It also sharpened your writing and thinking. By responding to questions you solidified your understanding of topics.
It got a lot of hate for the moderation but I think that was mainly in huge communities where literally “dumb” questions got bombarded every minute. Smaller tech like Docker when it first arrived on the scene had communities that learned together.
Spent a lot of time there when I was a few years out of school and still trying to figure out what it meant to be a software eng. It’s sad to see it become a ghost town and I think it’s a net negative for young engineers to have an all knowing entity spit out every answer.
AI does not have as good knowledge of the OS as frequent forum contributors. I'm sure plenty of people get by with AI help for their questions and there's likely little questions that hasn't been already discussed, but I love to see new people using the OS and it doesn't take long to give them an exact answer. The Flarum software that the forum runs is very fast, as well.
I realize that everything seems to be about increasing the pace of life, but this is another "chance" for humanity to figure things out.
Capitalism is optimized to produce products and services people want to buy which drives people wanting to work more hours. Which then drives up the costs of things that aren’t replicated endlessly like land and goods that are intentionally left scarce such as admission to elite institutions.
You can work dramatically less and still live well, but the sirens call is very seductive. Even our medical system is optimized to extract value instead of optimizing care. Food, clothes, transportation, housing, etc all offer real value at minimal cost and little pushing you in that direction.
Less/fewer is probably a lost cause, and a little bit of why is this kind of useless correction. If those who correct can’t or won’t explain why one is correct over the other, then it simply isn’t.
> If those who correct can’t or won’t explain why one is correct over the other, then it simply isn’t.
I will try to remember this and also execute it with kindness and trivia, like you suggest, in the future.
Thank you.
The assumption here is that, people as a crowd, have some discretion, will, thouhht, intention, agentic control and act to change something.
Mostly they don't. Especially on the matters that don't affect their survival drastically.Things might be going down-hill, but if is a slide with mild ramp, no one even notices it. They might even enjoy the ride and going-down is normalized.
Just like Romans might have done when the Rome declined over a prolonged period. No one noticed it.
People are just subjects without own descretion on all matters that are not survival related. They go with crowd. Theat's precisely why we have billionaires owning people's communities.
Deleted my account after a while and never looked back. Also toxic community in general.
So glad now I can just spar with AI to troubleshoot stuff.
Meanwhile, the rest of us still have work to do and can't spend all day arguing with strangers on the internet. Not all even speak English at all.
My app tries to help people read the Bible more.
I’m asking myself.. What constitutes better? And is it worth pursuing?
Is better always better?
Not that I find them all that useful, still.
Such a massive theft of labor will have negative consequences that we all have to live with.
I've noticed that in "programming" forums, questions have devolved.
In the "before times", you'd get a mix of simple-medium-hard-extreme questions.
Google and StackOverflow made most of the medium and hard questions disappear.
Now with LLMs, all the higher difficulty levels except "beyond extreme" have vanished, leaving only the stupidly difficult questions that nobody can answer -- and hence doesn't contribute to collective knowledge, including the AI's knowledge.
Conversely, there is a new level of "below simple" questions by people that I dare say are too stupid to even attempt to become software developers. The type of questions that can could always have been answered with just Google, and are "beneath" both AIs and humans. These are worthless questions along the lines of "my computer not work, plz halp!?" followed by "I can't reboot it!" as if that makes any sense.
Again, that contributes nothing of value to the zeitgeist.
Worse, because the effort required to spin up a blog is trivial now thanks to AI and people are getting desperate for work, I'm seeing a mountain of "slop coding blogs" that are either 100% low-cost-AI output full of errors, or organic human-origin slop... full of errors. No longer are blogs written by the "best of the best" to disseminate their hard earned knowledge, they're now an alternative to a resume and produced in bulk by the most junior developers hoping to land a job through "exposure".
This also massively dilutes the last remaining source of good public information to draw. Google searches are useless now because finds nothing but endless SEO garbage.
What's going to happen in 5 or 10 years from now, when all of the pre-AI knowledge[1] is stale and out of date, making it irrelevant, but there's no new knowledge being publicly produced to train on?
Will programming languages, tools, and frameworks ossify because new languages are "post-AI" and hence untrainable due to a lack of StackOverflow questions and answers?
Will AI labs build their own private "AI members only" version of StackOverflow, building up their internal knowledgebases for training, sharing this with nobody else?
Will humans be paid to solve problems for the sole purpose of generating AI training materials? Is this the future of knowledge work!?
You can't steal something that's infinitely duplicatable. Also, AI training is fair use, not that I believe it should have to be.
There are many ways to steal labor, violating copyright is one such way, but not all copyright violations is labor theft, nor does labor theft require copyright to be violated.
Quick, remove this from HN before the investors see it!
Seriously though, there's so many posts "about AI" that amount to "is AI going to ruin humanity?" and I find it so tiresome. It's just a tool, people. Tools don't stop people from being people. If anything the problem is it makes people more peopley. The telephone didn't end in-person socialization, and neither did books, television, VHS, video games, the internet, etc. These are technologies that, despite allowing you to distance yourself from people and get information without talking to a person, actually brought people together more. Six million years of evolution doesn't go away because you made a robot. There will still be communities. People are still gonna people.
What we should be doing is not focusing so much on the technology, and focus more on how we are constantly being manipulated by the rich and corporations, so that our socialization is to their benefit and our detriment.
> You know who did help me? Random strangers on Stack Overflow. People who had nothing to gain from helping me other than just trying to help someone in need.
This part makes the entire post sound like a parody. Maybe Jeff Atwood has a wicked, self-deprecating sense of humor?
Yeah no, ask for help on Stack Overflow and you were were more likely to be met with castigation and snide remarks. It was such a breath of fresh air when ChatGPT let us not have to deal with that community anymore.
What marked it out originally (and was visible in some other less-travelled StackExchange sites rather later) was a culture of holding replies to a sort of account in the reply comments; people urging each other to make their replies better-sourced, less hollow, more responsive.
The goal of being non-duplicative alas ultimately is always going to lead to a culture that polices itself too hard. I am an LLM cynic but I think it’s possible that LLMs could actually help steer that process more gently, guiding submitters to likely answers but also helping them fine-tune a more specific, narrow, never-asked question.