In my time we didn’t paste LLM-generated code we barely understand and hoped it compiled, let alone work. We pasted code from stack overflow we barely understood and hoped it compiled and let alone work, as god intended.
You’re young. Back in my day, we bought a book called “Advanced Algorithms for C vol. 3”, and we manually typed the code from it if it didn’t come with a CD.
I’m too young for that, but I got a piece of that experience when I bought a physical programming book as a reward from Kickstarter.
Some of the code lines were too long to fit the page and were cut off which added another fun element (though it was pretty rare).
When I was a kid I remember copying entire games in BASIC printed in popular science magazines. They never worked because my dads computer had a slightly different BASIC dialect.
Good times.
I remember on the C64 they used to have ‘pokes’ which were written in assembler.
You’d have to manually typing 500 lines of it. Of course, it almost never worked. The times it did work I used to save it to a tape, I think I had about 9 cheats on it :)
As a teen, on my zx81 I remember typing line after line of hex numbers.
If the rampack didn’t wobble and fail and I hadn’t missed a line or entered one twice then I’d play something new.
I must have saved the thing somehow, but I can’t remember…
On C64 you could just type rundot save I think, stick a tape in and press record. I had a little inlay with the counter numbers for each cheat on the tape written on it.
Now we’re still pasting code from stack overflow we don’t understand, we’re just getting it from an LLM
Yes, but did the LLM get it from the answers or the questions?..
Who knows, and furthermore, who cares?
Both, of course.
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Thanks Cloudflare for giving me a moment of reflection on why the fuck I am heading to Stack Overflow so I can close the tab before I get there.
CF: We defended your website from 69,420 bots today!
The 65,000 users: 👁️L👁️
its funny. when its anubis, the common opinion is rightly fuck ai, but when its cloudflare, then it is somehow fuck the website.
what a weird world we live in.
Anubis does its thing, shows me cute art, then leaves without elaborating. It’s a mostly non-intrusive, individual/community effort to protect people against big tech and abusive scrapers. I usually see it in open source community websites that were getting hammered by LLM scrapers.
Cloudflare’s is a corporate solution from the company that man-in-the-middles half the internet and makes me click shit every fucking time. I see it whenever I make the mistake of following a stackoverflow link.
You’re goddamn right my reaction is accordingly different.
Cloudflare’s is a corporate solution from the company that man-in-the-middles half the internet and makes me click shit every fucking time. I see it whenever I make the mistake of following a stackoverflow link.
It is also not very useful if you don’t use a PC. Every time I look up a Cloudflare-gated site on my iPad, I usually have to jump through a few captchas before it will let me in, if it doesn’t decide to be a grump and decide to put you in a sisyphean cycle of captchas, constantly refreshing without end.
Or if you use some software. I have citation software that gets stuck in the loop because Elsevier puts their journals behind a Cloudflare wall, and when it pops up the prompt to prove you’re not a bot, just refreshes straight into another prompt.
Cloudflare’s is a corporate solution from the company that man-in-the-middles half the internet and makes me click shit every fucking time. I see it whenever I make the mistake of following a stackoverflow link.
on SO sites all the difference is a single click. and you have to allow scripts and cookies for both, so no difference there.
Oh thank god, I thought it was just me and that my IP had been flagged for some reason.
well yeah they went all in on ai.
IMO, this would be more ironic if the post was closed automatically by a bot. But that’s not the vibe I’m getting from this.
Stack overflow has always been ego and arrogance. Personally I’d love to see a federated version, we all host shards
You are correct. But without defending Stack Overflow, I feel the need to point out that the arrogance and condescension is by no means limited to their platform. I’ve been on several “support” pages that were the same or worse. For example Evernote’s “support”. It wasn’t “officially” hosted by Evernote, but had the Evernote logo everywhere . The most common phrases I remember from there are the equivalent of:
- “The Evernote devs don’t read this site, so you’re wasting your time trying to appeal to them here.”
- “That’s stupid, why do you have that problem?”
- “No, you don’t want to do that.”
- “No, you don’t want that feature and neither does anyone else.”
- etc.
I can only guess that asking moderators deal with the internet public for no pay is more than reasonable people are willing to do. So we wind up with unpaid people with people skills equivalent to 13 y.o. boys put in charge. Their only compensation being allowed to troll users and feel they have power over some small portion of other people. My guess is they eventually grow older and move on to being in charge of a homeowner association.
Yes please. I tried participating in some StackExchange communities many years ago, but they felt so hostile to new contributors. Like I asked an immigration-related question about my personal situation, and multiple people edited my question to change the grammar and take out the thanks and smiley at the end 🤦 Oh no, we can’t have a bit of humanity in there… Multiple similar experiences left such a bitter taste, that I ended up deleting most of my sub-profiles. I found Reddit-style communities much more helpful. Even wikis are typically nowhere near this hostile.
SE seems too heavily focusing on helping a “generic public” rather than the actual people asking the questions. (Or even answering them, with all the reputation restrictions on accounts.) I’m sure I’m not the only contributor they pushed away :/
multiple people edited my question to change the grammar and take out the thanks and smiley at the end
Well, the Welcome Tour tells you that SO is about “just questions and answers”. This facilitates finding a question that’s written as concise as possible, checking its answer, and leaving. SO is deliberately not like a forum.
