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The real cost is that society at large is no longer contributing to the StackOverflow, so problems and solutions are all now stored in proprietary databases (wh
by TuringNYC 2y ago
The real cost is that society at large is no longer contributing to the StackOverflow, so problems and solutions are all now stored in proprietary databases (which granted SO also was) but also now stored in an invisible proprietary database
- daemin 2y agoThe StackOverflow database was open source for a while, but I haven't checked for a data dump since the new management came in.
- TuringNYC 2y agoTrue, may not be open source, but it is still viewable. Best for Society: Open Source <-- Where SO was Medium for Society: Proprietary, but openly browsable <-- Where SO is Worst for Society: Proprietary, not browsable <-- LLM-based code assist tools
- Wowfunhappy 2y ago...where would you classify Llama in here? That's not really "open source" despite what Facebook calls it, but I wouldn't call it proprietary, anyone can download and use the whole thing locally.
- pabs3 2y ago"public weights"?
- _heimdall 2y agoCan those weights be interpreted by anyone viewing them? If not, it seems like publicly available, obfuscated code at best.
- fragmede 2y ago"model available" would be my preferred term. Is Photoshop.exe "interpretable" by anybody with a copy (of windows)? How about a binary that's been heavily decompiled, like a Mario game?
- _heimdall 2y agoPhotoshop doesn't claim to be open source like llama does though, I'm not sure of the connection you're making. Don't get me wrong, llama is at least more open than OpenAI and that may be meaningful.
- fragmede 2y agoThe license aside, the question is what can be done with a carefully arranged blob of binary? Without additional software (Windows) I can't really do anything with Photoshop.exe. Similarly, Llama.gguf is either useful, with Ollama.app, or not, standing alone. So (looking past the difference in license), would you consider Photoshop.exe similar in that it's a binary blob that's useless by itself, or is it a useful collection of bytes, and why is/is not an ML model available on hugging faces the same?
- _heimdall 2y agoThe license used isn't important in my opinion, when talking about open source the question is whether the source code is available to be modified and reviewed/interpreted. Photoshop, or any compiled binary, isn't meant to be open source and the code isn't meant to be reviewable. Llama is called open source, though the most important part isn't publicly available for review. If llama didn't claim to be open source I don't think it would matter that the model itself and all the weights aren't available. If your argument is just that most software is shipped as compiled and/or obfuscated code, sure that's how it is usually done. That isn't considered open source though, and the line with LLMs seems to be very gray - it can be "open source" if the source code for the training logic is available even though the actual code/model being run can't be reviewed or interpreted.
- justsid 2y agoThis is just like the majority of communities moving to Discord over Forums. The barrier to entry might be a lot lower than getting a VPS and hosting phpBB or whatever, but the discoverability and searchabilty has gone towards 0. Everything is just moving into opaque black boxes.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y agoI never understood the move to Discord. Maybe I should host a PhpBB and bring some sanity back.
- weebull 2y ago> phpBB Whoa there Nelly! If we're going to resurrect things, can we do it whilst leaving PHP in the past?
- ribadeo 2y ago[dead]
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y agoPHP hasn't failed me yet. Been using if for about 20 years. Not heavily but it gets the job done and it's still improving. It's really quite sane if you start comparing it to the alternatives. It continues to 'just work'
- disqard 2y agoYour comment sparked a thought -- maybe this is the "Dark Forest" of the Web: Either your site's content stays hidden behind discord, or an LLM's bot/minion scrapes all your content and makes visiting your site superfluous, thereby effectively killing your site.
- networked 2y agoThis is an interesting thought because there is probably a real dynamic like this with some kinds of content, but as an HN comment it is also somewhat self-refuting.
- Terretta 2y agoI think you'd find society-at-small was contributing, with perhaps 10x larger yet still quite small number posting but watering down useful contributions, 100x that lurking, and 1000x that just drive-by copy-pasting from SO to their IDE.
- TuringNYC 2y agoSure, but at least the knowledge the publicly viewable, even if the contributions werent equal. Upvoting, browsing, asking is also a contribution.
- AlienRobot 2y ago"Useful contributions" is subjective. Not everyone is born a senior developer. Juniors, and even children who aren't even juniors yet ask questions on these channels. Source: I bothered a lot of people on the Internet about C++ when I was child.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y agoAre you saying these child questions are useful contributions?
- AlienRobot 2y agoTo the child that asked it? Absolutely. :-) Information is only useful if it's accessible. If they are asking questions it's because the information they want is in practice not accessible to them.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y agoI'm not disagreeing, just clarifying. I myself have asked lots of dumb/easy questions but prior to ChatGPT it was hard to get simple straight-forward answers.
