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
Instead of hoping that the corporation will change, they should just move to the fediverse.
Me: Good for them, that’s great hope they get want they want.
Me, to myself, in bed at night: Oh god how will I code
At least we have readily available AI tools to help
Fun fact: the stack exchange for research mathematics, MathOverflow, is a separate 501©(3) nonprofit which at any time can pack up their stuff and migrate, including their domain name and all of their data, per the agreement they made when they joined the stack exchange network in 2013, originally operating the site themselves since 2009.
https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/969/who-owns-mathoverflow/970#970
While the MathOverflow site is operated by Stack Exchange, Inc., the domain and the MathOverflow name are owned by the MathOverflow corporation. The MathOverflow corporation is completely independent from Stack Exchange and its mission is to ensure the continued operation of the site in a manner that meets the needs and expectations of the community.
Subject to Section 8, should MathOverflow wish to migrate its data outside of the Stack Exchange network, Stack Exchange shall, within thirty (30) days of receipt of a written request from MathOverflow, provide MathOverflow with a complete and current database that contains all the data necessary to recreate MathOverflow on MathOverflow’s own servers and software. Following such transfer, Stack Exchange will cease all use of the MathOverflow database.
If they don’t like how the site is being run, they can leave. Food for thought. If all communities on the internet were so careful and prescient to plan an exit strategy in advance, to make clear that you just operate our site and we can leave for a competitor, we’d not be in this mess.
If all communities on the internet were so careful and prescient to plan an exit strategy in advance, to make clear that you just operate our site and we can leave for a competitor, we’d not be in this mess.
That’s why God invented the GPL.
If only /r/AskHistorians were this prescient.
Stack overflow has mods?
Found that out today too
Closed: This question has already been answered 5 years ago here <link to completely unrelated question>
Better yet: “this question has been answered here <link to old question, answer does not work/doesnt apply or work anymore>”
I want to strike. Anybody want to strike with me?
Hell yeah, a few people are on board! First things first: why are we striking?
A Lucky Strike?
Check out Codidact for a community run alternative!
Fuuuuuuuuuuck. Welp. That’s it. The internet is closed for business. Thanks for stopping by
I never got any help asking questions there anyways. Answers I got back we’re trollish. When I provide and answer it can’t be the answer as it’s based on your own reputation score which you can’t get but answering questions. It seems like a flawed system. Didn’t know they had mods either. Never really got any solutions either from stack overflow, unless you read every comment for the right answer.
If even the elitist programmers at stack overflow that know everything and discourage questions like it is some sort of question and answers site can be effected by companies taking from the communities, it can happen to anyone.
Is there a FOSS alternative to stackexchange yet?
Following
Seems like Lemmy has a starring functionality.
All open source forum software pretty much
Yeah, before StackOverflow took over everything my web searches for programming problems would usually lead to forum threads. The quality of information would usually be better there, too.
To be fair, did anyone ever actually like Stack?
I liked it the hundreds of times it was an accurate first hit for my Google queries
So…was the strike because they put a 100-strike limit on moderators marking normal questions as Duplicate/Opinionated/Unclear? Or, because all of the normal users left and it’s just spam trolls left behind?
Ahhh, it’s because of divisions of opinion on AI. No doubt, it’d be easy to tell ChatGPT “ChatGPT, can you come up with excuses to lock all the questions on the front page so my query about Scala stays up top?”
I’m constantly baffled by my coding professor suggesting stackoverflow to students for asking questions because of the experience I am seeing others have there. The new ones are always downvoted and the only reply usually just calls the person stupid. I’d just kinda accepted that this was the culture I was going to matriculate into when I graduate.
I once handed in a citation from an answer to my Stack Overflow question.
Something along the lines of… “After hitting a roadblock the community at Stack Overflow was consulted, as suggested in the lecture, and deemed the task not feasible [1].”
The answer I put in the reference was one of the many variants of “Who in their right mind would do this in Matlab? Use Python instead.”
I passed lol.
It was good when it was relatively new. The culture quickly turned toxic, as you’re seeing, and it’s been getting steadily worse for years now. There is a lot of useful information, and often the only thing online with code examples for a certain programming issue. but it is also increasingly outdated, in part due to the ‘no repeat questions’ thing. I have a couple popular answers about PHP and JavaScript from over 12 years ago, and they still get upvoted. Some people comment and say “this is answer is incorrect!” and… yeah, it’s from 2009.
Removed by mod
Dammit it’s AI again. What can I say. It’s been causing more destruction of things I care about, and all I see from AI is scams and impersonations.
This actually reminds me of a book by Charles Stross called Accelerando. Human explorers during a time in which people upload their minds to computer systems travel to (and this part is fuzzy in my memory), a world orbiting a brown dwarf. The world is just a giant computer and it’s inhabited almost entirely by superintelligent banking scams and viruses. It turns out that almost all “life” in the universe is like this, just parasitic AI that serves no real purpose other than to fuck over other people for short-term gains. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about that book more and more in recent years.
Someone should work on a LemmyOverflow UI for Lemmy
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’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!
People are saying that using ChatGPT doesn’t give accurate information and fails to convey important concepts
I wish my students would care about the concepts and try to understand the answers instead of just blindly copying and pasting ill-fitting code (and then wondering why it only kinda works…).
As a former student now practicing engineer this habit never gets broken. All of us accept cargo cult computing to one extent or another. It sucks.
Usually the engineers with the least tolerance for it do better but only in the long run. In the short run they are yelled at for holding back projects.
I played around with ChatGPT for programming for a few hours a while back.
It is far better at explaining code in plain language than pretty much any human I’ve seen, atleast online. It’s absolute dogshit st writing anything but the most basic of code, but it does do a good job explaining.
Programmers are shit at communicating.
I’ve found that it gives me a decent skeleton of something that I can then apply to my actual problem, but not much more, and it usually comes with some pretty big mistakes. I was trying to learn Z80 assembly and it gave me a good idea of how my code should generally look, but I did end up having to rewrite a whole bunch of it before I could actually execute anything.
That’s not unpopular. But there is a problem. ChatGPT can answer your questions mostly because it was trained on the posts and answers of sites like StackOverflow.
If people abandon SO and similar forums then the quality of ChatGPTs answers will go down too.
Especially with something like programming. It’s always changing. Next year there will be new versions of C++ and python. There will be new JS frameworks as always. It doesn’t stand still.
And without new discussions about new problems, there’s nowhere for ChatGPT to learn about them.
Haven’t though about that, you’re right.
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 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.
Here to echo the same. I thought using AI to assist me in coding would just make me lazy and learn nothing, but turns out I actually learn more than ever since it’s much faster, more polite and patient, and the semantics are usually more catered to my needs and self explanatory than the average answers I find elsewhere.
It’s great for writing snippets and creating basic frameworks. However, it definitely makes a lot of mistakes which I doubt a total beginner can spot, especially if the error lies in logic and not syntax.
Works great only as a tool for now, but chances are AI will probably surpass human coders sooner than we think.
I think there’s a sweet spot for how many other resources are out there. JavaScript GPT answers are pretty good. But when you get to a less popular language like Elixir not so much
