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The timing on the sale was genius. Similar to Mark Cuban with Broadcast.com. I guess it's best to sell something before the value plummets to 0. As far as its

The timing on the sale was genius. Similar to Mark Cuban with Broadcast.com. I guess it's best to sell something before the value plummets to 0. As far as its demise? AI ate its lunch. I use to use Stack Overflow all the time and haven't even gone to the site for a couple of years now.

mosdl 1y ago
AI just stole all its content, I wonder if they will choose to sue.
- wanderingstan 1y ago
  Stack overflow never owned the content, it is and was Creative Commons: https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing
  - amanaplanacanal 1y ago
    That license comes with obligations that the AI companies aren't following.
    - souldeux 1y ago
      A distinction that is unfortunately as important as it is meaningless
    - bawolff 1y ago
      Its highly debatable if that's true. The cc lience only applies to the presentation of the information, it doesn't apply to the factual content of the information. Which part openAI used is a matter of much controversy.
      - timewizard 1y ago
        Well.. if given the right prompt.. it will effectively fully reproduce a stack overflow post in it's original form then there is no controversy and we can all see plainly what's going on behind the scenes.
        bawolff 1y ago
        Will it actually? There have certainly been incidents of that sort of thing, but from what i understand people have not been able to reliably make that happen for specific posts .
        timewizard 1y ago
        Define "it." And yes. I've gotten many free LLM tools and demos to fully recreate stack overflow posts or blog articles. They seem to have a habit of copying comments verbatim which is usually good token to search for to find the original "inspiration." It pretty reliably does this. The simpler the program you ask for the more likely it is to just copy one. Which we can argue that the simpler the program the fewer the plausible implementations but when it copies the comments so exactly and positions them identically then there aren't any other conclusions to reach. The current set of "AI" companies are just in the business of whitewashing copyright violations.
        bawolff 1y ago
        Sure, but copying 1 or 2 sentences verbatim into a long program probably isn't enough to win a copyright suit (de minimis). Or at least it would be pretty grey. Similarly, the simpler the program, the less likely the creative intent shines through. (Mostly im just trying to say these things depend on the details, and the anti-AI crowd tend to handwave the details away. They might still be right, but its far from an obvious slam dunk)
      - shinycode 1y ago
        Cursor once wrote a comment, I prompted then « what is the source of the comment » and it replaced the comment with a stackoverflow url in which the page contained the said comment verbatim. I didn’t expect cursor to paste the full url
  - zahlman 1y ago
    That license is granted to the community, but per the linked Terms of Service, the company gets a slightly different license (https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#licensing https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#lice... ; scroll to "Subscriber Content"). Emphasis on: > ... and you grant Stack Overflow the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to ...
jsheard 1y ago
Where's the AI of tomorrow going to learn from if nobody is posting Q&As online anymore?
- stego-tech 1y ago
  That’s a tomorrow problem. (As someone who is all too often hired tomorrow, at a fraction of the before rates, to clean up this mess)
- chickenzzzzu 1y ago
  information will be repackaged like credit default swaps in the mid 2000s.
- bawolff 1y ago
  From the official docs? AI is good at sumarizing after all
  - tedunangst 1y ago
    Good luck with that. The last thing I used SO for was getting answers for SwiftUI and I can assure you the official docs did not contain the needed information.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - Buttons840 1y ago
    I've been trying to get ChatGPT to write some Emacs Lisp for me and it sucks. Few things are better documented than Emacs. There's several hundreds of pages of documentation, and several million lines of Elisp, but apparently that's not enough. And I'm not asking for some beautiful architecture from ChatGPT, I'm just asking for simple hacks that get the job done. Elisp is designed to make simple hacks easy, but not easy enough for ChatGPT I guess. Like, I asked it to make a command which would move the "mark" and the "point" so that the full line was selected. If a selection covered only part of a line, I wanted the selection to expand to cover the full line. To do this, all you have to do is move the mark and the point so that they surround a line. ChatGPT couldn't do it. It would only move the point, but not the mark, it wouldn't do anything with the mark. I explicitly told ChatGPT "no, you have to set both the point and the mark correctly", and then it wrote even more code that only adjusts the point, but not the mark--it would move the point to the beginning of the line, and then move the point to the end of the line, never touching the mark--it's stupid.
zahlman 1y ago
The new owners have been trying very hard with the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach. They know this is radically against community consensus (it's been shown to them on the meta site over and over) - so they just get sneakier about it. Notably, after getting completely humiliated with https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425081 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425081 in June 2023 (right after a moderator strike had just started, protesting the staff trying to prevent them from removing AI content from the site), and getting embarrassing feedback on the feature (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162), they came back last November with https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432154 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432154 and have been forcing it through.

