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Yes, but they’re not the ones producing all of the content. Again, that’s produced by volunteers.

Yeah, that’s a fair point. After I posted my previous comment, I realized it probably wouldn’t work since the entire point of SO was to create canonical answers to canonical questions. But how do you decide what “instance” gets to have the canonical answer to a given question? Having a central authority host everything makes it a heck of a lot easier.

I think a big problem was how new users had to unlock things like the ability to comment. Probably a lot of new users really should have added comments to previous questions to clarify things, but instead the site tells them to create a new question first to get reputation points. So they do, but what they want isn’t really a unique question, just clarification on a previous question.

Once you get enough reputation to be “in,” suddenly the whole site opens up and you can do everything you need to. But a new user has to get to that point, and that is daunting if they’re new to programming.

I also think that SO selling their data for training AI really rubbed a lot of old timers the wrong way too. If they had not given in to that, I wonder if the decline would have been nearly as sharp. There were users active there daily, finding questions to answer and evaluating others answers. Now there really aren’t.

This is their fault. I blame them for it. And I celebrate their downfall because they were shitty humans.

Who is the “they” in this? The volunteers who contributed to the site? StackOverflow isn’t like a company or anything. No one is paid to answer questions there. They’re all people who were working hard to make a collection of common questions with the best possible answers, and trying to uphold a certain standard for the content there.

Based on your comment, I think maybe we as a group just don’t deserve stackoverflow. If we really are all now turning to LLMs instead (which are not in any way “decentralized”) to get a bunch of statistical bullshit spit at us instead of, you know, the actual right answer, then maybe we deserve what will happen next.

I guess the main issue here is that we let some group “own” all of the questions and answers, giving them the opportunity to sell it whenever they wanted to cash out.

Maybe a better solution is some kind of decentralized version of StackOverflow that prevents one person from owning everything. Something like Lemmy and Mastodon, but for questions and answers specifically.

A lot of people seem to be celebrating this, but I personally think this is a net negative for programming. Are people actually replacing SO with talking to LLMs? If not, where are they going?

I’ve seen an uptick in people using places like discord to get help. But that’s not easily searchable and not in the same format that it is in stackoverflow. SO was meant to organize these answers to make asking questions easier. Now it seems like we’re walking away from that, and I can’t quite understand why. Is it really because SO is “toxic”?

It would be slower to read the value if you had to also do bitwise operations to get the value.

But you can also define your own bitfield types to store booleans packed together if you really need to. I would much rather that than have the compiler do it automatically for me.

Know a guy who tried to use AI to vibe code a simple web server. He wasn’t a programmer and kept insisting to me that programmers were done for.

After weeks of trying to get the thing to work, he had nothing. He showed me the code, and it was the worst I’ve ever seen. Dozens of empty files where the AI had apparently added and then deleted the same code. Also some utter garbage code. Tons of functions copied and pasted instead of being defined once.

I then showed him a web app I had made in that same amount of time. It worked perfectly. Never heard anything more about AI from him.

“no, having a meeting about it won’t help, it will just waste my time that I could be using to figure out the problem.”

This describes literally every python contract job I’ve ever had.

I’ve never heard of any badger song.

This comment is completely irrational. The fahrenheit temperature is in a screenshot of a text message that was sent in the US. The only temperature in the message you replied to that isn’t in the screenshot is in Celsius. How is that “American exceptionalism”?

lmao what book is this?

Looks like the kidnapper also stole the null terminator for this string!

Any context on him “trashing his reputation”?

Most new books I find are books I check out from my local library. While the library did pay for a copy, so it’s not quite the same, as a reader I didn’t pay anything for it. The barrier to trying the new book is very small, and if I don’t like it I haven’t lost anything.

Readers finding your book online for free are having the same experience. Maybe not everyone who reads it will want to buy copies, but some will. Just like how some who find your book in a library would want to buy their own copy.

It’s like saying someone stole your bike and you don’t want to be immoral by stealing it back.

Honestly, you ever tried to look back through a long thread on Discord? It’s impossible. If you want to read the original message that started the thread, good luck, you’ll be scrolling all day and may never get there. How anyone can claim that’s “easy to use” is beyond me.

Discord works for quick discussions happening right now, and that’s it.

Don’t forget to upload them all to crates.io. Add them to the list of useless crates that no one will ever use.