Why you should know: StackOverflow is facing a mod strike in a similar way as Reddit’s mod strike. They are doing this in response to StackOverflow’s failure to address it’s promises and provide moderation tools

  • Clbull@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Unlike Reddit, Stack Overflow would probably be better without moderators.

    In fact, you could easily replace Stack Overflow mods with a script that goes into every new question, comments “USE THE FUCKING SEARCH BAR” and locks the thread.

    • Rotten_potato@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I don’t think so: Stack Overflow requires much more moderation for the comments and answers to actually stay on topic and be somewhat professional. Especially the “don’t just link somewhere, explain the thing” rule might require a lot of moderation.

    • damnYouSun@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Replace them with a script that goes into every comment and put “duplicate of existing post”.

      Even if there is no existing post.

  • lettruthout@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Thank you for posting this. I had no idea this was going on. What are companies thinking when they implement policies that hamper volunteers? You’d think they’d want to engage, and keep happy, these people that give their time.

    • jkure2@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Companies don’t even care beyond bare minimum for the labor that they pay why would they care about the labor they don’t lol

        • HidingCat@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          This awfulness is usually seen with bigger companies, especially ones who are going or have gone public on the stock market.

          The basic premise for a capitalistic market economy isn’t something I don’t like per se; consumers choose to buy goods or services from a company that best serves their needs (demand), and companies strive to provide that (supply), and the best providers win. Consumers get a great service or product (as exemplified in your example), and to do that, the staff are motivated and well paid to do so.

          The shitty part is when both are disregarded in modern day late stage capitalism for the shareholder, which results in sheninagans that treat both customer and staff poorly, in the name of short-term profits.

          • redballooon
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            1 year ago

            Amazon customer service is great and they still treat their employees like shit.

        • markr@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Sure, but then they are organizations that are not yet fully incorporated (lol) into the system of end stage financial capitalism… They haven’t been commodified yet.

    • ColonelSanders@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      “What are companies thinking”

      It turns out I actually have the ability to convert thoughts to text for any company CEO or Board Member. So allow me to post an excerpt of what I’ve found:

      “moneymoneymoneymoneymoneymoneymoneyiwishepsteinwerestillheremoneymoneymoneymoneymoneymoneymoneymoney”

    • bedrooms@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Siding with the community is one thing. I couldn’t understand the core demand of the community, though.

      Apparently, the community wants to ban AI-generated answers. But it’s unrealistic to filter AI-generated text, and I thought the quality control has been done through user votes anyway.

  • daniskarma@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Duplicated, here’s a link to a totally unrelated question made 10 years ago that didn’t got any answer anyway.

    • maybe@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      OMG these responses drive me bananas. I’m searching for a code solution and I keep landing on “Duplicated” dead ends with dead end links posted as the solution. Why do they leave it just sitting there?? WHY???

        • imperator3733@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          jQuery is a JavaScript* library that played a really important role in adding interactivity to websites and doing so in a way that works across browsers. Its capabilities were fantastic for its day, but newer iterations of JavaScript and subsequent frameworks and libraries (such as Angular, Vue, Svelte, and React) generally provide the same capabilities in a form that is easier to work with. Most new sites use those newer tools, but jQuery was one of the key technologies behind the kind of interactive websites from the mid-2000s until the mid-2010s (essentially the heyday of Web 2.0 (RIP)), and is still used in websites from that era that haven’t needed huge overhauls since then.

          • JavaScript is the main programming language used to add interactivity to websites (plus a bunch more that’s beyond the scope of this).
      • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Striking will just be replaced with defederation. For example lemmy.world has been defederated by a bunch of instances because it allows anyone to sign up for an account.

          • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Some people might do that. But lemmy.world is a very well run community that has never done anything offensive, and yet it’s still defederated by some of the biggest lemmy instances.

            That proves defederation is for more than just spam/illegal content/harassment. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s pretty disruptive. Like a strike.

              • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Yeah, they’re the one that makes you answer 3 vague open end questions and then manually approve it.

                If you don’t write enough, or write something they dont agree with… You dont get denied, it’s just like it’s still pending indefinitely.

                Lemmy.world requires a valid email instead (something beehaw doesn’t).

                There’s no right or wrong way to go about it. Which is the biggest benefit of Lemmy. Somewhere out there, there’s an instance being ran like how you want, if not, just make your own.

                • coz@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  I’d say that leaving your request pending forever is definitely the wrong way They are trying to hide their rejections

                  But the great thing about federated instances is that even if you are wronged, you have options You’re never between a rock and a hard place

                  What I plan to do is just create accounts in the server I’m interested in, and link between accounts so people know I’m the same person. It even works as a backup

                  There will be instances that will delete your account if you have an account at other instances, however my life experience is that I’m better without the kind of people who does that so their self-revelation as such an agent is also a plus

      • redditsucks@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        While I agree, I think this is unlikely because unlike Reddit and StackOverflow modding, YouTube content creators rely on YouTube for their livelihoods.

        • PopularUsername@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          And this is of course because youtube actually pays its creators. Youtube is a far more just platform and is nothing like the social media sites that rely on free labour.

        • Freesoftwareenjoyer@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          That should give them more incentive to want to move to the fediverse. I’m sure many youtubers can afford to host their own PeerTube instance.

          • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            But then they’d have to coordinate directly with advertisers.

            The biggest can probably do that, but not 99.9% of content creators.

  • 🐱TheCat@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Me: Good for them, that’s great hope they get want they want.

    Me, to myself, in bed at night: Oh god how will I code

      • possum@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Trained on old stack overflow answers, so newer things could be a problem.

        • httpjames@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          The new Copilot for Docs beta aims to solve that problem by providing the AI context about the libraries you’re using, new or old. It’ll have all the information from the documentation, so it will know all the functions, parameters, outputs, etc.

  • armchair_progamer@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Thankfully SO is better than Reddit: the frontend is actually decent and even though they’re pausing data dumps, everything posted is technically CC-SA

  • eah@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Fun fact: the stack exchange for research mathematics, MathOverflow, is a separate 501©(3) nonprofit which at any time can pack up their stuff and migrate, including their domain name and all of their data, per the agreement they made when they joined the stack exchange network in 2013, originally operating the site themselves since 2009.

    https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/969/who-owns-mathoverflow/970#970

    While the MathOverflow site is operated by Stack Exchange, Inc., the domain and the MathOverflow name are owned by the MathOverflow corporation. The MathOverflow corporation is completely independent from Stack Exchange and its mission is to ensure the continued operation of the site in a manner that meets the needs and expectations of the community.

    Subject to Section 8, should MathOverflow wish to migrate its data outside of the Stack Exchange network, Stack Exchange shall, within thirty (30) days of receipt of a written request from MathOverflow, provide MathOverflow with a complete and current database that contains all the data necessary to recreate MathOverflow on MathOverflow’s own servers and software. Following such transfer, Stack Exchange will cease all use of the MathOverflow database.

    If they don’t like how the site is being run, they can leave. Food for thought. If all communities on the internet were so careful and prescient to plan an exit strategy in advance, to make clear that you just operate our site and we can leave for a competitor, we’d not be in this mess.

  • gonzo0815@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Unpopular opinion: for a beginner, ChatGPT gives way better answers than stackoverflow users. The advantage of ChatGPT is that I can command it to dumb it down. Stackoverflow users are used to answer in a language that resembles the language in documentations. They are dry, abstract, lack good examples to the point that the “foobar” shit triggers an immediate defensive reaction in my brain and are phrased for people who already understood a concept but need to refresh their knowledge. Their core problem, as is tradition in any IT field, is that they lack the empathy to understand the viewpoint of someone who understands less of something than they do. It’s like asking someone to teach you reading and getting a poem with the advice to just read it as an answer.

