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Does anyone still use Stack Overflow post-2022?
by netdevphoenix 2y ago
Does anyone still use Stack Overflow post-2022?
- burgerrito 2y agoMany including me
- netdevphoenix 2y agoNot that many judging by the two answers. Even 100k is too little relative to the number of English speaking devs in the world
- glitchc 2y agoThe answers are only 18 minutes old. Give it time.
- gus_massa 2y agoI had to write a powerscript last week. I lifted 90% of it from 2 or 3 posts in SO
- danpalmer 2y agoYes, for non-work things I find it vaguely useful. My workflow is to first google search, often see Stack Overflow answers, and then move on to an LLM or actual documentation if I don't get anything through search. I do it this way around because I can search far faster than I can write out reasonable english sentences that head-off bad LLM responses. Sometimes when I'm confident enough that the LLM will be able to give me the "right answer" faster than search I'll do it first, but that's mostly when I have something I can copy/paste in.
- recroad 2y agoMy experience with LLMs has been different. I give it trash prompts and it gives me reasonable responses. I think it's figured out the space between what I type and what I want. That's great. Until we get an input which allows it to figure out the space between what I type and what I think. That doesn't even sound too bad, because now I can just think and it'll happen. I look forward to this future, sounds wonderfully efficient, which would finally give me the time to do that thing I really want to do but don't have the time right now because we're not efficient enough. But no, my experience is different with regards to the ratio of quality of input versus output. I think we all do a subconscious ROI of whether typing that little extra will yield an output that's going to be that much better that it was worth the time and effort. Or much more likely I'm just lazy.
- magicalhippo 2y agoIf I know what I want, just not exactly where, I'll go straight for a search. But if it's more fuzzy then LLMs has totally changed how I acquire knowledge. Now I find it more productive to ask an LLM to get some keywords or similar which I might search for afterwards. The great thing about LLMs is that, unlike a search engine, you can tell it "no, not quite like that, more like this" to guide it.
- scarface_74 2y agoThen why not just tell the LLM to do the search for you? ChatGPT has had built in web search for over two yeass for paid users
- magicalhippo 2y agoMostly because I'm not a paying user. I use local LLMs for easier stuff, so not often I need to reach to ChatGPT. Besides, I guess I want to have some control over the search, like which sites to visit. Sometimes the search might retur something tangential, but interesting for example.
- password4321 2y agoOpenAI
- croes 2y agoSure, why not?
- Terr_ 2y agoI search it for things that are outside regular documentation. However any contributions (answers, questions) are directly related to something I'm working on. There's no community (or certainty that your work will not be marked-as-duplicate) which would justify a more-general kind of helping-out.
- bluedino 2y agoI don't think I find any useful, recent answers
- lawgimenez 2y agoYes, I still answer some few questions if I know the answer.
- epistasis 2y agoToday I had a small amount of Google Sheets work to do, to extend somebody else's work, and I had both Claude and ChatGPT hallucinating mythical function names, and not understanding array functions with utter confidence and certainty. StackOverflow results from a web search gave me the answer faster, in the end.
- b112 2y agoNot to mention, such sites often have a discussion, with pros and cons of certain tacts, why some methods may be pitfalls, and more. Such sites help you understand why, far more than a distilled down response of a LLM. Such sites help you learn. Knowing the why, is often far more important than the how.
- epistasis 2y agoIronically enough, the LLM was better at explaining trade offs and new syntax, and I learned more about the topic from the LLMs, largely from observing the unintended effects of their incorrect instructions. It was just dead wrong on several key details and when it didn't know how to do something it answered with BS with just as much confidence as the insightful parts, which would be infuriating from a human, but merely time wasting from the LLM.
- ncruces 2y agoLLM are the reason I get bug reports like… Them: “why doesn't this thing work I your OSS lib, whereas it works in this other OSS lib?” Me: “does it? it's not supposed to.” Then: “oh idk, ChatGPT told me so.”
- epistasis 2y agoThere should be reputation points on bug reports where somebody loses the ability to file after a certain amount of bad behavior like that...
- arkh 2y ago> hallucinating I hate the use of this word to describe when a sentence completer gives a wrong result. To hallucinate you have to have a concept of reality. Which those models don't have. They're just mathematical tools which some times manage to give a result humans think as human-like.
- bigstrat2003 2y agoYes, of course I do. Why wouldn't I?
- Salgat 2y agoAt least for me, I've found chatgpt to be a good Google replacement. It might be helpful beyond that occasionally, but it really excels in spitting out existing data.
- shric 2y agoFor me it depends on what I need. Google -> stackoverflow is typically much faster than chatgpt. If you are a fast typer and can formulate a short question then you can often get from thought to answer in well under 10 seconds. With chatgpt there is a small thinking delay then often a long token sequence of filler before you get the few lines you're looking for. ChatGPT shines compared to stackoverflow for something you know that requires a dialog of prompts or you're asking it to write some specific code instead of just finding out how to accomplish a small task with very clear syntax.
- Salgat 2y agoIt sounds weird but google seems like it used to be scary accurate back in the day, but results for me seem a lot muddier than they used to be in the past few years.
- cyberax 2y agoFor me, Google started to fail when they decided to start dropping parts of the query. And inevitably, the crucial ones. E.g. I wanted to search for "CUDA on Fedora 41" and Google "helpfully" drops the "41" number from the query! So I have to notice that and click on "41" to force the search.
- shric 2y agoI tried CUDA on Fedora 41 (no quotes) and got exclusively results around Fedora 41 without any changes required, weird.
- jiniux 2y agoI still do. Personally, I only use LLMs to generate boilerplate code and for inline predictions. Sometimes is just faster for me to lookup an answer on SO than trying to ask something to a LLM that may be outdated or wrong (at least on SO I can see the date of the answer and what other people think about it).
- lemper 2y agoyea, mate. i still use it to read some questions and answers.
- firesteelrain 2y agoDeleted all of my accounts. It's not worth it anymore.
- jmuguy 2y agoYes, several times a week. The process of just searching for something and reading SO answers is still just as good as ever.
- andyjohnson0 2y agoI still use to find answers to problems, but less often than I did a few years ago (thank you chatgpt et al) and I search via my browser (thank you Kagi search adjustments) not via the site's search. I haven't posted questions or answers for years. Too many petty, officious people and general toxicity.
- abanana 2y agoIs there a psychological term for the self-centred thinking where a person thinks "I've stopped using X, therefore everyone's stopped using X"?
- scarface_74 2y agoYes and people still watch TV even though you haven’t owned a TV in 20 years (tm Slashdot 2002)
- ge96 2y agoI do, I don't use co-pilot to code or LLMs much other than for work until I find a personal use for it. I like other fields of AI more eg. ML/computer vision.
- donatj 2y agoComes up in my Googling sometimes. I don't really have the time I used to have to try to answer things these days.
- cookiengineer 2y agoOffline, yes. I selfhost it now. Everything that came after the mod strike kind of made things worse anyways, so there's not that much change in knowledge requirements for me. There's also kiwix and zim files available in case you don't wanna self host but still be able to have it offline on your desktop machine.
- c00kien1gg3r 2y ago[dead]
- junto 2y agoI work in the .NET space and was very active for many years on some niche topics (my account is now 16 years old). I still support some older .NET applications, and I’ve had the situation several times where I’ve ended up on SO via a Google search and started to read the answer, only to feel as if the writing style is familiar. Then noted that I myself answered it and I’m reading my own text for the solution. I’m always amused that a) I keep having the solve the same things over and over again, and b) I can’t remember the solutions. Maybe I’m just old.