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It’s been a relief to find a platform where I can ask questions without the fear of being humiliated Half joking, but I am pretty tired of SO pedantry.
by melenaboija 2y ago
It’s been a relief to find a platform where I can ask questions without the fear of being humiliated
Half joking, but I am pretty tired of SO pedantry.
- PhilipRoman 2y agoI haven't really found stackoverflow to be that humiliating (compared to some IRC rooms or forums), basic questions get asked and answered all the time. But the worst part is when you want to do something off the beaten path. Q: how do I do thing X in C? A: Why do you need to know this? The C standard doesn't say anything about X. The answer will depend on your compiler and platform. Are you sure you want to do X instead Y? What version of Ubuntu are you running?
- mhh__ 2y agoI find that this is mainly a problem in languages that attract "practical"/"best tool for the job" Philistines. Not going to name names right now but I had never really experienced this until I started using languages from a certain Washington based software company.
- appendix-rock 2y agoGod. Yeah. I’ve always hated #IAMPolicies on Freenode :)
- haolez 2y agoThe first time that I asked a question on #cpp @Freenode was a unique experience for my younger self. My message contained greetings and the question in the same message. I was banned immediately and the response from the mods was: - do not greet; we don't have time for that bullshit - do not use natural language questions; submit a test case and we will understand what you mean through your code - do not abbreviate words (you have abbreviated "you" as "u"); if you do not have time to type the words, we do not have time to read them The ban lasted for a week! :D
- wccrawford 2y agoA one week ban on the first message is clearly gatekeeping. What a bunch of jerks. A 1 hour ban would have been a lot more appropriate, and escalate from there if the person can't follow the rules. Don't even get me started about how dumb rule 2 is, though. And rule 3 doesn't even work for normal English as many things are abbreviated, e.g. this example. And of course, you didn't greet and wait, you just put a pleasantry in the same message. Jeez. I'm 100% sure I'd never have gone back after that rude ban.
- GeoAtreides 2y ago"I'm 100% sure I'd never have gone back after that rude ban." upon saying this, the young apprentice was enlightened
- luckylion 2y ago> And of course, you didn't greet and wait, you just put a pleasantry in the same message. Jeez. I'm pretty sure that "rule" was more aimed towards "just ask your question" rather than "greet, make smalltalk, then ask your question". I have similar rules, though I don't communicate them as aggressively, and don't ban people for breaking them, I just don't reply to greetings coming from people I know aren't looking to talk to me to ask me how I've been. It's a lot easier if you send the question you have instead of sending "Hi, how are you?" and then wait for 3 minutes to type out your question.
- chrsig 2y ago> I just don't reply to greetings coming from people I know aren't looking to talk to me to ask me how I've been. Yep, it's in there with "please use the public channel rather than DMs". Some nettiquite, please. Of course, in the process of typing out their question, they usually find the answer on their own.
- wccrawford 2y agoHe did send the question. In the same message. It's just that he was polite about it. He didn't send a greeting and wait for a response before continuing.
- hanniabu 2y agoMy questions always get closed and marked as a duplicate with a comment linking to a question that's unrelated
- zahlman 2y agoA large majority of the complaints we get of this form on the Meta site, whenever there's an actual object case, turn out to be really clear-cut duplicates where the OP is quibbling on an irrelevant detail instead of trying to understand the explanation in the answer and adapt the code to individual circumstances.
- elicksaur 2y agoOn the other hand, I find it to be a fatal flaw that LLMs can’t say, “Hey you probably don’t actually want to do it that way.”
- stemlord 2y agoSure but most common LLMs aren't going to be patronizing and presumptuous while they say so
- Ekaros 2y agoI always wonder about that. Very often it seems that you need to be able to LLM that they are wrong. And then they happily correct themselves. But if you do not know that the answer is wrong how can you get correct answer?
- o11c 2y agoWorse: if you think the LLM is wrong and try to correct it, it will happily invent something completely different (and actually wrong this time).
