4 ms·

We used to say "stop copying and pasting from stackoverflow without reading it first". Everything changed, yet everything is the same.

alecsm 1y ago
[flagged]
- hekkle 1y ago
  OMG YES, that site needed to die! I posted a few times on subjects I was an expert in, and hence they were difficult issues, and no one would ever answer them. The few other times I posted they were questions about things I wasn't an expert in, hence why I was asking, and my god, it was like I was pulling them away from their busy schedules and costing them time at work. It's like you don't have to answer if you have something better to do.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  ChatGPT would be worthless without training material like SO.
  - CamperBob2 1y ago
    Not really. LLMs are good at indexing and digesting documentation, up to and including actual source code, and answering questions about it. And they never "Vote to close as duplicate" because somebody asked something vaguely similar 10 years ago about a completely different platform and didn't get a good answer even then. Stack Overflow is the taxi industry to AI's Uber. We needed it at one point, but it really always sucked, and unsurprisingly some people took exception to that and built something better, or at least different.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
      > LLMs are good at indexing and digesting documentation, up to and including actual source code, and answering questions about it. Requires citations not in evidence. Source code and documentation rarely co-exist, and even the best source code is not even close to well-described by documentation of the software it is a part of. I basically call BS.
      - CamperBob2 1y ago
        Source code and documentation rarely co-exist They may not co-exist in real life, but in a million-dimension latent space you'd be surprised how many shortcuts you can find. Requires citations not in evidence. If you didn't bother to read the foundational papers on arxiv or other primary sources, it'd be a waste of time for me to hunt them down for you. Ask your friendly neighborhood LLM.
      - xd1936 1y ago
        OpenAI, through Microsoft + Github, has access to unfathomable amounts of source code training data and would be just fine without StackOverflow.
        PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
        SO provided the connection between natural language (primarily English) and source code. Access to source code alone doesn't do that, commented code nothwithstanding.
        CamperBob2 1y ago
        No, compsci textbooks and language manuals do that. SO is not the primary, canonical educational resource you seem to think it is, and they'd be the first to agree.
        ceejayoz 1y ago
        > No, compsci textbooks do that. No, they don't.
        CamperBob2 1y ago
        Sigh. Yes, you're right, programming textbooks do that. Now, where's my cilice...
        kazinator 1y ago
        By and large compsi text books are not sources of large amounts of working code in a specific language. Some programming-oriented ones may be; does Numerical Recipes in C count as a comp sci book?
  - taneq 1y ago
    It can’t have been trained on THAT much SO because it’s never told me my question is off topic or is a repeat of a different question. :P
    - extraduder_ire 1y ago
      Stack overflow is not for you and your question, it's for the person doing a google search with the same question months or years later. A machine that produces a large set of annotated FAQs.
      - taneq 1y ago
        I’ve never posted a question to S.O. My infuriation is entirely gratuitous. So many times I’ve found a polite, well worded question asking exactly what I need answered, only to see it closed as off topic (and we’re talking “question about preg_match() on the PHP stackexchange” type question) or for some condescending asshole to mark it as duplicate, linking a mostly unrelated and far simpler question with no further indication why this might be at all the proper response.
- xgulfie 1y ago
  You're absolutely correct!
ixxie 1y ago
The reading part is a few orders of magnitude more work now. I would say that is a change.

alecsm 1y ago

[flagged]

hekkle 1y ago
OMG YES, that site needed to die! I posted a few times on subjects I was an expert in, and hence they were difficult issues, and no one would ever answer them. The few other times I posted they were questions about things I wasn't an expert in, hence why I was asking, and my god, it was like I was pulling them away from their busy schedules and costing them time at work. It's like you don't have to answer if you have something better to do.
ceejayoz 1y ago
ChatGPT would be worthless without training material like SO.
- CamperBob2 1y ago
  Not really. LLMs are good at indexing and digesting documentation, up to and including actual source code, and answering questions about it. And they never "Vote to close as duplicate" because somebody asked something vaguely similar 10 years ago about a completely different platform and didn't get a good answer even then. Stack Overflow is the taxi industry to AI's Uber. We needed it at one point, but it really always sucked, and unsurprisingly some people took exception to that and built something better, or at least different.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
    > LLMs are good at indexing and digesting documentation, up to and including actual source code, and answering questions about it. Requires citations not in evidence. Source code and documentation rarely co-exist, and even the best source code is not even close to well-described by documentation of the software it is a part of. I basically call BS.
    - CamperBob2 1y ago
      Source code and documentation rarely co-exist They may not co-exist in real life, but in a million-dimension latent space you'd be surprised how many shortcuts you can find. Requires citations not in evidence. If you didn't bother to read the foundational papers on arxiv or other primary sources, it'd be a waste of time for me to hunt them down for you. Ask your friendly neighborhood LLM.
    - xd1936 1y ago
      OpenAI, through Microsoft + Github, has access to unfathomable amounts of source code training data and would be just fine without StackOverflow.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
        SO provided the connection between natural language (primarily English) and source code. Access to source code alone doesn't do that, commented code nothwithstanding.
        CamperBob2 1y ago
        No, compsci textbooks and language manuals do that. SO is not the primary, canonical educational resource you seem to think it is, and they'd be the first to agree.
        ceejayoz 1y ago
        > No, compsci textbooks do that. No, they don't.
        CamperBob2 1y ago
        Sigh. Yes, you're right, programming textbooks do that. Now, where's my cilice...
        kazinator 1y ago
        By and large compsi text books are not sources of large amounts of working code in a specific language. Some programming-oriented ones may be; does Numerical Recipes in C count as a comp sci book?
- taneq 1y ago
  It can’t have been trained on THAT much SO because it’s never told me my question is off topic or is a repeat of a different question. :P
  - extraduder_ire 1y ago
    Stack overflow is not for you and your question, it's for the person doing a google search with the same question months or years later. A machine that produces a large set of annotated FAQs.
    - taneq 1y ago
      I’ve never posted a question to S.O. My infuriation is entirely gratuitous. So many times I’ve found a polite, well worded question asking exactly what I need answered, only to see it closed as off topic (and we’re talking “question about preg_match() on the PHP stackexchange” type question) or for some condescending asshole to mark it as duplicate, linking a mostly unrelated and far simpler question with no further indication why this might be at all the proper response.
xgulfie 1y ago
You're absolutely correct!

ixxie 1y ago

The reading part is a few orders of magnitude more work now. I would say that is a change.