    I can circumvent that via ChatGPT by asking it to ELI5. Also, I get an answer instantly, am not discouraged to ask further questions and not advised to read a link where a solution is offered in an equally difficult language.

    People are saying that using ChatGPT doesn’t give accurate information and fails to convey important concepts, but I feel it’s actually the other way around. Since there is ChatGPT, I’m making way more progress than before.

    I understand that users don’t want AI answers, but I also don’t get why anyone would want that on this platform. You can just, you know, use AI directly.

    • veroxii@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That’s not unpopular. But there is a problem. ChatGPT can answer your questions mostly because it was trained on the posts and answers of sites like StackOverflow.

      If people abandon SO and similar forums then the quality of ChatGPTs answers will go down too.

      Especially with something like programming. It’s always changing. Next year there will be new versions of C++ and python. There will be new JS frameworks as always. It doesn’t stand still.

      And without new discussions about new problems, there’s nowhere for ChatGPT to learn about them.

    • Crackhappy@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I think that one issue with using AI to help you solve programming problems is that sometimes it will wholesale make things up. Of course, people can do that too, which is why communities of coders can vote on the best answer. I say, more power to you, using the tools that work for you. Just be cautious.

      • pachrist@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The key with ChatGPT for me has been taken use it as an augmentation, not a gap fill. There’s some prerequisite knowledge required on my part. It’s a much more useful tool when it’s helping flesh out something I know, but have forgotten, or am familiar with, but not proficient. That means I find mistakes faster, and am less prone to having it loop or hallucinate. If I need to ask a question about something where I know very little or nothing at all, I’ll peek at a Wikipedia page or something first if I can.

    • Botree@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Here to echo the same. I thought using AI to assist me in coding would just make me lazy and learn nothing, but turns out I actually learn more than ever since it’s much faster, more polite and patient, and the semantics are usually more catered to my needs and self explanatory than the average answers I find elsewhere.

      It’s great for writing snippets and creating basic frameworks. However, it definitely makes a lot of mistakes which I doubt a total beginner can spot, especially if the error lies in logic and not syntax.

      Works great only as a tool for now, but chances are AI will probably surpass human coders sooner than we think.

    • InfiniteFlow@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      People are saying that using ChatGPT doesn’t give accurate information and fails to convey important concepts

      I wish my students would care about the concepts and try to understand the answers instead of just blindly copying and pasting ill-fitting code (and then wondering why it only kinda works…).

      • afraid_of_zombies2@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        As a former student now practicing engineer this habit never gets broken. All of us accept cargo cult computing to one extent or another. It sucks.

        Usually the engineers with the least tolerance for it do better but only in the long run. In the short run they are yelled at for holding back projects.

    • ScreaminOctopus@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      I’ve yet to get a useful answer out of chatgpt for a technical question. It’s good for fluffing up emails, but I haven’t been super impressed with any use case I’ve tried for it.

      • CylonBunny@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        When I’ve used it for decently complex programming questions I’ve found it often likes to make up functions and libraries. It’ll be like just use this reasonable sounding function from this library, and I look it up and the library does not have that functionality at all. Over and over!

        • david@feddit.uk
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          1 year ago

          Well it’s a large language model that generates text probabilistically. It’s trained on vast amounts of data, so it’s expert at sounding like a skilled programmer, but there’s absolutely no reason at all for the results to be useful code. It will sound like useful code and look like useful code, and it will be on the right topic, and that might well be enough, but it might not.

    • Crackhappy@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I think that one issue with using AI to help you solve programming problems is that sometimes it will wholesale make things up. Of course, people can do that too, which is why communities of coders can vote on the best answer. I say, more power to you, using the tools that work for you. Just be cautious.

      • JonnyJ@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        ChatGPT is incredible for middle ground developers like myself. I understand the goal I’m trying to achieve, and I understand the general process of how to do it. I can ask very granular, specific questions to ChatGPT and it will spit out some code that will get me close to what I need.

