Comment by mezyt
16 hours ago
Remind me of a recent discussion we had among Stackoverflow moderator:
> “Think about it,” he continued. “Who discovers the edge cases the docs don’t mention? Who answers the questions that haven’t been asked before? It can’t be people trained only to repeat canonical answers. Somewhere, it has to stop. Somewhere, someone has to think.”
> “Yes,” said the Moderator.
> He leaned back. For a moment, restlessness flickered in his eyes.
> “So why wasn’t I told this at the start?”
> “If we told everyone,” said the Moderator gently, “we’d destroy the system. Most contributors must believe the goal is to fix their CRUD apps. They need closure. They need certainty. They need to get to be a Registered Something—Frontend, Backend, DevOps, Full stack. Only someone who suffered through the abuse of another moderator closing their novel question as a duplicate can be trusted to put enough effort to make an actual contribution”
What does “destroy the system” mean here?
The metaphor doesn't match very well here because stackoverflow is not selling new tape at a premium but giving them for free and reading a stackoverflow answer is harder than asking an LLM.
Could be that AI companies feeding on stackoverflow are selling tape at a premium, and if they tell you it's only supervised learning from a lot of human experts it's going to destroy the nice bubble they have going on around AGI.
Could also be that you have to do the actual theory / practice / correction work for your basal ganglia to "know" about something without thinking about it (i.e. learn), contrary to the novel where the knowledge is directly inserted in your brain. If everyone use AI to skip the "practice" phase lazily then there's no one to make the AI evolve anymore. And the world is not a Go board where the AI can learn against itself indefinitely.
If you have to ask, you aren't ready to know the answer. There are some things you have to figure out on your own. This is one of them.
Use it to train an "AI"? :)
Probably not the OPs intent though. I suspect there are a lot of ways to destroy the system.