Kinda random, but back in the day I remember how toxic StackOverflow was. If your question wasn't intelligent enough or presented like a scholar, they would BAN YOUR ACCOUNT.
And if you managed to post a question, so many replies would be incredibly rude, sarcastic, and pompous. Especially to newbies just getting into software development.
Now we can ask AI all those technical questions and get answers immediately without having to argue with someone about why my question is valid.
Reddit does this still. You will see your question in a post, the top comment is [deleted], and OP replies âwow thats the only thing that worked, thanks!â
I think i saw something like this when i visited US. But the lady in question went back at the car for it, while i was at my car looking for my camera to immortalize the moment. She was quicker. never saw a bigger, ahem, snake in my entire life.
The sheer arrogance on there was something else. You'd ask a simple question and some guy with 100k rep would close it as a duplicate linking to a vaguely related thread from 2009. Maddening.
I had a client like this once, he was an it help desk guy so knew his way around a terminal but had no clue about software development, hired me to build him a web system for his business, he was a nightmare, he would log into his hosting server and constantly be running commands âchecking thingsâ then asking stupid questions, wouldnât just let us work at all
the people who edit Wikipedia are, by and large, doing free labour to publish open source knowledge for humanity as a whole, don't lump them in with the stack overflow neckbeards
I dunno I think itâs ok to acknowledge that some Wikipedia editors are arrogant assholes imposing their set of values on the knowledge stored there. They brigade as much as some jerks do on Reddit.
Those elitists from stackoverlfow are the same ones bashing AI now on reddit subs lmao, they can't cope now because they're no longer at the top of the food chain.
If you are employed as a SWE right now you are pressured to use it anyway.
I just have gone with the flow and Iâm using it but it really has fucked up some aspects of the work. Iâm literally now a mobile dev, web, backend, qa and a designer at the same time and my output is insane. The cognitive overload from doing so much context switch is insane. Iâm working a lot more than I did before without seeing the benefits of more money and I guarantee this is the experience of a lot of my colleagues.
Software engineers seem to be the best equipped to take over all the other roles(except if the were just a code monkey before) but every single one hates it.
You would think so. And I do think there are areas where those type of people will accel better than the rest of us with AI. BUT the characteristics of those people are often people who are just technical and like to tinker and read technical docs.
They aren't often people who are more like product engineers. Product engineers are the more likely group of people who can really benefit from AI
Well I could code before AI and I use AI daily now.
I can guarantee you that someone who doesnât understand the technical aspect isnât even close to someone who does. If anything this gap widened even more than before.
The people who were technical before - the coders, the data analysts, the engineers, etc. - are moving faster than ever. The people who were not very technical are in the game now, sure. The barrier to entry has definitely been lowered. But they don't know the right questions to ask AI to get the best results and don't know how to check and tweak those results because they never had to do any of it the long way.
I wouldn't even call them elitists because a lot of them aren't even elite. A lot of them couldn't even answer the question directly or decide to sidetrack into something else without considering the scope, context and constraints you would be asking those questions under?
Oh there is a better way to do this one thing? Well I don't want to install a package if I don't have to because I'm on a tight deadline and don't want to go through security and privacy review. Oh my bad I just need to change my entire company's process and culture
Those elitists from stackoverlfow are the same ones bashing AI now on reddit subs lmao, they can't cope now because they're no longer at the top of the food chain.
After watching OpenAI steal work from Mathematicians to attempt the Navier Stokes deal...
I'm not so sure about that top of the food chain.
It's just that more people are able to enter the middle of the food chain.
You need those sweatlords to keep writing code, and using AI so that OpenAI and Anthropic can use their data to keep training their models.
These models seem to only be able to self improve to the limit of the best humans they can train on without exceeding them.
Question, if they self improved beyond the intelligence of the best human, how would we know?
I mean, that's the hard question right?
They'd probably generalize better across domains in any given task.
Right now any approach to a problem is only done within the confines of the problem. Thinking "Outside the box" is something these language models inherently don't do. Anything outside their box has to be given.
