26 ms·
My heart goes to the stack overflow community which has always been very kind and helpful, essentially working for free. As a self-taught developer since the ag
by louison11 1y ago
My heart goes to the stack overflow community which has always been very kind and helpful, essentially working for free.
As a self-taught developer since the age of 8, I literally grew up learning how to code through SO, asking hundreds of questions and answering many more.
So many bugs that would take 2-3 days to fix would eventually find their answer through it.
But now ChatGPT does that in minutes… so it’s for the best!
- threatofrain 1y agoI just hope that we can continue to find sources of high quality training data like SO. If people don't publish their mutual learnings somewhere then there's no data to train on.
- aquafox 1y agoUntil there is a radically new version of {popular programming language} with breaking changes and no new and correct answers to train on.
- 1123581321 1y agoThese models can figure out syntax and language features they haven’t seen before. Try it with a few code snippets of your own made-up language. It’s a little freaky.
- zahlman 1y agoThey can implicitly assume that your made-up language is designed to be easy to use by native language speakers, and thus apply their existing understanding of "code" to it, sure.
- 1123581321 1y agoYes, that’s part of it, but it can also correctly reason the language is designed to be hard to understand. If you try this exercise, it’ll list its reasoning for what it thinks each unfamiliar piece of syntax might be, and one of its approaches is to bring in analogues to other languages, including other esoterica attempts. If you give it something more inventive, it’ll reason its way to other academic fields to come up with solutions. It’s a good check to make sure you haven’t accidentally made something too simple or similar to another language, too; that’ll be spotted immediately.
- int_19h 1y agoThey can indeed, but 1) this takes up an inordinate amount of context, and 2) the more you force model to think about that, the less effective it is at actually writing code.
- awesome_dude 1y agoClosing this as its a statement not a question
- TremendousJudge 1y ago> But now ChatGPT does that in minutes But it's trained on stackoverflow data? What happens in a few years when the data gets more and more outdated? Where will it get its knowledge then?
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoIt will steal our own data and we'll have a big "oopsie! didn't mean to!" moment 5-10 years after.
- TremendousJudge 1y agoMy point is that there won't even be any data to steal! The novel human-written and human-rated answers just won't exist anymore. Where will it get its answers on C++26 features from? Not the non-existing StackOverflow, that's for sure.
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoAh in the training data sense, yeah that makes sense. My bet is that "code artisans" will see a revival in the 300k+ usd range that will drop into your codebase like a special forces team to unfuck the AI garbage all the prior "Seniors" implemented.
- staircasebug 1y agoThey're learning from working code in GitHub, IDE "co-pilots"...
- TremendousJudge 1y agoBut a priori you don't know if the code you find on Github is "good", plus it doesn't come with a handy explanation. The quality of the data is much, much worse.
- staircasebug 1y ago
- moribvndvs 1y agoThe presumption is that things will improve over time, but the big difference in my experience is the assistance I got from SO _worked_ the vast majority of the time, whereas various LLMs I have used generate unusable, misleading, or unreliable results pretty regularly, increasing as complexity or rarity arises. As human-driven knowledge bases backed by actual experience are replaced by inference from models who rely on such inputs, I am concerned about the medium to long term impact. A lot of people grew frustrated with SO for various reasons and went back to unhelpful behaviors that SO resolved at its zenith (rather than dead ends and flame wars in newslists and irc channels, they do it in random subreddits and discord servers instead). Now what if we circle back after degenerative LLM experiences only to find there’s nothing to circle back on?
- myvoiceismypass 1y agoPersonally, I am getting extremely tired of ChatGPT hallucinating npm packages that don't exist, or package imports that do not exist
- datavirtue 1y agoGet a good service. Running it on your old gaming machine?
- surgical_fire 1y agoAre you implying he is running ChatGPT from his gaming machine? State of the art models constantly generate bullshit, even if I find them generally useful. Your blind hype does nothing but make people more skeptical of it.
- soraminazuki 1y agoMaybe at least learn the difference between a web service and a local application before getting carried away by hype.
- danjl 1y agoThose hallucinated libraries exist in the future where the LLM lives and works. You just haven't caught up in time yet. ;-)
- Gigachad 1y agoMixed feelings on SO. It was helpful, but it was also a website you dread having to post on because it was filled with the most intolerable people of the internet who you just had to endure abuse from if you wanted help. Now chatGPT gives you the same help without the abuse.
- awesome_dude 1y agoThe next AI totally needs to be more snarky to make it feel more like we're dealing with actual "thinksperts", people that think they are experts even if their answers are demonstrably wrong.
- NBJack 1y ago"You are Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. You are very knowledgeable in the _____ language; in fact, you believe you are the foremost expert on it. You have taken time from your busy schedule to help the unwashed masses by answering the following question..."
- ElCapitanMarkla 1y ago"Be sure to edit the original question to better fit your answer"
- Gigachad 1y ago>Oh, the pain... the sheer agony of having to explain basic React concepts to someone who likely thinks JSX is a new boy band. But fine. For the sake of humanity—or at least to preserve what little remains of good developer practices—I shall lower myself to answer your question. Hooks and components in React are as different as a limited-edition issue of Radioactive Man and the garbage they stuff in the Sunday comics. [...] If you're writing React without understanding this distinction, please, for the love of all that is unholy in Springfield, step away from the keyboard and go read the official React docs. Twice. Maybe thrice.
