Do they actually publish this data?
Isn’t this when Safari and Firefox started blocking third party trackers by default?
That wouldn’t stop page views from being counted.
I’ve been on SO like ten times altogether since ChatGPT came out. It’s so much nicer than the condescending pricks of Stack Overflow. My favourite is when some genius links a question as a duplicate of something that’s vaguely similar.
What do you ask ChatGPT? I rarely get a correct answer really, it’s all made-up bullshit usually.
I usually have good answers with only minimal bullshit when it comes to coding. If not, it at least points me in the right direction.
This question was already answered 10 years ago in a completely different version of the programming language to the one you’re using, and we know it doesn’t work anymore, in fact hasn’t for 8 years, but we’re going to close it anyway because screw you.
Also you should be doing it in Rust anyway
The problem is that fewer people are generating the new content for gpt to slurp up.
Free information stops working when people stop caring about creating it.
Yeah, I’ve thought about that as well. Doesn’t mean I’m gonna miss Stack Overflow specifically. Perhaps something better replaces it when AI gets poisoned by its own output too much.
I think not. The problem isn’t in a service, the problem is in people.
Sure, that’s why a good service doesn’t create an environment which supports people being dicks. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what SO does with the way it works.
Yup. Stopped answering questions as soon as they did that.
my first thought about it too
Just wait until there’s no stack overflow to scrape.
I think the quality contributors are probably not the ones moving to chatGPT…
I think it goes further than that. There’s two things happening with regard to AI and software development.
1: Stack overflow has become less common as a resource to solve problems. This, as you say has a problem of input into LLMs for future problems to solve.
2: Junior developers are being hired less because of AI. I assume the idea is that seniors will use AI in the same way they would usually use juniors. Except, they’ve done what business always does. Not think one bit about the future. Today’s senior developers are yesterdays junior developers.The combination of AI performance drop due to point 1, and the lack of new developers because of point 2 makes for potentially, a bad future for the profession.
As a senior developer I have no idea how I’d get an AI to autonomously keep a small subsystem maintained. If I was replacing junior developers, that’s what it has to do.
Everybody in my team gets to own something. What you own depends on your capability. You learn by doing. No dogsbodies doing busy work.
Everybody in my team gets to own something.
Oh I like this.
It works great if nobody ever leaves or dies or takes vacation. We try to discourage siloization of projects and emphasize cross-training - it makes the job more interesting, gives people more/better tools to solve problems with, etc. And anytime the business objects we mention the project where X left and how painful it is to get new anything added/enhanced because none of those tenets were involved.
However, all bets are off with offshore contractors. Some want to learn, some simply don’t care and will do the bare minimum.
We try to discourage siloization of projects and emphasize cross-training
This is how my work has been and it allowed me to touch every part of the repo while still a junior dev and gain lots of experience. So I also like that. But lately I’m trying to specialize more and go deep into things, and I like the idea of being an expert on something. So I appreciate the trade-offs.
all bets are off with offshore contractors. Some want to learn, some simply don’t care and will do the bare minimum.
As a guy who was replaced by offshore contractors, and who hasn’t had a single interview in 7 months while offshore contractors are (probably) still getting lots of work… I find this observation both heartening and disheartening.
One of my bosses has a concept of “T-shaped developers”, which means you know everything a little, and have depth on one thing.
7months: ouch, sorry to hear. I wish I had some words of wisdom to share.
I don’t think developers are doing it. It’s managers making this kind of decision I’d say.
Everybody in my team gets to own something. What you own depends on your capability.
This is a point I try to constantly make when people don’t understand why 2 people have the same title but don’t really have the same job, especially in technical fields.
No two people have the same set of skills, so we all end up taking on the tasks we’re more capable of than the next person.
Junior developers are being hired less because of AI.
Where are you seeing this? I’ve not seen any evidence of that, yet.
I’ve been told about companies in the same field as mine with a hiring freeze on juniors. So it’s kinda second hand.