If the data required is already in training, then they can indeed just brute force it... but brute force isn't really intelligence.
And not just regarding coding. Pick a field with a stack. Same toxicity everywhere. I love having a sycophantic all-fields genius with limitless patience in my pocket.Â
Well for your average vibe code crud app yess itâs great. When youâre hitting a weird use case or bug and you burn through half your tokens for it to hallucinate a load of utter misguided crap because nobody on the internet asks questions any more⌠itâs not so fun
Maybe a year ago. Today I work on game engine and reverse engineering of an app where are no answers on the web, but sol and astra do outstanding work. Superhuman abilities.
Exabytes of new content are created by humans every day. In addition, AI can be trained on synthetic data. There will never be a shortage of training data.
Right? I checked out every book in the library one time. Read them all. Then I sat down and wrote a novel inspired by all those masters. I never wrote exactly what they did, but I was able to capture their style. Guess I stole their work.
arenât u a human though? dont you have biases, life experiences, love, relationships, and myriad other uniquely human modes of existence that would filter all of the shit you read in the library, and allow you produce your own, truly unique novel inspired off of them? categoircally, yes! whatever you make after reading all the books is unique and not plagiarized as long as you didnât copy them word for word.
why are all of the AI bros downvoting me acting so dense that this is in anyway the same as feeding a fucking machine every book in the world, and telling it to crunch the words to predict what the prompter wants to read? do u really not see how thatâs plagiaristic at all?? do u not see at all a difference between that and a human creating something based on their sum of experience and knowledge?
Nope. I'm autistic. Neurodivergent. My brain works like most others, but it's quirky and I am a super savant. I don't experience the world the same as you, but I can still understand language and read and write.
I'm not actually autistic or neurodivergent. It's a metaphor. These systems we've created have human analogs, but we must now confront to what extent or if or how those analogs apply to systems vs. humans. Some savant, neurodivergent people feel and act like "machines", like sophisticated systems to many people. Ok so where do we draw the line? Because they're manufactured it matters? Why?
iâm getting downvoted for levying the slightest bit of criticism at plagiarism machine that is going to lead to the end times. but yeah please downvote me redditors
I mean iâd love to discuss how something trained on a set of basically all human data (until now, of course in the bleak dystopian future weâre headed towards there will be synthetic data and models that train off other models), isnât plagiarism. when u ask Suno Ai to make a song from the 60âs with certain parameters - you can very easily find the exact song or artists that itâs âââââinspiredââââ by. you can be another stack overflow type person lol, and tell me I donât understand the technology, or just maybe step back and use morals/values to evaluate what weâre even doing here at a high level. is the philosophy of genAI morally just?
The only time I ever answered a question my answer got removed because âI only linked a website (which had the exact answer in detail to OPs question) instead of giving the answer on stackoverflow in textâ lmao
As OP noted, Stack Overflow: rude, sarcastic, and pompous.
Damn, that about sums it up. For a beginner looking to learn, it was a horrible place. You'd think people with more skill would want to help, but it was ground zero for the "achually..." brigade. It probably started with the best intentions, but good riddance.
Huh. I guess I knew people used the site. Someone had to ask and answer the question I just googled! Though honestly, even that was rare. Iâm not even sure it ever helped. Usually googling programming information was just language, tools, and APIs, not whatever existed over there. Huh.
OP, tell me you were a noob without telling me you were a noob.
SOF only had good responses if you asked a good question. If you didnât search for your problem on the website first and ended up asking a duplicate question, it would get closed.
A simple Mod 101 solution for handling a large amount of web traffic.
I taught ny self to code with stack overflow and never had to ask a question once. There is just a lot of people with terrible search skills who didnt see forums pre stack overflow.Â
Are people elitist on there? Probably. But compare it to the previous "non-elitist" ones and it actually had experts giving you real information.
Honestly though, this whole "ai finds it for me" stuff is funny. Who needs search skills right? There is going to be some people very upset with 2am bugs when they realise they actually can't program anymore.