        If I was a complete novice, I think ChatGPT would make me too dependent on using it for answers.

        • Crackhappy@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          That seems like a totally valid use case. I occasionally will outline some very specific requirements and have AI generate the code, which just saves a lot of time typing, versus it generating it entirely on its own. And I still go through all the code and verify that it’s good. It’s just a tool that can be used to make your job easier.

          • JonnyJ@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Totally. The other day I had to test a csv/xls upload tool. I wanted to make sure that no matter what configuration an asshole user had for phone numbers, it would strip everything out so it would be a valid integer for my database.

            I told chatgpt to make me a csv with 20 rows, 6 columns with xyz headers, and to give me an assortment of different phone number formats. Took 10 seconds.

    • ObsidianBlk@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      While I have no issues with the use of ChatGPT as an asist, from my understanding of the system as well as from some examples of using it, I would be very hesitant to say a beginner should use ChatGPT. While ChatGPT has given me some great starting points in a couple projects, I have also encountered a few instances where the code output was… not totally optimal at best, or wrong at worst. It also varies in quality from language to language (usually based on that languages over all popularity at the time the model was trained).

      I suppose all of the above could hold true when it comes to getting your info from SO or any other social media source, but I would still highly suggest not relying on ChatGPT or AI systems until one has a intermediate or better grasp of the language.

      Totally my opinion, though.

    • Machefi@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’m using Bing AI, but that itself uses ChatGPT. The answers are well written, but I feel like it’s important to keep in mind that language models, by design, lie often and do it in an extremely plausible way. Use AI all you want, but never rely on its answer without proper fact-checking.

    • Stuka@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I played around with ChatGPT for programming for a few hours a while back.

      It is far better at explaining code in plain language than pretty much any human I’ve seen, atleast online. It’s absolute dogshit st writing anything but the most basic of code, but it does do a good job explaining.

      Programmers are shit at communicating.

      • sambeastie@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’ve found that it gives me a decent skeleton of something that I can then apply to my actual problem, but not much more, and it usually comes with some pretty big mistakes. I was trying to learn Z80 assembly and it gave me a good idea of how my code should generally look, but I did end up having to rewrite a whole bunch of it before I could actually execute anything.

    • sulungskwa@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I think there’s a sweet spot for how many other resources are out there. JavaScript GPT answers are pretty good. But when you get to a less popular language like Elixir not so much

    • Kraiden@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Closed: This question has already been answered 5 years ago here <link to completely unrelated question>

      • May@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Better yet: “this question has been answered here <link to old question, answer does not work/doesnt apply or work anymore>”

  • IceQuest@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Dammit it’s AI again. What can I say. It’s been causing more destruction of things I care about, and all I see from AI is scams and impersonations.

    • rwhitisissle@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This actually reminds me of a book by Charles Stross called Accelerando. Human explorers during a time in which people upload their minds to computer systems travel to (and this part is fuzzy in my memory), a world orbiting a brown dwarf. The world is just a giant computer and it’s inhabited almost entirely by superintelligent banking scams and viruses. It turns out that almost all “life” in the universe is like this, just parasitic AI that serves no real purpose other than to fuck over other people for short-term gains. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about that book more and more in recent years.

    • pachrist@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      For real. It might not always give me the answer, but it usually gets me a step closer to at least asking the right question.

    • Krompus@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Betcha some people lose their jobs when management notices how much less productive they are without Reddit and StackOverflow.

      At least school’s out for summer.

      • ante@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The quality of programming-related content on Reddit is absolutely terrible. The major lanuage-related subreddits are almost nothing but people self-promoting their latest Medium blogspam or thousands of people patting someone on the back for sharing their first “Hello world” program. Anyone going there for any sort of advice surely didn’t gain any sort of productivity boost.

      • RoboticMask@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Um, I would say that stackoverflow contributes to productivity, but reddit is likely mostly detrimental. Never used Reddit for work, not even programming subreddits, but StackOverflow all the time.