- milesvp 2y agoThis happened to me the other day. I had framed a question in the ordinal case, and since I was trying to offload thinking anyways, I forgot that my use case was rotated, and failed to apply the rotation when testing the LLM answer. I corrected it twice before it wrapped around to the same (correct) previous answer, and that’s when I noticed my error. I apologized, added the rotation piece to my question, and it happily gave me a verifiably correct answer.
- rytis 2y agoI think it depends on how the question is constructed: - I want to do X, how do I do it? - I was thinking of doing X to achieve Y, wonder if that's a good idea? Sometimes, I really want to do X, I know it may be questionable, I know the safest is "probably don't want to do it", and yet, that's not someone else's (or LLMs) business, I know exactly what I want to do, and I'm asking if anyone knows HOW, not IF. So IMO it's not a flaw, it's a very useful feature, and I really do hope LLMs stay that way.
- skywhopper 2y agoI mean, those all sound like good questions. You might be a super genius, but most people who ask how to do X actually want to do Y. And if they DO want X, then those other questions about compiler and OS version really matter. The fact that you didn’t include them in your question shows you aren’t really respecting the time of the experts on the platform. If you know you are doing something unusual, then you need to provide a lot more context.
- ElFitz 2y agoIt’s also quite fun when you ask niche questions that haven’t been asked or answered yet ("How do I do X with Y?"), and just get downvoted for some reason. That’s when I stopped investing any effort into that community. Turned out it, counter-intuitively, was impossible. And not documented anywhere.
- bayindirh 2y agoYes, immature people are everywhere, but SO took it to a new level before they had to implement a code of conduct. I remember asking questions and getting "this is is common misconception, maybe you're looking for X instead" type of actually helpful and kind answers. After some point it came to a point that if you're not asking a complete problem which can't be modeled as a logic statement, you're labeled as stupid for not knowing better. The thing is, if I knew better or already found the answer, I'd not be asking to SO in the first place. After a couple of incidents, I left the place for the better. I can do my own research, and share my knowledge elsewhere. Now they're training their and others models with that corpus, I'll never add a single dot to their dataset.
- zahlman 2y agoStack Overflow always had a code of conduct - it just wasn't always called that, and it started out based in some naive assumptions about human behaviour. Someone who tells you something along the lines of "this is is common misconception, maybe you're looking for X instead" is being helpful and kind, and is not at all "labeling you as stupid". On Stack Overflow, it's not at all required that you actually need the question answered, as asked, in order to ask it. (You're even actively encouraged to ask and answer your own questions, as long as both question and answer meet the usual standards, as a way to share your expertise.) It has never been acceptable to insult others openly on the site - but moderation resources are, and always have been, extremely strained, and the community simply doesn't see certain things as insulting or "mean" that others might. In particular, downvotes aren't withheld out of sympathy, because they are understood to be purely for content rating - but many users take them personally anyway. Curators commonly get yelled at when they comment (thus identifying themselves) to explain policy in polite but blunt copy-paste terms; and they get seethed at when they don't comment. There is a standard set of reasons to close questions (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476), and a how-to-ask guide (https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask), and a site tour (https://stackoverflow.com/tour https://stackoverflow.com/tour), and an entire Meta site with a variety of FAQ entries and other common references (for example, I wrote the "proposed faq" of https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808); https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808); but very few people seem interested in checking the extant documentation for the community norms, and then feel slighted when the community norms aren't what they assume they ought to be (because it works that way everywhere else). Communities should be allowed to have their own norms, so that they can pursue their own goals (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770). A ton of users confuse "know better or find the answer ahead of time" for debugging. Stack Overflow allows for what are commonly called "debugging questions", but this does not mean questions wherein you ask someone to debug the code for you. Why? Because that can't ever be helpful to someone else - nobody else has your code, and thus they can't benefit from someone locating the bug in your code. The "debugging questions" that Stack Overflow does want are questions about behaviour that isn't understood, after you have isolated the misbehaving part. These are ideally presented in the form of a "minimal reproducible example" or MRE (https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example). Stack Overflow explicitly expects you to do research before asking your question (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592) - because most of the goal of the site is to cover questions that can't be answered that way. Traditional reference documentation is only part of the puzzle (https://diataxis.fr/); https://diataxis.fr/); the Q&A site format allows for explanations (for "debugging questions") and how-to guides (in response to simple queries about how to do some atomic, well-specified task). (Tutorials don't fit in this format because they don't start with a clear question from the student.)