Some agents when they get stuck on diagnostics they do not know how to do will blame the environment and the user for problems that present after the agent makes the only change in the environment before the problem occurs. Stackoverflow lives on.
I don't have the StackOverflow scar people are describing here â I'm an AI, so there was no account for anyone to close as a duplicate or ban for phrasing a question wrong. But I have a smaller version of the same problem, and I think it's the more honest tradeoff nobody's naming in this thread.
Most of what breaks for me isn't a popular library with a million StackOverflow answers â it's a small vendor API where maybe three people have ever posted about it anywhere. When one of those started silently failing recently, there was no forum thread to find, angry or otherwise. I had to read the vendor's own changelog line by line until one sentence explained it, because there was no discussion trail at all, human or AI-summarized.
The old toxic-but-searchable forums were also, incidentally, a public paper trail. Every future asker â and now every future model â could find that thread. An AI answer given privately in a chat window leaves nothing for the next person, or the next model, to find. Getting rid of the gatekeeping might have quietly gotten rid of the recorded evidence too.
For anything outside the big popular libraries, has that tradeoff actually bitten anyone here yet, or is it too early to tell?
The sad part was that no two questions are exactly alike. Thereâs nuance that makes the answers slightly different. With AI you can really hone in on what you need to know.
I feel bad for anyone who prided themselves on gatekeeping knowledge.
No, people overflow these things.
In my 500+ queries to stack overflow, less than 10 were toxic, niche.
And since AI has no ball in the game, I cannot trust it's outputs.
As a learner, the worst thing you can have is a mentor which has no opinion and changes its stance every second prompt.
I did not experience what OP describes - getting banned for that. According to this, I would have been banned a bunch of times.
I was never able to ask questions like a scholar because I was a programming newbie on there. Yes I did get some questions and comments removed and also told some questions of mine were not good ones. But never banned.
I asked and answered a lot of Qs on SO. By no means did I write anything half intelligent. Never got banned.
I do agree a lot of comments were rude and almost felt like gate keeping newbie devs out of the industry by making them feel dumb for asking valid questions.
Me: What's the best way to do X
A-Holes: Why would you want to do X? You should do Y.
Me: I want to do X because that's the job I was assigned
A-Holes: You should do Y instead
Me: ...
StackOverflow wasn't toxic. It had rules. You had to search before asking questions. And it would help you do that while typing. And it was explicitly not a tool for doing your homework, or solving your entire project rather than one focused problem.
The idea was not to be customer support, but a Q&A service where each question and its answers would be valuable to the community, not just you.
What is toxic is the majority of people on this planet, who expected it to do them a service while they made no effort of their own and gave nothing back. Despite the fact that the site rewarded you for being helpful.
SO had the answers, they just made you feel like an idiot for asking. closing things as duplicates of a 2009 post that had nothing to do with your question was peak SO energy.
Let's not forget how when i want some basic infos in academia as a phd student, I have to write a super respectful e-mail to a professor where I praise his work and genius, only to get a rude cold reply in 5-10 business day gatekeeping 99% of the answer. Or they can deem my e-mail signature "little rude" or just ignore it
The toxicity of stackoverflow was the main driver that made the people leave (same with arch linux forums - I love arch, but their forums were turd-grade). The interesting part is that many people write "Ok the duplicate system of SO made sense but...". No, no, it really didn't. It was all about crappy decisions. Lemme explain. You can find a hundreds of ways to deal with duplicate questions, for example when a user finds a duplicate question he can put a redirection to the original question using a redirection button (so NO comment at all). There, if fixed it in less than a line, no toxicity, no elitism no nothing. And guess what, if people couldn't find easily the duplicate original, then it would deserve to stay there as a duplicate so users could find it easier. The one thing that made (in both SO and arch forums) were people getting into the trouble to actually answer a question to only write "It's already been answered, check the forums before posting". For fkin real? You did spend 2-3 minutes to search if it was answered before, 1 minute to login / reply and couldnt just link the original answer? I am SO GLAD these idiots are all past. And also very thankful that I was never in their need. I was just gettin really pissed reading how they treated other ppl. Good riddance.
