coding recipe book. It was fine for hobbyists. Not professionals.
Before they pulled up the ladder. There is NOTHING more frustrating than looking up a problem, getting the exact question you are looking for, only for the answers to say the question is locked and given a link to another malformed question which tell you to rtfm, and that this is no longer supported., try to do something else with a completely different software in a completely different way. All in an attempt to keep the question pool pure. I do not mourn SO.
My favorite is being provided a solution but with absolutely no context or how the solution addresses the root cause.
The amount of people I’ve been helping out that have copied some code from somewhere and say “it doesn’t work”, and who are dumbfounded when I ask them to read the surrounding text aloud for me…
Along the same line: When something crashes, and all I have to do is tell people to read the error message aloud, and ask them what that means. It’s like so many people expect to be spoon-fed solutions, to the point where they don’t even stop to think about the problem if something doesn’t immediately work.
Interesting. I actually thought of it as a replacement for Google. With Google search being broken for years it’s the only easy way to get information now.
They are really bad for getting correct information and putting it in context: Information literacy and chatbots as search
"New ChatGPT with Ads!
Giving you that Google feeling once again. "
yeah it’s replacement for google only if you don’t care if any of information received is accurate at all
Which… is google
There are other search engines.
Most of them have the same problem though. The more specific you are the worse the results.
Idk, I rarely have any problems searching for things.
duckduckgo and searx using duckduckgo work fine
That’s what I use too. Can recommend.
Yeah. When I need additional insights on a difficult technical configuration, it’s nice to be able to speak to an artificial insufferable dipshit, rather than a real human insufferable dipshit.
The AI ones continue helping me even after I explain to them how they come across to real humans.
Isn’t this when Safari and Firefox started blocking third party trackers by default?
That wouldn’t stop page views from being counted.
The first dip is all of us back filling answers with “F U ChatGPT” and getting temporarily banned :)
It’s also around the time they did away with their jobs board thing isn’t it? I got a job through it in 2021 and somewhere after that they sunset it, which was an insane business decision because it was the best job search platform out there.