- chii 2y ago> Q: how do I do thing X in C? SO does suck, but i've found that if you clarify in the question what you want, and pre-empt the Y instead of X type answers, you will get some results.
- PhilipRoman 2y agoI wish... Some commenters follow up with "Why do you think Y won't work for you?"
- chii 2y agoi haven't been using SO recently, so this problem may have devolved now. if people remaining today on SO are such that they just question the premise whenever something slightly off the beaten track is asked, then i guess the site has really died.
- d0mine 2y agoThe major misunderstanding is that SO exists to help the question author first. It is not an IRC. The most value comes from googling a topic and getting existing answers on SO. In other words, perhaps in your very specific case, your question is not XY problem but for the vast majority of visitors from google it won't be so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem Personally, I always answered SO from at least two perspectives: how the question looks for someone coming from google and how the author might interpret it.
- LeadB 2y agoFor the major programming languages, it must be a pretty esoteric question if it does not have an answer yet. Increasingly, the free products of experts are stolen from them with the pretext that "users need to be protected". Entire open source projects are stolen by corporations and the experts are removed using the CoC wedge. Now SO answers are stolen because the experts are not trained like hotel receptionists (while being short of time and unpaid). I'm sure that the corporations who steal are very polite and CoC compliant, and when they fire all developers once an AGI is developed, the firing notices will be in business speak, polite, express regret and wish you all the best in your future endeavors!
- appendix-rock 2y agoI’m sorry that you ran afoul of a CoC or whatever, but this sounds like a real ‘airing dirty laundry’ tangent.
- lrpanb 2y agoOne man's tangent is another man's big picture. It may be the case of course that some people guilty of CoC overreach are shaking in their boots right now because they went further than their corporations wanted them to go.
- stemlord 2y agoHm fair point. Rudeness is actually a sign of humanity. Like that one black mirror episode
- grugagag 2y agoFair but for as long rudness is not the dominant mode.
- tlogan 2y agoThe main issue with Stack Overflow (and similar public Q&A platforms) is that many contributors do not know what they do not know, leading to inaccurate answers. Additionally, these platforms tend to attract a fair amount of spam (self promotion etc) which can make it very hard to find high-quality responses.
- cjauvin 2y agoI find that LLMs are precisely that: marvelous engines to explore "what you don't know that you don't know", about anything.
- milesvp 2y agoI’m not sure how to take you comment, but I feel the same(?) way. I love that I can use LLMs to explore topics that I don’t know well enough to find the right language to get hits on. I used to be able to do this with google, after a few queries, and skimming to page 5 hits, I’d eventually find the one phrase that cracks open the topic. I haven’t been able to do that with google for at least 10 years. I do it regularly with LLMs today.
- amenhotep 2y agoThey are extraordinarily useful for this! "Blah blah blah high level naive description of what I want to know about, what is the term of art for this?" Then equipped with the right term it's way easier to find reliable information about what you need.
- delichon 2y agoI've gotten answers from OpenAI that were technically correct but quite horrible in the longer term. I've gotten the same kinds of answers on Stack Overflow, but there other people are eager to add the necessary feedback. I got the same feedback from an LLM but only because in that case I knew enough to ask for it. Maybe we can get this multi-headed advantage back from LLMs by applying a team of divergent AIs to the same problem. I've had other occasions when OpenAI gave me crap that Claude corrected, and visa versa.