- throwaway277432 2y agoI contributed well-researched answers already when I was ostensibly a very junior dev, and even before that during my CS studies. Stuff you can lookup or simply try out is doable, of course questions where you need experience aren't a good fit. When I was in high school I read the docs, and learned C++ from books and MSDN. Granted my access to the internet was rather limited back then, but it also never crossed my mind to bother people for things I could easily lookup myself. Growing up in a RTFM, "search the forum first before asking" environment is seen as toxic today, but it really helps keeping certain behavior in check thats a drag on society as a whole. One of the best mentors/bosses I ever had never answered coding questions directly, but always in the form of a question so I could look it up and learn for myself. I try to do the same with my junior devs today, unless there's time constraints or they're under stress, I try to let them figure out the final answer themselves.
- jefftk 2y ago> proprietary databases (which granted SO also was)* StackOverflow's database was public and shared at the Internet Archive until recently: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange They've now moved it onto their own infra, ostensibly so people have to agree not to use it for LLM training: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/401324/announcing-a-change-to-the-data-dump-process https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/401324/announcing-a...
- jimjimwii 2y agoWait, I thought they backed off from this nonsense. If they really did close off db downloads then I'll never answer a question there ever again. I bet many others wont either. Maybe that's also part of why SE will fail. The only deal I personally am willing to tolerate is me spending time providing quality questions and answers in my domain in return for being able to download all questions and answers under the cc-sa license and being able to freely download them for offline viewing without an account (via kiwix). No other arrangement is acceptable. I'll look further into this and update this comment with my findings. Edit: Yep. No more answers from me. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water. Maybe small community forums are really the only way to share knowledge these days :(
- Buttons840 2y agoI wonder if a purge and a fresh start for StackOverflow would renew interest. I used to like reading StackExchange sites as a social media site--lots of interesting questions and clever answers. Today, votes have slowed down and the best answers are from 2017, and only niche questions can avoid being closed.
- rankun203 2y agoI think there will always be open platforms for us to exchange ideas where Copilot can't help. It's just now simple problems can be solved with Copilot directly, we can finally focus on implementing ideas and optimizing them.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y agoI don't know. Sometimes there's many ways to solve a simple problem but some are better than others. On stack overflow you get that variety and that discussion. Copilot just gives one. It might be suboptimal or it might have subtle bugs.
- jart 2y agoStack Overflow is now a proprietary database too. Given the choice between that, and a proprietary robot offering 10x as much clarity and quality, I'd choose the robot. Not all LLMs are proprietary in the same way as Claude. Many LLMs have their weights publicly available, like Gemma. But I can understand if you feel like a floating point numbers file is de facto proprietary tool. But if you're smart, you would look at this instead as an opportunity to invent the tools that will make this knowledge accessible. I've been working with Mozilla to build a "fantasy mode" feature for Firefox, which works similar to incognito mode, where you have a local LLM generate a synthetic version of the world wide web on the fly. This gives you the ability to explore the knowledge contained in LLM weights using an intuitive familiar browser-based interface. So far it's about as fast as 56k dialup was in the 1990s but as microprocessors become faster, I believe we'll be able to generate artificial realities of useful information we can't live without which are superior to Stack Overflow today.
- nativeit 2y agoForgive me if I have missed something, but how is a synthetic version of the web (which sounds interesting and impressive in its own right) in any way comparable to a vast, indexed repository of curated and organized technical knowledge shared by experts with nuanced experiences and insights? > but as microprocessors become faster, I believe we'll be able to generate artificial realities of useful information we can't live without which are superior to Stack Overflow today. Was this written by an LLM bot? It seems…off.
- WD-42 2y agoThis sounds great! There isn't enough slop in the web, so this sounds like a good way to experience browsing without any non-ai generated nonsense getting in the way!
- RestartKernel 2y agoThe situation at large is even worse if you consider how Discord moved a significant portion of discussion away from the indexable Web. I thought of mailing lists as archaic, but maybe we just regressed from there.
- spacechild1 2y agoIMO public forums are the sweet spot.
- ncr100 2y agoSo the real solution is tracking all of your data. There should be a product, something that you install to capture your own data, and then pseudo-anonymize it and sell it back to databurgers (I meant to write data brokers but I kept this misspelling for lolz). Is there? Assistant LLMs like Limitless.AI merged with their older desktop scraper app could be repackaged to do that... New industry? Or old?
- data-ottawa 2y agoI think this only removes the low quality questions like “how do I make X in React”. There will always be new libraries and software updates, and those will always have corners and edge cases that will foster questions. The LLMs won’t have the answers out of the box until they have something to train from, so there’s still room for StackOverflow.
- janaagaard 2y agoYeah, I agree that StackOverflow it but a shadow of what it used to be, and that this is a shame. But I don’t think that AI is to blame for this - all the interesting discussions had already migrated to GitHub issues. AI is just the nail in the coffin for SO.