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
Stack overflow has mods?
Found that out today too
Closed: This question has already been answered 5 years ago here <link to completely unrelated question>
Better yet: “this question has been answered here <link to old question, answer does not work/doesnt apply or work anymore>”
good for them. Organizing and taking action is the only way to get capitalists to listen
Instead of hoping that the corporation will change, they should just move to the fediverse.
To be fair, did anyone ever actually like Stack?
It can be a great resource if you put time into writing really good questions. I’ve gotten dozens of fantastic answers over the years, and thousands of times I’ve found the question I wanted to ask already answered.
When someone complains about StackOverflow, I always ask to see their question. What I observe is:
- The vast majority of the time, they just didn’t provide nearly enough information to answer the question.
- A lot of the time people got upset because of perceived rudeness, even though they got an answer to their question. StackOverflow tends to be direct / blunt, which isn’t necessarily rude, though it’s definitely not friendly
- People got upset that a question was marked as a duplicate, when it clearly was a duplicate to me, they just didn’t understand how the duplicate applied to their case
However, 10% of the time, the answer really was wrong.
I liked it the hundreds of times it was an accurate first hit for my Google queries
If even the elitist programmers at stack overflow that know everything and discourage questions from users that treat it as some sort of question and answers site can be effected by companies taking from the communities, it can happen to anyone.
I really hope protesting social media/websites owner’s BS becomes a regular practice
I agree, but on the other hand if we moved to decentralized platforms no strikes would be necessary. People only do this, because a company is holding their content as a hostage.
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.
If stackoverflow was a Lemmy instance, I think people would just host a new one and move there?
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.
I thought only beehaw.org defederated it?
Youtube needs a lot of creator strikes to get back to the way it used to be!
While I agree, I think this is unlikely because unlike Reddit and StackOverflow modding, YouTube content creators rely on YouTube for their livelihoods.
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.
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
At least we have readily available AI tools to help
Trained on old stack overflow answers, so newer things could be a problem.
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.
Duplicated, here’s a link to a totally unrelated question made 10 years ago that didn’t got any answer anyway.
The answer is to use jQuery. Always jQuery.
What’s jQuery? I tried googling it and skimmed the Wikipedia, but I don’t get it.
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).
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???
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
Damn, nowhere to find coding help anymore I guess
You can still ask it here /m/stackoverflow 🤣
github isssues.
Once you have a basic level of coding your problem is with a certain package/libraryEdit:// gah I don’t know how to post federated links either :(
So…was the strike because they put a 100-strike limit on moderators marking normal questions as Duplicate/Opinionated/Unclear? Or, because all of the normal users left and it’s just spam trolls left behind?
Ahhh, it’s because of divisions of opinion on AI. No doubt, it’d be easy to tell ChatGPT “ChatGPT, can you come up with excuses to lock all the questions on the front page so my query about Scala stays up top?”
I’m constantly baffled by my coding professor suggesting stackoverflow to students for asking questions because of the experience I am seeing others have there. The new ones are always downvoted and the only reply usually just calls the person stupid. I’d just kinda accepted that this was the culture I was going to matriculate into when I graduate.
Honestly? Your coding professor sounds kind of awesome. Because that is the most useful skill you can learn as a programmer/coder.
There are two (now three-ish) ways to solve a problem like 'I need to integrate this new library" or “I am trying to do X with Y” and the like. You can spend hours learning every nuance of every library and algorithm to figure out exactly what corner case you are in. Or you can ask for help.
And when you ask for help? You need to know how to vet those answers and figure out what is useful. This is true wither it is Jane on the Frontend team or xxx_420_JustBlazeIt on Stack Overflow. And sometimes that is going to involve dealing with an asshole and trying to key in on the useful bits.
Adding on to that is the idea of using an LLM like ChatGPT (which scrapes stackoverflow…). Which is mostly the same end user experience.
One of the hardest and most annoying things to teach people is how to ask for help. It pisses me off to no end how many “weekly standup” meetings I need to schedule just because I know that there are those people who will not ask for help unless I specifically ask them “oh, okay. What is the source of that delay and how can we help? Hey Fred, you have a lot of experience with X, right? Can you and Jim try to sum this problem up for the rest of us?”. And if we don’t have that meeting, they are going to sit by themselves silently trying to parse shitty documentation for weeks.
I once handed in a citation from an answer to my Stack Overflow question.
Something along the lines of… “After hitting a roadblock the community at Stack Overflow was consulted, as suggested in the lecture, and deemed the task not feasible [1].”
The answer I put in the reference was one of the many variants of “Who in their right mind would do this in Matlab? Use Python instead.”
I passed lol.
It was good when it was relatively new. The culture quickly turned toxic, as you’re seeing, and it’s been getting steadily worse for years now. There is a lot of useful information, and often the only thing online with code examples for a certain programming issue. but it is also increasingly outdated, in part due to the ‘no repeat questions’ thing. I have a couple popular answers about PHP and JavaScript from over 12 years ago, and they still get upvoted. Some people comment and say “this is answer is incorrect!” and… yeah, it’s from 2009.
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.
What are companies thinking when they implement policies that hamper volunteers?
“Money!”
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
Let’s not be hyperbolic. I’ll agree MOST companies behave this way. There are plenty of companies that also value their staff, pay them well and take good care of their customers.
I bought a handcrafted cane from a craftsman in Ukraine and when a small crack formed in the handle after a few months of use. I wrote him to ask how to repair the crack and he straight up remade the entire handle and sent it to me for free. He also sent me a free leather strap for the cane.
The company is called Asterom and they are absolutely worth your money if you need/want a cane. You also support an awesome Ukrainian company.
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.
Amazon customer service is great and they still treat their employees like shit.
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.
💀
Correct my evidence is anecdotal. However your comment is completely void of any. I will agree apples and oranges are very different though.
It’s not often that I can post this song in a manner relevant to a conversation.
Can’t resist. Leon Redbone. Enjoy.I often come to YSK for my cane recommendations
“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”
Fuuuuuuuuuuck. Welp. That’s it. The internet is closed for business. Thanks for stopping by
The new corporate internet is slowly dying, seems like. About time to go back the the more grassroots internet if possible. The rich won’t save us.
Is there a FOSS alternative to stackexchange yet?
https://www.codidact.com/ was started in response to the previous round of exactly the same shitty behaviour from the stack exchange management a few years ago.
All open source forum software pretty much
Yeah, before StackOverflow took over everything my web searches for programming problems would usually lead to forum threads. The quality of information would usually be better there, too.
Following
Seems like Lemmy has a starring functionality.
OSQA (question & answer) used to be the one that you could host locally
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You’re storing phone numbers as integers?
OOooooooohhh that’s a great use case. Get it to generate data!
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.
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.
I’ve asked the Bing one to look through some documentation for me before, and generally that seems to work out alright.
“Using [some package], how do I do X?”
Recently there was a Typescript thing I didn’t know how to do, and it was faster to ask the robot than dig through tons and tons of documentation. And I can still always double check (which I do).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Haven’t though about that, you’re right.
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…).
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