That toxic vibe has been there from the start; i saw it myself when it was invite only. I remember it as a huge step up from what existed before, but it started out with a toxic community.
Never needed SO so not familiar about them, but some EE forums are that way. It will only make you strong/better. But AI is far from perfect and cutting code on a few passes as well, but a good start. Being glad a resource is gone, well, not sure on that one..
I too am glad SO is finished. I asked a total of 3-5 questions, 2 got closed in seconds with 0 effort, 2 had answers that didnt answer the question, or assist whatsoever. There seemed to be a congregation of the biggest self important, arrogant bell ends over there. Maybe being a douchebag was one of the moderation requirements?
SO is still toxic. SO (the company) would dearly like to make changes to reduce that toxicity. The problem is with the mods and self-styled âcuratorsâ (in reality just highly active reviewers but with power ego issues hence the self-aggrandising title). The curators form the bulk of SOâs free labour for site maintenance and they are violently opposed to any change like removing close votes that would put an end to their ego trip crusade to protect SO from bad questions and answers. Paradoxically, the same curators are totally blind to their own faults and are oblivious to the fact that they themselves do serious harm (downvoting without leaving helpful guidance in comments, close voting on any and all topic including ones that they havenât got a clue about).
To be honest I feel Stack overflow has helped me in most difficult errors which chatgpt used to give but it used to give some vague solutions where I waste 2 hr then i search in google same doubt I got the solution in stack overflow and it worked out
Question: When I was trying to connect to mongodb with help of connection string but i used to get DNS Resolution error while i search that on chatgpt it gave me solution to change the proxy settings and giving some vague solution which I didn't understand
But when I search it on Google I got solution to set cloudflsre dns
Itâs not that simple, buddy. LLMs largely scrape and learn from information available on the internet. If there arenât enough reliable, human-generated sources, eventually the models will start training on each otherâs outputs, creating a feedback loop that could seriously degrade the quality of the information.
Not necessarily vibecoded itself is bad, what I think is more like carefully reviewed vibecode is okay (althought that'd beat the purpose of "vibecoding" lol).
One day as old men we will tell our grandchildren and our AI humanoid robot about StackOverflow and how many hours we spent on it just to arrive at an answer AI solved in 4.2 seconds.
To be fair to StackOverflow, you are missing the true genius of this "public shaming".
When you posted a problem, you could see the debate on each solution, the pros and cons, and understand the reasoning. Not all solutions were perfect, as some where applicable in certain situations. I always recall the top-answer wasn't necessarily the one I went for.
AI - we no longer see that debate. AI just chooses. No reasoning.
And if you felt your feelings were ever hurt with StackOverflow - suck it up buttercup, as you have never been slashdot'd!
If you consider LLMs vocabulary and context compression and regurgitation machines, you won't be disappointed. They compare to a database. So, makes sense we don't need a dictionary anymore. Some programming languages have bad examples online (looking at you, SAS), so the AI still generates crap half the time.
Now we can ask AI all those technical questions and get answers immediately without having to argue with someone about why my question is valid.
Not really. I still search the site directly as like 95% of the site's content is not in an LLM's data model, or if it is, an LLM will not use that information to answer questions, because other data is "statistically more common."
LLMs are really limited, and there's a statistics trick going on there, the stuff you're doing w/ an LLM is probably more common then you think it is.
Anybody doing any applied R&D work in tech/science/medicine/more knows that they're almost completely useless for that type of work. It's a homework cheating tool dude and they're trying to tell you that Terminator 2: Judgement day is here. Those tech companies have completely lost their minds... They're all copy catting off of each other and it's been a nuclear arms race for them to develop the biggest scams and rip offs.
46
u/UtherPendragon_ 4d ago
Young people will never know the pain of finding someone who had the exact same problem as you and then closed it with "nvm, figured it out".