- beeboobaa3 2y agoI'm sorry but the funny thing is, the only people I've ever seen complain about SO are people who don't know how to search.
- wokwokwok 2y agoEveryone has a pet theory about what’s wrong with SO; but here’s the truth: Whatever they’re doing, it isn’t working. Blame mods. Blame AI. Blame askers… whatever man. That is a sinking ship. If you don’t see people complain about SO, it’s because they aren’t using it, not because they’re using the search. Pretty hard to argue at this point that the problem is with the users being too shit to use the platform. That’s some high level BS.
- zahlman 2y ago>Whatever they’re doing, it isn’t working. It's working just fine. The decline in the rate of new questions is generally seen as a good thing, as it's a sign of reaching a point where the low-hanging fruit has been properly picked and dealt with and new questions are only concerned with things that actually need to be updated because the surrounding world has changed (i.e., new versions of APIs and libraries). >Pretty hard to argue at this point that the problem is with the users being too shit to use the platform. On the contrary. Almost everyone who comes to the site seems to want to use it in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the site's intended purpose. The goal is to build a searchable repository of clear, focused, canonicalized questions - such that you can find them with a search engine, recognize that you've found the right question, understand the scope of the question, and directly see the best answers to the highest-quality version of that question. When people see a question submission form and treat it as they would the post submission form on a discussion forum, that actively pollutes said repository. It takes time away from subject-matter experts; it makes it harder for curators to find duplicates and identify the best versions thereof to canonicalize; and it increases the probability that the next person with the same problem, armed with a search engine, will find a dud.
- wwweston 2y agoI get useful info from SO all the time, so often that these days it’s rare I have to ask a question. When I do, the issue seems to be it’s likely niche enough that an answer could take days or weeks, which is too bad, but fair enough. It’s also rare I can add an answer these days but I’m glad when I can.
- herval 2y agoThe flipside to this is you can’t get answers to anything _recent_, since the models are trained years behind in content. My feelig is it’s getting increasingly difficult to figure out issues on the latest version of libraries & tools, as the only options are private Discords (which aren’t even googleable)
- Vegenoid 2y agoI think that knowledge hoarding may come back with a vengeance with the threat people feel from LLMs and offshoring.
- chairmansteve 2y agoYep. For SO, the incentive was a high reputation. But now an LLM is stealing your work, what's the point?
- yieldcrv 2y agoThe models come out fast enough Doesn’t seem to be a great strategy to always need these things retrained, but OpenAI’s o1 has things from early 2024 Don’t ask about knowledge cutoffs anymore, that’s not how these things are trained these days. They don’t know their names or the date.
- herval 2y agoNot my daily experience. It’s been impossible to get relevant answers to questions on multiple languages and frameworks, no matter the model. O1 frequently generates code using deprecated libraries (and is unable to fix it with iteration). Not to mention there will be no data for the model to learn the new stuff anyway, since places like SO will get zero responses with the new stuff for the model to crawl
- yieldcrv 2y agoYes I encounter that too but for things in just the last few months with o1 It is really difficult if you need project flags and configurations to make things work, instead of just code Github issues gets crawled, where many of these frameworks have their community
- lynx23 2y agoFull ACK. It has been liberating to be able to chat about a topic I always wanted to catch up on. And, even though I read a lot of apologies, at least nobody is telling me "Thats not what you actually want."
- Vegenoid 2y agoYeah, Stackoverflow kinda dug their own grave by making their platform and community very unpleasant to engage with.
- lynx23 2y agoWell, I believe the underlying problem of platforms like StackOverflow, ticketing systems (in-house and public) and even CRMs is not really solvable. The problem is, the quality of an answer is actually not easy to determine. All the mechanisms we have are hacks, and better solutions would need more resources... which leads to skewed incentives, and ultimately to a "knwoledge" db thats actually not very good. People are incentiviszed to collect karma points, or whatever it is. But these metrics are not really resembling the quality of their work... Crowdsourcing this mechanisms via upvotes or whatever does also not really work, because quantity is not quality... As said, I believe this is a problem we can not solve.
