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Stack Overflow is a casualty of its hostile atmosphere, of the elitism displayed by its most powerful members, of its past community moderation and advertising
by p-e-w 3y ago
Stack Overflow is a casualty of its hostile atmosphere, of the elitism displayed by its most powerful members, of its past community moderation and advertising scandals, and of its stubborn refusal to implement features long requested by users.
ChatGPT is just the executioner. If people are abandoning ship in droves the moment an alternative becomes available, you know just how bad your platform is.
- rixary 3y ago[flagged]
- 7e 3y agoStack Overflow could be the greatest website in the world; ChatGPT would still kill it. The experience is that much better. The universe is not fair.
- legends2k 3y agoI think the difference is the user's type: if a programmer is looking for code, sans any learning interest, then ChatGPT is handsdown the optimal choice; just get an solution, do copy-pasta and move who. If one is looking to learn, then I think SO is better. I've personally found the lazier devs jumping to ChatGPT as they are not interested in learning or asking smart questions [0]. [0]: https://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html https://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
- afarviral 3y agoDefending myself, the lazy programmer: realtime feedback is a proven condition which improves learning. I'm not sure why I would use SO if LLMs continue to improve as I can even debate with it and it encourages me to define my problem and chunk my work. If they remain at their current limits, maybe, sometimes I will need expert advise from a human, but I dont see them slowing down so that seems like wishful thinking on my part.
- legends2k 3y agoI think the difference is the user's type: if a programmer is looking for code, sans any learning interest, then ChatGPT is hands down the optimal choice; just get a solution, do copy-pasta and move on. If one is looking to learn, then I think SO is better. I've personally found the lazier devs jumping to ChatGPT as they are not interested in learning or asking smart questions [0]. [0]: https://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html https://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
- surgical_fire 3y agoMy experience is the opposite. In ChatGPT i actually ask questions, get answer, and use its response to either refine my questions or look up documentation. Since I know that ChatGPT can't really code, I use its responses as a hint. I leaned a lot when using it to explore the capabilities of languages and libraries I'm not that familiar with. On SO, the opposite happens. I seldom ask questions, since the site has a reputation of being hostile. I look for previous answers and just try whatever answer I found on my code. If it doesn't work, I try looking for another answer, rinse and repeat.
- Arnt 3y agoSpeaking as someone who answers: Your approach is noticeable not hostile, I'd even say it's friendly and nice. I follow some SO tags where I have domain expertise (there's an RSS feed for each tag, so that's convenient). Often I remember having seen that answered before, so I copy the entire headline and paste it into google, and see a good answer somewhere on the first result page. My domain expertise enables me to pick it out from the other results quickly; the asker would probably need minutes, quite likely tens of minutes. What to do? I personally vote to close as duplicate, which is friendly to you and hostile to the people who asked without searching. What would ChatGPT do, though? Based on a single experiment, it'll rephrase the top answer in a confident, friendly, patient, informative manner. But the top answer was wrong for that question, for reasons that require domain expertise to understand (a five-word phrase whose meaning isn't a minor variant of its three-word prefix), and ChatGPT's answer nebulised that difference. I find ChatGTP to be very good at some things. I worry for sites like SO, though. SO's genius is to find a way to make answering worthwhile for people like me, not just for the people who'd like to ask questions and get free answer from someone with domain expertise. Replicating that two-sided model with an AI in the middle seems very, very difficult.
- raydiatian 3y ago> If people are abandoning ship in droves the moment an alternative becomes available, you know just how bad your platform is. This
- v3ss0n 3y agoFor human to learn and try harder they need to be in harsh condition, to grow thicker skin. sometimes SO community do not give answer directly and harsh for stupid questions, which I did get harsh treatment when I was a kid and that push me to ask questions better also learn harder. I am thankful for the way they did. Now things gonna be a lot easier for people and sloths and laziness gonna come with it which makes so easy for machines to win.
- afarviral 3y agoIt is a studied phenomena what conditions are required for optimal growth and learning. Therefore it should be easy to synthesize a ciriculum for new developers with challenges pitched at the right level for them to reach their highest potential. Thick skin is no substitute for an environment with fewer assholes/abuse, not an ingredient required for growth.
- p-e-w 3y agoAh yes, the "people become better the worse you treat them" early-20th-century political pseudoscience trope.
- afarviral 3y agoYes, quite a convenient lie if you ask me. Why try to address abuse and mistreatment when you can label it character-building!?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- surgical_fire 3y agoCuriously enough, asking stupid questions is part of any learning process. I that regard, SO is awful for learning anything, it's only use is finding existing answers. If answer doesn't exist, you're better looking elsewhere.
- afarviral 3y agoI dont know about all that. But as someone who had just started with stack overflow (begun actually posting/participating)… it died for me the moment I discovered the GPT playground and eventually chatGPT. These days I use Bing Chat as my coding mentor. My theory is it takes less energy for the user to get what they need from an LLM tuned for code then any alternative. Luckily there will be users who have different needs than choosing the path of least resistence who ennjoy the community and challenges and I salute them, and looking forward to joining them when my needs change. It seems there are a contingent of people suffering "rubber band" effect where LLMs are concerned; "oh its just.."… "...hype...", "...boring...". No, it is AGI now already.
- zht 3y agoAre you able to tell when it is hallucinating?
- p-e-w 3y agoAre you able to tell when a human is?
- gwoolhurme 3y agoIf it is a community effort yes. Yes we are. That’s the idea of SO. It’s a community effort. Highly flawed and elitist yes, but the theory is it is community policed.
- p-e-w 3y agoIf that is good enough, you can replace the "community" with a cohort of different LLMs, which should work analogously.
- gwoolhurme 3y agoNo? Maybe if they reach human levels of sensory and cognition. For example, again, my FairPlay problem. On iOS 16 there is a timing issue when DRM can be ingested, but this isn’t documented from apple and it is kind of a rare problem. If I ask Bing right now, which is connected to the internet. It gives you links to a human stackoverflow. How would an LLM know about this timing issue? The source code looks fine, there is no compiler error, there are no crashes. There IS sometimes just a video that is not playable in AVPlayer. How does an LLM with an LLM community solve that?
- tennisflyi 3y agoSounds similar to Elitist Jerks for WOW.