5 ms·

> Even though StackOverflow in the common use case has been taken over by ChatGPT Claim asserted without evidence.

maxlin 3y ago
It has for me, and several developer friends, and considering the fame ChatGPT has gotten, and that StackOverflow's fall has accelerated, it's obvious the milkshake's migrating. Not all of it of course, as I stated, "for the common use case"
- zacmps 3y ago
  To contrast, I've not once used it where I would have previously used SO (professional developer).
  - droopyEyelids 3y ago
    Have you tried to use it?
    - riffraff 3y ago
      I tried and it didn't work nearly as well. Probably depends on the topic.
    - sznio 3y ago
      I did. It's painfully slow. I can Google the question, click one of the top results, skip to the relevant part and read it faster than GPT can generate two sentences. You also have to build an elaborate prompt instead of throwing two/three keywords into it. It doesn't help that GPT is insistent on replying in the three paragraph format, meaning that the first 30-40 words it creates are just trash to be ignored. I found it useful once - when I had to write an essay about ISO 27001 for college and just wanted it to go away. Took what it generated and spent 20 minutes editing it to look closer to my style. For real work it isn't as useful.
      - wokwokwok 3y ago
        I find it incredible you find a LLM slower and less full of useless chitchat about a question than stack overflow. I don’t even open SO anymore; if it has a direct answer to your question, the LLM almost certainly does too; and asking new questions on SO is basically impossible. If you manage to survive the gauntlet of “too specific, already answered, not general interest, arbitrary moderator activity”, the chances of getting an answer that answers your question can take forever; most likely you’ll get a stupid answer that doesn’t answer it, upvoted by idiots who don’t understand that it not an answer the the actual question, and, ultimately, because it “already has an answer”, ignored, never to receive an answer. Maybe one day, a passing savant will answer in a comment. …and yet, you find it faster and more reliable? You, and I, have had different experiences on stack overflow in the last two years. > For real work it isn't as useful. To you.
        zacmps 3y ago
        > To you. Which was the whole point of this chain :)
      - stevage 3y ago
        I add "no preamble, no summary" to a lot of my prompts to avoid that wordiness.
      - da39a3ee 3y ago
        I think maybe you haven't been using GPT4 (the one where you have to pay money). Or else you're coming at it with a very strong prior, or you're not asking it about software engineering questions, or you're not phrasing your questions carefully. GPT4 is demonstrably extremely useful for technical questions in the realm of software engineering, and in addition to surfacing useful answers, it (obviously) presents a completely unprecedented conversational interface.
      - BeetleB 3y ago
        > I can Google the question, click one of the top results, skip to the relevant part and read it faster than GPT can generate two sentences. Ironically, this is why people like me prefer LLMs (when they're accurate). With Google, about 50% of the times the top SO hit is not answering my question. So I have to click 5-10 SO links, parse each one to see if: 1. The question being asked is relevant to my problem. 2. The answer actually answers it. I may be able to do it quickly, but it is a tedious burden on my brain. While GPT doesn't always work, the nice thing about it is that when it does work, it has taken care of this burden for me. Also, GPT's pretty much memorized a lot of the answers. I once asked it an obscure question involving openpyxl. It gave a perfectly working answer. I wondered: Did it reason it and generate the code, or is there a SO post with the exact same answer? So I Googled it, and sure enough, there was an SO question with the same code! Except GPT's solution was superior in one tiny respect: The SO answer had some profanity in the code (in a commented line). GPT removed the profanity :-)
    - Seb-C 3y ago
      I have tried it a couple of times and got wrong answers. When I search for something, I want factual and correct information, which is not what a language model is for.
- dools 3y ago
  Yes I spend far less time reading stack overflow answers now that I have GPT4. However GPT4 is occasionally still inadequate so I certainly hope SO sticks around, it is a tremendous resource.
da39a3ee 3y ago
Certainly true for me and the people I know.
petesergeant 3y ago
Sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true, and for many of us its truth is prima facie because it’s true of both our own usage and the people we work with and talk to.
svachalek 3y ago
I have 110% replaced it with ChatGPT. Perhaps SO would still have a chance back in its glory days but there's no comparison to having a direct, specific, instant answer vs having to fight against SEO or moderators for hours.
- ezconnect 3y ago
  I always read here ChatGPT is amazing. Can you give a link on how to use it? Every time I tried to google it returns lots of different results and when I tried it it:s not even usable for basic things I want. Is the ChatGPT you:re talking about on their website? Do I have to pay for it?
  - osigurdson 3y ago
    https://chat.openai.com/ https://chat.openai.com/ I currently pay for it but I'm not sure if it makes any difference.
    - p1mrx 3y ago
      https://ai.com https://ai.com is easier to type
      - osigurdson 3y ago
        Nice! Good to know.
        p1mrx 3y ago
        Looks like ai.com now redirects to an Elon Musk site. Perhaps OpenAI never controlled the domain?
    - Agingcoder 3y ago
      Yes it does - gpt 4 is vastly superior to gpt 3.
osigurdson 3y ago
Adding one datapoint... it certainly has for me.
Tao3300 3y ago
Anecdata: I've started asking Bing these questions instead of SO. E.g., it recently gave me a very helpful answer for debugging a Spring issue and cited its sources. What it didn't do was present me with a whole lot of moderation cruft. I can ask for recommendations for tools and libraries, which IIRC SO disallows. I also don't have to pray my question will get enough vote attention or worry that I posted it at the wrong time of day. On the whole, going the GPT route has been more satisfying in all ways.
- collaborative 3y ago
  I wonder how you feel aisearch.vip compares to your Bing experience. Send me a message via Side Menu-> Contact and I will give you a grand for free
  - redsaber 3y ago
    small nitpick but I thought it was just an icon but it turns out to be the button for switching light/dark mode. It would be great if you could replace it.
    - collaborative 3y ago
      Thank you. What would you have it replaced with?
- BeetleB 3y ago
  > I can ask for recommendations for tools and libraries, which IIRC SO disallows. Bing Chat almost always is useless for me with these kinds of queries. A few days ago I asked for a tool that monitors to see if a website is up. I told it I needed the tool to be something I'd run locally - not an online service and not something I need to sign up for. It gave me 3-4 online services. I reminded it about my constraint. It gave me 3-4 more online services. I reminded it about my constraint. It said it didn't want to talk to me any more.
  - Tao3300 3y ago

