There's something here that I can't put my finger on. Sites like ServerFault (and the rest of the trilogy in tfa) were places where people like the author literally, and pretty silently dramatically improved my life. I owe such a great debt to what looks like the end of the end for these places. A sad moment where the machines just sliced everything up and took over.
> I'm not questioning if AI delivers, it does, and you need - cannot say it more politely - a reality check if you think it's completely useless.
Why fret. The doubters will be washed away by the flood anyway. I’m completely serious. Either if or when, it’s not like anyone can stay a doubter on a computer if (if or when) everything is transformed.
I can never understand these faith rituals. First declare that you are a believer. Then declare that the doubters are delusional. Politely.
But delusion is a reality-correcting problem, except for the clinically ill.
I don't agree with your interpretation how it has been, but I wouldn't really want to argue about it as it'd not be that meaningful IMHO. After all, it'd be your observation vs mine.
I just want to point out one thing: If it were all about the results, AI also makes the results worth less.
half my working knowledge came from forum threads exactly like these. weird era to watch the whole thing get strip-mined for training data while the places themselves rot.
You guys tbh are just infuriating. StackOverflow and ServerFault in particular are CC BY-SA. I contributed to a lot of websites which are currently switching from public access to login required. I did it under the assumption that anyone will be able to read it. Thank god Stack Exchange and HN so far are not showing petty resentment.
You are absolutely right. These contributions were given willingly under a very permissive license. That is on the contributors.
It might not have been that apropos to roll out in this context, but the point goes for all LLM vacuuming.
PS: Although those contributors might have been willing to let anyone, corporation or person, manually use their submissions, they might have felt differently about remix machines.
It “““manually””” uses a submission by working with data and information like the Old World did, before our wonder machines made copying and plagiarizing (in the non-consentual case) into a factory. One might consent to how things work in a world with certain preconditions but not when those preconditions change.
“Remix”: you can make any analogies you like. Huh, people are non-deterministic because you don’t know their brainstate. You can go nuts with that kind of misanthropic sophistry for all I care.
Of course I don’t blame a computer program for anything.
Yes, it's like a lot of other content that no one will bother to maintain anymore because it is easier to ask an LLM. Not sure where they are planning to get their new training data from ...
Average user input quality is not optimal by definition. SO's upvote system and reputation system is what really refined quality. Much like Reddit's system is helping a lot for conversation. Much like academia's publish and citation system is an even better system.
I'm not saying LLM won't be able to train further, but tough and sound reviews are paramount to improving the corpus of quality content. And with the replacement of SO by LLMs, one can wonder if one quality system went down the drain. Anyway there's still code reviews on GitHub and in private repos, but we're still far from getting the human judgement out of the loop.
I do expect there will be more closed knowledge forums. Unfortunately one person exposing it to LLM provider will be enough to break the whole idea. But I believe there will be many that will keep secrets for some in group.
"Average user input quality is not optimal by definition."
Absolutely.
"SO's upvote system and reputation system is what really refined quality."
Absolutely not!
SO's problem was exactly that they gave average users moderating power. That lead to half of the questions closed because they were over the head of the average user regardless of being interesting useful questions or not.
People do still talk about programming online, just not on Stackoverflow.
I think since AI finally provided a non-adversarial alternative to Stackoverflow it lost the critical mass to be a one stop shop for all tools/languages/projects. So people just reverted to communication forums specific to those tools/languages/projects.
There are plenty of project mailing lists, GitHub issues, language forums, blog posts etc. that are still active. E.g. just the Rust users forum gets more than 2-3 posts per day.
The aggressive moderation on StackOverflow was so annoying. I still remember multiple times where I found a question about my exact issue, but it had been closed as a duplicate, and the "duplicate" was basically irrelevant.
And plenty of times I had an answer to a question but couldn't because I didn't have enough 'karma'. Sorry I'm not going to waste my time gaming the system to answer a question and be helpful.
The AI "understood" the concepts enough. It can generate readable code in new syntax like Typst, D2lang etc; refer 80 page documentation scattered across urls (looking at you AWS); clone tools from Github to find undocumented features.
It was great while it was good. The demise wasn’t quality as such, but rather the insane moderation - closing everything as duplicates or out of scope etc.
What happens when intelligent entities are working is that the entity posting the question itself starts with a working answer, although not an optimal answer. Over time, other entities provide more optimal answers.
The stackexchange sites are too fragmented into too many narrow topics for the traffic. They should consider merging.
E.g. Network Engineering and Server Fault could easily be one thing. Just ignore the questions you're not into about problems with switches, if application services are more your thing. Throw in Super User also: "TechExchange".
I guess that's a problem with content provided by karma farmers. When they decide to farm something else (gith7b stars now?) the flow stops. I think there also might be a tendancy for the culture to chase away people providing information purely so that others have access to it.
