Comment by billy99k
1 year ago
The timing on the sale was genius. Similar to Mark Cuban with Broadcast.com. I guess it's best to sell something before the value plummets to 0.
As far as its demise? AI ate its lunch. I use to use Stack Overflow all the time and haven't even gone to the site for a couple of years now.
The new owners have been trying very hard with the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach. They know this is radically against community consensus (it's been shown to them on the meta site over and over) - so they just get sneakier about it.
Notably, after getting completely humiliated with https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425081 in June 2023 (right after a moderator strike had just started, protesting the staff trying to prevent them from removing AI content from the site), and getting embarrassing feedback on the feature (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162), they came back last November with https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432154 and have been forcing it through.
Where's the AI of tomorrow going to learn from if nobody is posting Q&As online anymore?
That’s a tomorrow problem.
(As someone who is all too often hired tomorrow, at a fraction of the before rates, to clean up this mess)
information will be repackaged like credit default swaps in the mid 2000s.
From the official docs? AI is good at sumarizing after all
I've been trying to get ChatGPT to write some Emacs Lisp for me and it sucks. Few things are better documented than Emacs. There's several hundreds of pages of documentation, and several million lines of Elisp, but apparently that's not enough.
And I'm not asking for some beautiful architecture from ChatGPT, I'm just asking for simple hacks that get the job done. Elisp is designed to make simple hacks easy, but not easy enough for ChatGPT I guess.
Like, I asked it to make a command which would move the "mark" and the "point" so that the full line was selected. If a selection covered only part of a line, I wanted the selection to expand to cover the full line. To do this, all you have to do is move the mark and the point so that they surround a line. ChatGPT couldn't do it. It would only move the point, but not the mark, it wouldn't do anything with the mark. I explicitly told ChatGPT "no, you have to set both the point and the mark correctly", and then it wrote even more code that only adjusts the point, but not the mark--it would move the point to the beginning of the line, and then move the point to the end of the line, never touching the mark--it's stupid.
Good luck with that. The last thing I used SO for was getting answers for SwiftUI and I can assure you the official docs did not contain the needed information.
Other people's code on GitHub.
The other people's code which will have been AI generated by older, dumber models in many if not most cases? Possibly even written and committed by AI agents with no human review at all? European royalty tried this kind of thing and it didn't end well.
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AI just stole all its content, I wonder if they will choose to sue.
Stack overflow never owned the content, it is and was Creative Commons: https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing
That license comes with obligations that the AI companies aren't following.
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That license is granted to the community, but per the linked Terms of Service, the company gets a slightly different license (https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#lice... ; scroll to "Subscriber Content"). Emphasis on:
> ... and you grant Stack Overflow the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to ...