3 ms·

Man I miss stack overflow. It feels so much better to ask humans a question then the machine, but it feels impossible to put the lid back on the box.

numbers 8mo ago
and no ai fluff to start or end the answer, just facts straight to the point.
globular-toast 8mo ago
It is possible. Many people choose a healthy lifestyle instead of becoming morbidly obese and incapable which is easy to do in our society.
rkachowski 8mo ago
It's really jarring to see this wave of nostalgia for "the good old days" appear since ~2025. Suddenly these rose tinted glasses have dropped and everything before LLM usage became ubiquitous was a beautiful romantic era of human collaboration, understanding and craftsmanship. I still acutely remember the gatekeeping and hostility of peak stack overflow, and the inanity of churning out jira tickets as fast as possible for misguided product initiatives. It's just wild yo
- LatencyKills 8mo ago
  MSGA: Make Software Great Again? /s
- mrpopo 8mo ago
  Probably people complaining about AI today were fine with Stack Overflow before and didn't have anything to complain about back then. I also had a better experience with Stack Overflow over AI. It's been unable to tell me that I couldn't assign a new value to my std::optional in my specific case, and kept hallucinating copy constructor rules. A Stack Overflow question matching my problem cleared that up for me. Sometimes you need someone to tell you no.
  - ruszki 8mo ago
    Or, like me, the kind of questions in which I’m interested are answered in a way worse rate by LLMs than StackOverflow, like ever. I have and had problems with StackOverflow. But LLMs are nowhere near that, and unfortunately, as we can see, StackOverflow is basically dead, and that’s very problematic with kinda new things, like Android compose. There was exactly zero time when for example Opus could answer the best options for the first time, like a simple one, like I want a zero WindowInset object… it gives an answer for sure, and completely ignores the simplest one. And that happens all the time. I’m not saying that StackOverflow was good regarding this, but it was better for sure.
  - skydhash 8mo ago
    I don’t think I’ve ever ask a question on Stack Overflow, but I’ve consulted it several time. Even when I’ve not found my exact use case, there’s always something similar or related that gave me the right direction for research (a book or an article reference, the name of a concept to use as keyword,…) It’s kinda the same feeling when browsing the faq of a project. It gives you a more complete sense of the domain boundaries. I still prefer to refer to book or SO instead of asking the AI. Coherency and purposefulness matter more to me then a direct answer that may be wrong.
  - rkachowski 8mo ago
    > A Stack Overflow question matching my problem cleared that up for me. Perhaps if there was no question already available you'd have had a different experience. Getting clearly written and specific questions promptly closed as duplicates of related, yet distinct issues, was part of the fun. I find that AI hallucinates in the same way that someone can be very confident and wrong at the same time, with the difference that the feedback is almost instant and there are no difficult personalities to deal with.
    - mrpopo 8mo ago
      > someone can be very confident and wrong at the same time And sometimes that someone can be you, and AI is notoriously bad at telling you that you're wrong (because it has to please people)
- tdb7893 7mo ago
  I think most people found StackOverflow to be pretty easy and useful since it's a pretty small minority of people that ever asked questions on it so many people didn't interact at all with the more annoying parts.
jamesnorden 8mo ago
Perhaps you mean searching for your question first, before asking. :)
webdevver 8mo ago
> It feels so much better to ask humans a question then the machine I could not disagree more! With pesky humans, you have all sorts of things to worry about: - is my question stupid? will they think badly of me if i ask it? - what if they dont know the answer? did i just inadvertantly make them look stupid? - the question i have is related to their current work... i hope they dont see me as a threat! and on and on. asking questions in such a manner as to elicit the answer, without negative externalities, is quite the art form as i'm sure many stack overflow users will tell you. many word orderings trigger a 'latent space' which activates the "umm, why are you even doing this?" with the implication begin "you really are stupid!", totally useless to the question-asker and a much more frustrating time-waster than even the most moralizing LLM. with LLMs, you don't have to play these 'token games'. you throw your query at it, and irrespective of the word order, word choice, or the nture of the question - it gives you a perfectly neutral response, or at worst politely refuses to answer.
- skydhash 8mo ago
  That’s a level of paranoia that I can’t really understand. I just do my research, then for information I can’t access, don’t know how to access, or can’t comprehend, I reach out. People have the right to not want to share information. If it’s in a work setting and the situation is blocking, I notify my supervisor. > many word orderings trigger a 'latent space' which activates the "umm, why are you even doing this?" with the implication begin "you really are stupid!" You may have heard of the XY situation when people asks a Y question only because they have an incorrect answer to X. A question has a goal (unless rethorical) and to the person being asked, it may be confusing. You may have a valid reason to go against common sense, but if the other person is not your tutor or a fellow researcher, he may not be willing to accommodate you and spend his time for a goal he have no context about. Remember the car wash question for LLMs? Some phrasing have the pattern of a trick question and that’s another thing people watch out for.