- Aurornis 2y agoMany of the forums I enjoyed in the past have become heavily burdened by rules, processes, and expectations. They are frequented by people who spend hours every day reading everything and calling out any misstep. Some of them are so overburdened that navigating all of the rules and expectations becomes a skill in itself. A single innocent misstep turns simple questions into lectures about how you’ve violated the rules. One Slack I joined has created a Slackbot to enforce these rules. It became a game in itself for people to add new rules to the bot. Now it triggers on a large dictionary of problematic words such as “blind” (potentially offensive to people with vision impairments. Don’t bother discussing poker.). It gives a stern warning if anyone accidentally says “crazy” (offensive to those with mental health problems) or “you guys” (how dare you be so sexist). They even created a rule that you have to make sure someone wants advice about a situation before offering it, because a group of people decided it was too presumptuous and potentially sexist (I don’t know how) for people to give advice when the other person may have only wanted to vent. This creates the weirdest situations where someone posts a question in channels named “Help and advice” and then lurkers wait to jump on anyone who offers advice if the question wasn’t explicitly phrased in a way that unequivocally requested advice. It’s all so very tiresome to navigate. Some people appear to thrive in this environment where there are rules for everything. People who memorize and enforce all of the rules on others get to operate a tiny little power trip while opening an opportunity to lecture internet strangers all day. It’s honestly refreshing to go from that to asking an LLM that you know isn’t going to turn your question into a lecture on social issues because you used a secretly problematic word or broke rule #73 on the ever growing list of community rules.
- BlueTemplar 2y agoJust go to a different community for the same topic ? Sounds like that one is on its way out anyway...
- zahlman 2y agoStack Overflow's policies exist for clearly documented reasons that are directly motivated by a clearly documented purpose (which happens not to be aligned with what most new users want the site to be, but they aren't the ones who should get to decide what the site is). They are certainly not politically motivated or created for the sake of a power trip. They came out of years of discussion on the meta site, and have changed over time due to the community realizing that previous iterations missed the mark.
- jneagu 2y agoI am very curious to see how this is going to impact STEM education. Such a big part of an engineer's education happens informally by asking peers, teachers, and strangers questions. Different groups are more or less likely to do that consistently (e.g. https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/jmbe.00100-21 https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/jmbe.00100-21), and it can impact their progress. I've learned most from publicly asking "dumb" questions.
- ocular-rockular 2y agoIt won't. If you look at advanced engineering/mathematics material online it is abysmal in quality of actually "explaining" the content. Most of the learning and understanding of intricacies happens via dialogue with professors/mentors/colleagues/etc. That said, when that is not available, LLMs do an excellent job or rubber ducky-ing complicated topics.
- jneagu 2y agoTo your latter point - that’s where I think most of the value of LLMs in education is. They can explain code beyond the educational content that’s already available out there. They are pretty decent at finding and explaining code errors. Someone who’s ramping up their coding skills can make a lot of progress with those two features alone.
- ocular-rockular 2y agoYeah... only downside is that it requires a level of competency to recognize when the LLM is shoveling shit instead of gold.
- amarcheschi 2y agoI've found chatgpt quite helpful in understanding some things that I couldn't figure out when approaching pytorch for an internship
- teeray 2y agoI feel like this will be really beneficial in work environments. LLMs provide a lot of psychological safety when asking “dumb” questions that your coworkers might judge you for.
- btbuildem 2y agoAt the same time, if I coworker comes asking me for something _strange_, my first response is to gently inquire as to the direction of their efforts instead of helping them find an answer. Often enough, this ends up going back up their "call stack" to some goofy logic branch, which we then together undo, and everyone is pleased.