It has for me, and several developer friends, and considering the fame ChatGPT has gotten, and that StackOverflow's fall has accelerated, it's obvious the milkshake's migrating. Not all of it of course, as I stated, "for the common use case"

zacmps 3y ago
To contrast, I've not once used it where I would have previously used SO (professional developer).
- droopyEyelids 3y ago
  Have you tried to use it?
  - riffraff 3y ago
    I tried and it didn't work nearly as well. Probably depends on the topic.
  - sznio 3y ago
    I did. It's painfully slow. I can Google the question, click one of the top results, skip to the relevant part and read it faster than GPT can generate two sentences. You also have to build an elaborate prompt instead of throwing two/three keywords into it. It doesn't help that GPT is insistent on replying in the three paragraph format, meaning that the first 30-40 words it creates are just trash to be ignored. I found it useful once - when I had to write an essay about ISO 27001 for college and just wanted it to go away. Took what it generated and spent 20 minutes editing it to look closer to my style. For real work it isn't as useful.
    - wokwokwok 3y ago
      I find it incredible you find a LLM slower and less full of useless chitchat about a question than stack overflow. I don’t even open SO anymore; if it has a direct answer to your question, the LLM almost certainly does too; and asking new questions on SO is basically impossible. If you manage to survive the gauntlet of “too specific, already answered, not general interest, arbitrary moderator activity”, the chances of getting an answer that answers your question can take forever; most likely you’ll get a stupid answer that doesn’t answer it, upvoted by idiots who don’t understand that it not an answer the the actual question, and, ultimately, because it “already has an answer”, ignored, never to receive an answer. Maybe one day, a passing savant will answer in a comment. …and yet, you find it faster and more reliable? You, and I, have had different experiences on stack overflow in the last two years. > For real work it isn't as useful. To you.
      - zacmps 3y ago
        > To you. Which was the whole point of this chain :)
    - stevage 3y ago
      I add "no preamble, no summary" to a lot of my prompts to avoid that wordiness.
    - da39a3ee 3y ago
      I think maybe you haven't been using GPT4 (the one where you have to pay money). Or else you're coming at it with a very strong prior, or you're not asking it about software engineering questions, or you're not phrasing your questions carefully. GPT4 is demonstrably extremely useful for technical questions in the realm of software engineering, and in addition to surfacing useful answers, it (obviously) presents a completely unprecedented conversational interface.
    - BeetleB 3y ago
      > I can Google the question, click one of the top results, skip to the relevant part and read it faster than GPT can generate two sentences. Ironically, this is why people like me prefer LLMs (when they're accurate). With Google, about 50% of the times the top SO hit is not answering my question. So I have to click 5-10 SO links, parse each one to see if: 1. The question being asked is relevant to my problem. 2. The answer actually answers it. I may be able to do it quickly, but it is a tedious burden on my brain. While GPT doesn't always work, the nice thing about it is that when it does work, it has taken care of this burden for me. Also, GPT's pretty much memorized a lot of the answers. I once asked it an obscure question involving openpyxl. It gave a perfectly working answer. I wondered: Did it reason it and generate the code, or is there a SO post with the exact same answer? So I Googled it, and sure enough, there was an SO question with the same code! Except GPT's solution was superior in one tiny respect: The SO answer had some profanity in the code (in a commented line). GPT removed the profanity :-)
  - Seb-C 3y ago
    I have tried it a couple of times and got wrong answers. When I search for something, I want factual and correct information, which is not what a language model is for.
dools 3y ago
Yes I spend far less time reading stack overflow answers now that I have GPT4. However GPT4 is occasionally still inadequate so I certainly hope SO sticks around, it is a tremendous resource.