SE seems too heavily focusing on helping a “generic public” rather than the actual people asking the questions.
This is just another consequence of not being a forum. Of course SO wants questions to be helpful to as many people as possible. I don’t see how that is a bad thing.
If you want a laxer approach to handling quality, consider if you’ve ever found useful information on yahoo answers.
I understand it’s not a forum (though tbh I can’t remember a welcome tour, but it was more than a decade ago, so could have just forgot), but even with that I just find the whole atmosphere kinda cold and elitist. Not a community that invites participation, like Wikipedia does. But each to our own :)
But each to our own :)
Exactly.
And it seems we, on average, decided to part ways with Stack Overflow.
I don’t know what the best answer is, but I’m not terribly surprised that Stack Overflow didn’t turn out to be it.
I’m sure I’m not the only contributor they pushed away
Yeah. I found myself not adding a potentially useful comment, more than once, due to reputation restrictions on a SE community despite me having enough rep in the ones I regularly use. And I am one of those that aligns well with the Question & Answer style format of their site.
So, I just leave, knowing that - some answer is incomplete - or - some question is not worded well enough to attract the correct answerer. I prefer suggesting fixes to the question rather than changing it myself, which would otherwise be assuming that I have understood correctly.
Individual tools already often host their own Q&A or forum systems. We just need to encourage more of that.
I wouldn’t call stackoverflow reliable. It is only partly reliable, if you are lucky.
Thread closed because that’s a stupid question and you should feel bad about yourself.
I do. Let me delete my account and come back tomorrow with the same question.
Been there done that. Closed as duplicate.
Gotta love finding the exact issue you’re having being asked, and closed as duplicate, and what they say it’s a duplicate of isn’t even the same issue and doesn’t apply to you…
On a serious note, last year I felt so pathetic after reading a comment on a question I posted on stackoverflow that I went over the edge and attempted suicide and like everything else I failed. Not saying that SO was responsible or anything. One guy pushed me over the edge, when I was already under a tremendous stress.
Glad to still have you here with us.
I really wish I could say the same. Depression sucks.
Good riddance. Whenever I search for a programming question I’d always hope for a) an official documentation page or, failing that, b) a page on a dedicated forum for the tool that I was using that covered the problem. I’d only ever click on SO links if I had no other choice.
And, of course, I’d never search for a problem on SO itself.
SO used to be good, but they have this problem right down in their core concept that makes sure the content gets outdated fast.
And that’s the concept that every question can only be asked once.
That makes sure that everything gets outdated as soon as possible.
- Q: Can X be done in framework Y? (asked in 2012)
- A: No.
Now it’s 13 years later, and framework Y can do X since 5 years, but you can’t ask again, because your question will get closed as a duplicate to the outdated one from 2012. And since every time someone asked this question again in the last 13 years the question just got closed, google will just link you back to the question from 2012 claiming that framework Y can’t do X.
I hate that so many projects are moving from public support forums to fucking Discord channels. God forbid a tech project be expected to maintain a public indexable forum and website. You can’t search it unless you join the channel, it’s not well organized at all, and the invite link probably expired 3 months ago. Fuck you if you didn’t join while it still worked I guess.
Eh, I hate its culture, but I regularly find useful excel or regex answers on StackExchange.
The LaTeX SE is also very useful. The official documentation of LaTeX and especially of third party packages, is often hard to read and it’s hard to find what you’re looking for. You can end up on the documentation on Overleaf,but they don’t go I to depth too much.
I almost always prefer SO answers because there was chance someone had the same issue I was seeing. Documentation only shows how things should work and dedicated forums are very hit or miss.
SO used to be really good in the past, but these days when I’m looking for an answer to a problem, I only unanswered closed questions.
That’s the stupid SO concept that questions can only be asked once. It makes sure that only the question from 2012 with all its outdated answers is available while everyone who asks for an update will get their question closed.
That’s why SO was great in 2012 but its rules made sure it got outdated fast.
Not necessarily about stack overflow. But i just got myself in a situation where the first search result I found for a problem was clearly AI generated. And the solution it provided was not at all technically possible. The AI decline is really terrible…
That said, does anyone know of an extension or block list for those terrible AI slob websites? Or a way to filter it from duckduckgo?
This AI blocklist for uBlacklist and uBlock origin should help.
That’s for images though, not text content.
THAT is the problem… we cannot filter them out. The real enshitification of the web has barely began.
I understand it will be a cat and mouse game. But surely its possible to make a curated list of big offenders akin to advertisement block lists?
Anybody remember what it was like 16+ years ago when “most questions” hadn’t already been asked yet?
PS: lol https://web.archive.org/web/20090330211513/http://stackoverflow.com/
Yeah, that site was good before they started rejecting every useful question.
It used to be much better than anything else that came earlier. Nowadays the odds are even that you’ll find your answer on the experts-one.
I spent a lot of time there the first couple of years, mostly answering questions. I was in the top 20 or so of users for a while - I remember when Jon Skeet was right below me in the rankings and I thought “huh, I’ll show this guy”. I did not in fact show that guy. I’m still in the top .1% but I haven’t done anything there in almost a decade.
As a read-only SO user - thank you for your answers!
Mods be thinking that if they dig SO’s grave deep enough it will emerge on the other side of the world.
🍴
