Comment by yeahwhatever10
6 days ago
I use it as a SO stand in as well.
What I like about Chatbots vs SO is the ability to keep a running conversation instead of 3+ tabs and tuning the specificity toward my problem.
I've also noticed that if I look up my same question on SO I often find the source code the LLM copied. My fear is that if chatbots kill SO where will the LLM's copied code come from in the future?
I use Perplexity as my daily driver and it seems to be pretty good at piecing together the path forward from documentation as it has that built-in web search when you ask a question. Hopefully LLMs go more in that direction and less in the SO copy-paste direction, sidestepping the ouroboros issue.
Not a dev. SO done for then? It's been an important part of history.
Agreed. It was a very important part of my personal journey, but, like so many of these things (What is a “payphone,” Alex), it seems to have become an anachronism.
Yesterday, I was looking at an answer, and I got a popup, saying that a user needed help. I dutifully went and checked the query. I thought “That’s a cool idea!”. I enjoy being of help, and sincerely wanted to be a resource. I have gotten a lot from SO, and wanted to give back.
It was an HTML question. Not a bad one, but I don’t think I’ve ever asked or answered an HTML question on SO. I guess I have the “HTML” tag checked, but I see no other reason for it to ask my help.
Yeah, I think it’s done.
Hey Chris! Thanks for the reply. :)
As I never used SO except to understand it for doing business for developers, I know many found the community aspect/self building/sense of worth aspect important, same with Quora. Do you have a idea of how this will change things for developers? Is that a real thing I was seeing? (maybe even an opportunity!)
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Yes, it's been an important part of tricking humans into sharing their knowledge with other humans to obtain a huge Q&A dataset to train the AI without any consent of said people.
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399619/our-partners...
My goal from posting on various forums like SO is to scale the impact of my knowledge to as many people as possible, to give something back. I really don't care what modality or mechanism is used to distribute my contribution to others.
Why should I care if my SO answer I posted 7 years ago ends up in an LLM output in some random model? I wasn't getting paid for it anyway, and didn't expect to.
I view my random contributions across the web ending up in LLMs as a good thing, my posts now potentially reach even more people & places than it would have on a single forum site, that's the whole point of me posting online. Maybe I'm an outlier here.
That's an issue. It will likely turn into a Worm Ouroboros.
There's usually some "iteration," with ChatGPT giving me deprecated APIs and whatnot.