da39a3ee 3y ago

Certainly true for me and the people I know.

petesergeant 3y ago

Sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true, and for many of us its truth is prima facie because it’s true of both our own usage and the people we work with and talk to.

svachalek 3y ago

I have 110% replaced it with ChatGPT. Perhaps SO would still have a chance back in its glory days but there's no comparison to having a direct, specific, instant answer vs having to fight against SEO or moderators for hours.

ezconnect 3y ago
I always read here ChatGPT is amazing. Can you give a link on how to use it? Every time I tried to google it returns lots of different results and when I tried it it:s not even usable for basic things I want. Is the ChatGPT you:re talking about on their website? Do I have to pay for it?
- osigurdson 3y ago
  https://chat.openai.com/ https://chat.openai.com/ I currently pay for it but I'm not sure if it makes any difference.
  - p1mrx 3y ago
    https://ai.com https://ai.com is easier to type
    - osigurdson 3y ago
      Nice! Good to know.
      - p1mrx 3y ago
        Looks like ai.com now redirects to an Elon Musk site. Perhaps OpenAI never controlled the domain?
  - Agingcoder 3y ago
    Yes it does - gpt 4 is vastly superior to gpt 3.

osigurdson 3y ago

Adding one datapoint... it certainly has for me.

Tao3300 3y ago

Anecdata: I've started asking Bing these questions instead of SO. E.g., it recently gave me a very helpful answer for debugging a Spring issue and cited its sources. What it didn't do was present me with a whole lot of moderation cruft. I can ask for recommendations for tools and libraries, which IIRC SO disallows. I also don't have to pray my question will get enough vote attention or worry that I posted it at the wrong time of day. On the whole, going the GPT route has been more satisfying in all ways.

collaborative 3y ago
I wonder how you feel aisearch.vip compares to your Bing experience. Send me a message via Side Menu-> Contact and I will give you a grand for free
- redsaber 3y ago
  small nitpick but I thought it was just an icon but it turns out to be the button for switching light/dark mode. It would be great if you could replace it.
  - collaborative 3y ago
    Thank you. What would you have it replaced with?
BeetleB 3y ago
> I can ask for recommendations for tools and libraries, which IIRC SO disallows. Bing Chat almost always is useless for me with these kinds of queries. A few days ago I asked for a tool that monitors to see if a website is up. I told it I needed the tool to be something I'd run locally - not an online service and not something I need to sign up for. It gave me 3-4 online services. I reminded it about my constraint. It gave me 3-4 more online services. I reminded it about my constraint. It said it didn't want to talk to me any more.
- Tao3300 3y ago