numbers 8mo ago

and no ai fluff to start or end the answer, just facts straight to the point.

globular-toast 8mo ago

It is possible. Many people choose a healthy lifestyle instead of becoming morbidly obese and incapable which is easy to do in our society.

rkachowski 8mo ago

It's really jarring to see this wave of nostalgia for "the good old days" appear since ~2025. Suddenly these rose tinted glasses have dropped and everything before LLM usage became ubiquitous was a beautiful romantic era of human collaboration, understanding and craftsmanship. I still acutely remember the gatekeeping and hostility of peak stack overflow, and the inanity of churning out jira tickets as fast as possible for misguided product initiatives. It's just wild yo

LatencyKills 8mo ago
MSGA: Make Software Great Again? /s
mrpopo 8mo ago
Probably people complaining about AI today were fine with Stack Overflow before and didn't have anything to complain about back then. I also had a better experience with Stack Overflow over AI. It's been unable to tell me that I couldn't assign a new value to my std::optional in my specific case, and kept hallucinating copy constructor rules. A Stack Overflow question matching my problem cleared that up for me. Sometimes you need someone to tell you no.
- ruszki 8mo ago
  Or, like me, the kind of questions in which I’m interested are answered in a way worse rate by LLMs than StackOverflow, like ever. I have and had problems with StackOverflow. But LLMs are nowhere near that, and unfortunately, as we can see, StackOverflow is basically dead, and that’s very problematic with kinda new things, like Android compose. There was exactly zero time when for example Opus could answer the best options for the first time, like a simple one, like I want a zero WindowInset object… it gives an answer for sure, and completely ignores the simplest one. And that happens all the time. I’m not saying that StackOverflow was good regarding this, but it was better for sure.
- skydhash 8mo ago
  I don’t think I’ve ever ask a question on Stack Overflow, but I’ve consulted it several time. Even when I’ve not found my exact use case, there’s always something similar or related that gave me the right direction for research (a book or an article reference, the name of a concept to use as keyword,…) It’s kinda the same feeling when browsing the faq of a project. It gives you a more complete sense of the domain boundaries. I still prefer to refer to book or SO instead of asking the AI. Coherency and purposefulness matter more to me then a direct answer that may be wrong.
- rkachowski 8mo ago
  > A Stack Overflow question matching my problem cleared that up for me. Perhaps if there was no question already available you'd have had a different experience. Getting clearly written and specific questions promptly closed as duplicates of related, yet distinct issues, was part of the fun. I find that AI hallucinates in the same way that someone can be very confident and wrong at the same time, with the difference that the feedback is almost instant and there are no difficult personalities to deal with.
  - mrpopo 8mo ago
    > someone can be very confident and wrong at the same time And sometimes that someone can be you, and AI is notoriously bad at telling you that you're wrong (because it has to please people)
tdb7893 7mo ago
I think most people found StackOverflow to be pretty easy and useful since it's a pretty small minority of people that ever asked questions on it so many people didn't interact at all with the more annoying parts.

jamesnorden 8mo ago

Perhaps you mean searching for your question first, before asking. :)

webdevver 8mo ago

> It feels so much better to ask humans a question then the machine I could not disagree more! With pesky humans, you have all sorts of things to worry about: - is my question stupid? will they think badly of me if i ask it? - what if they dont know the answer? did i just inadvertantly make them look stupid? - the question i have is related to their current work... i hope they dont see me as a threat! and on and on. asking questions in such a manner as to elicit the answer, without negative externalities, is quite the art form as i'm sure many stack overflow users will tell you. many word orderings trigger a 'latent space' which activates the "umm, why are you even doing this?" with the implication begin "you really are stupid!", totally useless to the question-asker and a much more frustrating time-waster than even the most moralizing LLM. with LLMs, you don't have to play these 'token games'. you throw your query at it, and irrespective of the word order, word choice, or the nture of the question - it gives you a perfectly neutral response, or at worst politely refuses to answer.

skydhash 8mo ago
That’s a level of paranoia that I can’t really understand. I just do my research, then for information I can’t access, don’t know how to access, or can’t comprehend, I reach out. People have the right to not want to share information. If it’s in a work setting and the situation is blocking, I notify my supervisor. > many word orderings trigger a 'latent space' which activates the "umm, why are you even doing this?" with the implication begin "you really are stupid!" You may have heard of the XY situation when people asks a Y question only because they have an incorrect answer to X. A question has a goal (unless rethorical) and to the person being asked, it may be confusing. You may have a valid reason to go against common sense, but if the other person is not your tutor or a fellow researcher, he may not be willing to accommodate you and spend his time for a goal he have no context about. Remember the car wash question for LLMs? Some phrasing have the pattern of a trick question and that’s another thing people watch out for.