While the use of Chatbots has diminished the utility of using the service as a direct interface, the information that Chatbots provide sourced some of that from here. There is possibly now a need for a new type repository of queries and answers in a different form. Perhaps people can have a skill on their Chatbots that gets them to post solutions into a wiki for issues that people have actually had that were solved by lengthy investigation.
I was happily active on the SE network, in several sites, for 15 or so years. Without any special efforts I accumulated some 500k internet points. Cool.
And then something changed. Ego trips. Questions immediately downvoted. An extremely, psychotic Meta site.
I get it that plenty of questions are low quality. But for fuck's sake - why not just having a second look at high rep questions, which are more likely to be well rounded ? This is how you lose your more enthusiastic members.
Within SO some groups were great and others (Go, I am looking at you) were elitist cliques.
And then there are the niche sites: cooking, LaTeX, ... Welcoming, happy questions and relevant answers. These are the ones I will miss a lot.
I contributed heavily to that site and spent the meat of my IT career posting about my gained experience. It helped me get jobs, and opened all sorts of consulting opportunities. I used to proudly point at that body of work because Stack Exchange and ServerFault were universally known in the industry.
It is wild knowing the LLMs were trained on these contributions. And today, I encounter IT professionals who confidently say, "I've never used anything from that site"
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 22.5 ms ] threadAnd: nice domain name.
I'm not questioning if AI delivers, it does, and you need - cannot say it more politely - a reality check if you think it's completely useless.
It's just that we are social creatures and those communities provided more than just technical answers to many.
Why fret. The doubters will be washed away by the flood anyway. I’m completely serious. Either if or when, it’s not like anyone can stay a doubter on a computer if (if or when) everything is transformed.
I can never understand these faith rituals. First declare that you are a believer. Then declare that the doubters are delusional. Politely.
But delusion is a reality-correcting problem, except for the clinically ill.
I just want to point out one thing: If it were all about the results, AI also makes the results worth less.
One rule for me, another for thee.
It might not have been that apropos to roll out in this context, but the point goes for all LLM vacuuming.
PS: Although those contributors might have been willing to let anyone, corporation or person, manually use their submissions, they might have felt differently about remix machines.
“Remix”: you can make any analogies you like. Huh, people are non-deterministic because you don’t know their brainstate. You can go nuts with that kind of misanthropic sophistry for all I care.
Of course I don’t blame a computer program for anything.
I'm not saying LLM won't be able to train further, but tough and sound reviews are paramount to improving the corpus of quality content. And with the replacement of SO by LLMs, one can wonder if one quality system went down the drain. Anyway there's still code reviews on GitHub and in private repos, but we're still far from getting the human judgement out of the loop.
Absolutely.
"SO's upvote system and reputation system is what really refined quality."
Absolutely not!
SO's problem was exactly that they gave average users moderating power. That lead to half of the questions closed because they were over the head of the average user regardless of being interesting useful questions or not.
I think since AI finally provided a non-adversarial alternative to Stackoverflow it lost the critical mass to be a one stop shop for all tools/languages/projects. So people just reverted to communication forums specific to those tools/languages/projects.
There are plenty of project mailing lists, GitHub issues, language forums, blog posts etc. that are still active. E.g. just the Rust users forum gets more than 2-3 posts per day.
Passive aggressive commenting and deleting questions because it looked remotely similar to another one was enough for me.
I was there for learning and sharing, not for the proverbial fighting cage.
I can spend 5 minutes more and use a search engine, and then take my own notes and keep them to myself. Thanks.
I think stackoverflow will evolve into something else. LLMs have added another layer of abstraction on high level programming languages
E.g. Network Engineering and Server Fault could easily be one thing. Just ignore the questions you're not into about problems with switches, if application services are more your thing. Throw in Super User also: "TechExchange".
While the use of Chatbots has diminished the utility of using the service as a direct interface, the information that Chatbots provide sourced some of that from here. There is possibly now a need for a new type repository of queries and answers in a different form. Perhaps people can have a skill on their Chatbots that gets them to post solutions into a wiki for issues that people have actually had that were solved by lengthy investigation.
And then something changed. Ego trips. Questions immediately downvoted. An extremely, psychotic Meta site.
I get it that plenty of questions are low quality. But for fuck's sake - why not just having a second look at high rep questions, which are more likely to be well rounded ? This is how you lose your more enthusiastic members.
Within SO some groups were great and others (Go, I am looking at you) were elitist cliques.
And then there are the niche sites: cooking, LaTeX, ... Welcoming, happy questions and relevant answers. These are the ones I will miss a lot.
I contributed heavily to that site and spent the meat of my IT career posting about my gained experience. It helped me get jobs, and opened all sorts of consulting opportunities. I used to proudly point at that body of work because Stack Exchange and ServerFault were universally known in the industry.
It is wild knowing the LLMs were trained on these contributions. And today, I encounter IT professionals who confidently say, "I've never used anything from that site"
I would've been active but I can't because of the karma rules.