Why you should know: StackOverflow is facing a mod strike in a similar way as Reddit’s mod strike. They are doing this in response to StackOverflow’s failure to address it’s promises and provide moderation tools
Unlike Reddit, Stack Overflow would probably be better without moderators.
In fact, you could easily replace Stack Overflow mods with a script that goes into every new question, comments “USE THE FUCKING SEARCH BAR” and locks the thread.
Replace them with a script that goes into every comment and put “duplicate of existing post”.
Even if there is no existing post.
Or there is but it was ages ago, had no decent answers and all information in it has become outdated.
I don’t think so: Stack Overflow requires much more moderation for the comments and answers to actually stay on topic and be somewhat professional. Especially the “don’t just link somewhere, explain the thing” rule might require a lot of moderation.
Moderation will probably be done by AI in the future. It’s probably just a bit too expensive still.
Why is this being downvoted? This dystopian nightmare future is very likely going to happen.
People on stack overflow explain things?
Duplicated, here’s a link to a totally unrelated question made 10 years ago that didn’t got any answer anyway.
OMG these responses drive me bananas. I’m searching for a code solution and I keep landing on “Duplicated” dead ends with dead end links posted as the solution. Why do they leave it just sitting there?? WHY???
The answer is to use jQuery. Always jQuery.
Thankfully SO is better than Reddit: the frontend is actually decent and even though they’re pausing data dumps, everything posted is technically CC-SA
Thank you for posting this. I had no idea this was going on. What are companies thinking when they implement policies that hamper volunteers? You’d think they’d want to engage, and keep happy, these people that give their time.
Companies don’t even care beyond bare minimum for the labor that they pay why would they care about the labor they don’t lol
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Damn, nowhere to find coding help anymore I guess
github isssues.
Once you have a basic level of coding your problem is with a certain package/library
Stack overflow has mods?
Closed: This question has already been answered 5 years ago here <link to completely unrelated question>
Unpopular opinion: for a beginner, ChatGPT gives way better answers than stackoverflow users. The advantage of ChatGPT is that I can command it to dumb it down. Stackoverflow users are used to answer in a language that resembles the language in documentations. They are dry, abstract, lack good examples to the point that the “foobar” shit triggers an immediate defensive reaction in my brain and are phrased for people who already understood a concept but need to refresh their knowledge. Their core problem, as is tradition in any IT field, is that they lack the empathy to understand the viewpoint of someone who understands less of something than they do. It’s like asking someone to teach you reading and getting a poem with the advice to just read it as an answer.
I can circumvent that via ChatGPT by asking it to ELI5. Also, I get an answer instantly, am not discouraged to ask further questions and not advised to read a link where a solution is offered in an equally difficult language.
People are saying that using ChatGPT doesn’t give accurate information and fails to convey important concepts, but I feel it’s actually the other way around. Since there is ChatGPT, I’m making way more progress than before.
I understand that users don’t want AI answers, but I also don’t get why anyone would want that on this platform. You can just, you know, use AI directly.
I’m using Bing AI, but that itself uses ChatGPT. The answers are well written, but I feel like it’s important to keep in mind that language models, by design, lie often and do it in an extremely plausible way. Use AI all you want, but never rely on its answer without proper fact-checking.
I think that one issue with using AI to help you solve programming problems is that sometimes it will wholesale make things up. Of course, people can do that too, which is why communities of coders can vote on the best answer. I say, more power to you, using the tools that work for you. Just be cautious.
ChatGPT is incredible for middle ground developers like myself. I understand the goal I’m trying to achieve, and I understand the general process of how to do it. I can ask very granular, specific questions to ChatGPT and it will spit out some code that will get me close to what I need.
If I was a complete novice, I think ChatGPT would make me too dependent on using it for answers.
That seems like a totally valid use case. I occasionally will outline some very specific requirements and have AI generate the code, which just saves a lot of time typing, versus it generating it entirely on its own. And I still go through all the code and verify that it’s good. It’s just a tool that can be used to make your job easier.
Totally. The other day I had to test a csv/xls upload tool. I wanted to make sure that no matter what configuration an asshole user had for phone numbers, it would strip everything out so it would be a valid integer for my database.
I told chatgpt to make me a csv with 20 rows, 6 columns with xyz headers, and to give me an assortment of different phone number formats. Took 10 seconds.
I’ve yet to get a useful answer out of chatgpt for a technical question. It’s good for fluffing up emails, but I haven’t been super impressed with any use case I’ve tried for it.
When I’ve used it for decently complex programming questions I’ve found it often likes to make up functions and libraries. It’ll be like just use this reasonable sounding function from this library, and I look it up and the library does not have that functionality at all. Over and over!
Well it’s a large language model that generates text probabilistically. It’s trained on vast amounts of data, so it’s expert at sounding like a skilled programmer, but there’s absolutely no reason at all for the results to be useful code. It will sound like useful code and look like useful code, and it will be on the right topic, and that might well be enough, but it might not.
I want to strike. Anybody want to strike with me?
You can go march in solidarity with anyone who might be striking in your region! You don’t have to be an employee to join the picket line. I went and picketed with some of my fellow nurses in Massachusetts a couple years ago even though I wasn’t personally on strike.
I hate the libertarian implications of the “join or die” snake, but I feel like this strikes my current sentiment:
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxlVDdu1Isl_H_QchRuNGe1MaX0nS_DUXk