mosdl 1y ago

AI just stole all its content, I wonder if they will choose to sue.

wanderingstan 1y ago
Stack overflow never owned the content, it is and was Creative Commons: https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing
- amanaplanacanal 1y ago
  That license comes with obligations that the AI companies aren't following.
  - souldeux 1y ago
    A distinction that is unfortunately as important as it is meaningless
  - bawolff 1y ago
    Its highly debatable if that's true. The cc lience only applies to the presentation of the information, it doesn't apply to the factual content of the information. Which part openAI used is a matter of much controversy.
    - timewizard 1y ago
      Well.. if given the right prompt.. it will effectively fully reproduce a stack overflow post in it's original form then there is no controversy and we can all see plainly what's going on behind the scenes.
      - bawolff 1y ago
        Will it actually? There have certainly been incidents of that sort of thing, but from what i understand people have not been able to reliably make that happen for specific posts .
        timewizard 1y ago
        Define "it." And yes. I've gotten many free LLM tools and demos to fully recreate stack overflow posts or blog articles. They seem to have a habit of copying comments verbatim which is usually good token to search for to find the original "inspiration." It pretty reliably does this. The simpler the program you ask for the more likely it is to just copy one. Which we can argue that the simpler the program the fewer the plausible implementations but when it copies the comments so exactly and positions them identically then there aren't any other conclusions to reach. The current set of "AI" companies are just in the business of whitewashing copyright violations.
        bawolff 1y ago
        Sure, but copying 1 or 2 sentences verbatim into a long program probably isn't enough to win a copyright suit (de minimis). Or at least it would be pretty grey. Similarly, the simpler the program, the less likely the creative intent shines through. (Mostly im just trying to say these things depend on the details, and the anti-AI crowd tend to handwave the details away. They might still be right, but its far from an obvious slam dunk)
    - shinycode 1y ago
      Cursor once wrote a comment, I prompted then « what is the source of the comment » and it replaced the comment with a stackoverflow url in which the page contained the said comment verbatim. I didn’t expect cursor to paste the full url
- zahlman 1y ago
  That license is granted to the community, but per the linked Terms of Service, the company gets a slightly different license (https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#licensing https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#lice... ; scroll to "Subscriber Content"). Emphasis on: > ... and you grant Stack Overflow the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to ...

jsheard 1y ago

Where's the AI of tomorrow going to learn from if nobody is posting Q&As online anymore?

stego-tech 1y ago
That’s a tomorrow problem. (As someone who is all too often hired tomorrow, at a fraction of the before rates, to clean up this mess)
chickenzzzzu 1y ago
information will be repackaged like credit default swaps in the mid 2000s.
bawolff 1y ago
From the official docs? AI is good at sumarizing after all
- tedunangst 1y ago
  Good luck with that. The last thing I used SO for was getting answers for SwiftUI and I can assure you the official docs did not contain the needed information.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Buttons840 1y ago
  I've been trying to get ChatGPT to write some Emacs Lisp for me and it sucks. Few things are better documented than Emacs. There's several hundreds of pages of documentation, and several million lines of Elisp, but apparently that's not enough. And I'm not asking for some beautiful architecture from ChatGPT, I'm just asking for simple hacks that get the job done. Elisp is designed to make simple hacks easy, but not easy enough for ChatGPT I guess. Like, I asked it to make a command which would move the "mark" and the "point" so that the full line was selected. If a selection covered only part of a line, I wanted the selection to expand to cover the full line. To do this, all you have to do is move the mark and the point so that they surround a line. ChatGPT couldn't do it. It would only move the point, but not the mark, it wouldn't do anything with the mark. I explicitly told ChatGPT "no, you have to set both the point and the mark correctly", and then it wrote even more code that only adjusts the point, but not the mark--it would move the point to the beginning of the line, and then move the point to the end of the line, never touching the mark--it's stupid.

zahlman 1y ago

The new owners have been trying very hard with the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach. They know this is radically against community consensus (it's been shown to them on the meta site over and over) - so they just get sneakier about it. Notably, after getting completely humiliated with https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425081 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425081 in June 2023 (right after a moderator strike had just started, protesting the staff trying to prevent them from removing AI content from the site), and getting embarrassing feedback on the feature (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162), they came back last November with https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432154 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432154 and have been forcing it through.