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ChatGPT would be worthless without training material like SO.
by ceejayoz 1y ago
ChatGPT would be worthless without training material like SO.
- CamperBob2 1y agoNot 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 agoSource 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 agoOpenAI, through Microsoft + Github, has access to unfathomable amounts of source code training data and would be just fine without StackOverflow.
- PaulDavisThe1st 1y agoSO 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 agoNo, 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 agoSigh. Yes, you're right, programming textbooks do that. Now, where's my cilice...
- kazinator 1y agoBy 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?
- CamperBob2 1y agoTrue, I was assuming that people would think a bit more abstractly, or at least a bit more generously, but sometimes I forget where I am. By "compsci" I mean everything from graduate-level theoretical texts all the way down to "101 BASIC Programs for the TRS-80." In the old days, magazine articles would also present practical code alongside plaintext explanations of how it worked. There's still no shortage of tutorial content, although not as much in paper form, and even less on Stack Overflow.
- taneq 1y agoIt 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 agoStack 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 agoI’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.