- kulahan 1y agoI think this is the first time I’ve ever heard someone describe the stack overflow community as “kind”. Usually it’s the exact opposite: “I asked a question and just got 30 questions asking why I’m trying to do this” or “my question was closed for seemingly no reason”. It’s literally the most blunt and aggressive website I’ve ever been on that wasn’t a straight-up troll site like 4-Chan.
- NBJack 1y agoQuestion closed; here's a link to another one that sounds vaguely related but doesn't actually address your problem. But seriously, I'd love to see some sentiment analysis of the SO corpus classifying tone by tag.
- zahlman 1y ago"Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself. When you are linked to a duplicate, it's because the person doing so believes in good faith that, to the extent that you have a question that meets the site's standards, answers to the other question will answer yours as well. This also means you are responsible for overlooking irrelevant details, reading the answers, making your own attempts to apply them, etc. If the other question is actually different, you are expected to edit the question to make this clear - not by adding an "Edit:" section like in a forum post, but by fixing the wording such that it's directly clear what you're looking for and how it's different. This might mean fixing your specification of input or desired output. It's difficult sometimes, and curators do make mistakes. Most frustratingly, it's entirely possible for two completely different problems to be reasonably described with all the same keywords. I personally had a hell of a time disentangling https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9764298 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9764298 from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18016827 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18016827, while also explaining that https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618515 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618515 really is the same as the first problem despite different phrasing. But curators much more often get it right. Not only that, a few of us go out of our way to create artificial Q&A (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205) for beginner issues that beginners never know how to explain, and put immense effort into both the question and answer. Some popular examples in the Python tag: "I'm getting an IndentationError (or a TabError). How do I fix it?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722) was written to replace "IndentationError: unindent does not match any outer indentation level, although the indentation looks correct" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/492387 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/492387) and a few others, with reasoning stated there. "Asking the user for input until they give a valid response" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23294658 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23294658) "Why does "a == x or y or z" always evaluate to True? How can I compare "a" to all of those?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20002503 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20002503) was written largely as an alternative to the organic "How to test multiple variables for equality against a single value?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15112125 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15112125) after the latter was found not to help beginners very well (the original example was quite unclear, although it's since been improved).
- bitbasher 1y agoAre you talking about Stackoverflow? Every time I asked a detailed question it would be closed within minutes. I'm not surprised it's on the way out.
- bryanlarsen 1y agoI've asked dozens of questions on SO, and never had a single one closed. I hear your sentiment often, but have no idea whether my experience or yours is more common. I've had 3 deleted by Community bot as abandoned, but since they were over a year old when that happened, I couldn't care less.
- fernirello 1y agoI've got valuable advice from SO over the years. There's overlap with LLMs, sure, but it's frequent to have questions that have no answers published anywhere on the web; SO brings people who know out of the woodwork, who create an explanation that didn't exist before. A couple days ago, someone in retrocomputing got to bank-switch a 1983 Radio Shack box... that kind of stuff wasn't published anywhere, until a guy who used to write games for that box answered that question on SO.
- s1ph3r 1y agoI moved this over to the Stackoverflow Will Be Missed thread. It does not belong in the Let's Dance On Stackoverflow's Demise thread.
- zero_shift 1y agoIronically, when someone first asked the Meta SO community if ChatGPT could ever become a threat, it was downvoted with prejudice: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/384355/could-chatgpt-be-a-viable-way-to-answer-peoples-questions/384378#384378 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/384355/could-chatgp...
- zahlman 1y agoIt was downvoted because the entire purported "threat" is based on a misconception. It is not relevant to SO whether an LLM can provide personalized help, write with any particular tone, answer promptly, accept every input prompt as valid and try to make sense of it, discuss back and forth to figure out a problem, etc. Because Stack Exchange is explicitly and by design not for those things. But also, downvotes work differently on meta anyway, and the community there generally takes a negative view of LLMs. Because, again, the point of SO is for the answer to come from a human expert, and be verified against subject matter expertise rather than simply being evaluated for coherence or generally sounding appropriate in context.
- zahlman 1y agoThe point of an LLM is that it can take your problem as input, along with answers to previously asked questions (perhaps implicit) in its training data, and attempt to synthesize a solution to a problem as output. Here, a "question" is something that can be found with a search engine - something that directly presents the/a crux of an issue, which is identified after a debugging session (for a problem in existing code; for projects still in the design phase, a how-to question emerges after coming up with user stories and breaking tasks down into their logical steps). The point is that the question can be relevant to many different people who have written different code which encounters different problems - all caused fundamentally by the same conceptual misunderstanding (or non-understanding). Stack Overflow is explicitly not designed or intended to solve problems or do the decomposition of the problem for you, nor the synthesis of answers. Because the result would never be useful to anyone else. The entire point is to have something searchable, and to allow answer-writers to keep their explanations DRY. This has spectacularly failed, because no matter how frustrated people get with traditional discussion forums (https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/979:_Wisdom_of_the_Ancients https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/979:_Wisdom_of_th... among many other typical complaints), they apparently are much more suited to human nature. Heaven knows how Wikipedia managed to avoid devolving into "Quora but even worse because you can scribble over someone else's post".