Im a consultant senior dev and devops engineer. Ive worked for over 100 companies in the last 10 years on various engagements. Ive worked for multiple companies and clients at the same time through some consulting agencies. Ive worked for startups and FAANG companys. Ive also worked as a technical PM and EM for these same companies and hired hundreds of engineers.
Junior dev market is 100% in its last death throws before finally officially being pronounced dead. The job market has vanished so thoroughly between AI and offshoring in a high fed-rate economy, even though we just started rate cutting, by the time we feel the effects, AI will have further killed juniors without ever returning.
I dislike it, because i want to train people not machines, but the average junior dev is so bad its insane and not only have companies found that out, senior engineers have too. Many people like to TALK about mentoring new engineers… the reality is, few actually do. It takes significantly less time to correct chatgpt and claude code then it does to have a junior take 2-5 days and write it all wrong, and they interrupt your work to ask you a million questions again and again.
I just had a contract with a startup company… 40 million series B company with a simple fucking CRUD app… their engineering team? 35 SENIOR ONLY engineers. The least senior of which was an IC3 our of IC6 senior engineer.
This does tally up with what I’ve been hearing. Where I’m at there’s been a few hires straight into senior. I’ve not heard of an official junior freeze. At the same time it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a new one.
The problem, as I commented prior, is that if we no longer bring in junior devs to gain this kind of experience, we lose the flow of junior -> senior. But in most places, the people making the decisions won’t consider anything beyond the end of the current fin year.
Is this finally the dusk of SO? It helps alot, but also suck alot.
Honestly SO fuelled the rise of the cut and paste developer. I won’t be that sad to see the end of it, and the LLMs that scraped it soon after.
You are also underestimating how sites like SO really helped a new generation of programmers learn. Anyone could search and learn things, whether to take a serious approach or just for a bit of fun.
Before they pulled up the ladder. There is NOTHING more frustrating than looking up a problem, getting the exact question you are looking for, only for the answers to say the question is locked and given a link to another malformed question which tell you to rtfm, and that this is no longer supported., try to do something else with a completely different software in a completely different way. All in an attempt to keep the question pool pure. I do not mourn SO.
The amount of people I’ve been helping out that have copied some code from somewhere and say “it doesn’t work”, and who are dumbfounded when I ask them to read the surrounding text aloud for me…
Along the same line: When something crashes, and all I have to do is tell people to read the error message aloud, and ask them what that means. It’s like so many people expect to be spoon-fed solutions, to the point where they don’t even stop to think about the problem if something doesn’t immediately work.
Closed as duplicate
Now that’s just a signal for training reinforcement
Interesting. I actually thought of it as a replacement for Google. With Google search being broken for years it’s the only easy way to get information now.
They are really bad for getting correct information and putting it in context: Information literacy and chatbots as search
yeah it’s replacement for google only if you don’t care if any of information received is accurate at all
Which… is google
"New ChatGPT with Ads!
Giving you that Google feeling once again. "
There are other search engines.
Most of them have the same problem though. The more specific you are the worse the results.
Idk, I rarely have any problems searching for things.
It’s also around the time they did away with their jobs board thing isn’t it? I got a job through it in 2021 and somewhere after that they sunset it, which was an insane business decision because it was the best job search platform out there.
Guilty <-
Down voted. If you’re just going to post a screenshot, you must include a link to the source. This is a link sharing platform.
I thought I was going to be rickrolled but this is better.
I’m raising their traffic,by slowly poisoning my answers & questions.
Why would you want to also make Stack Overflow worse?
I didn’t consent to ChatGPT using my stuff. So they get 💩.
But so do the Stack Overflow users
Wut. You consented to CC BY-SA. That’s consenting to everyone using your work, including for profit companies and nonprofits. This is a good thing.
OpenAI doesn’t attribute the original training data, so not consented?
That’s valid, if true. Are you sure somewhere on their website they don’t have a link back to SE?
Their training data is their secret
I’ve tried to delete my content, I wasn’t allowed. So I replaced all my content with text about not consenting to this whole thing. I got banned for 2 months “to think about my behavior”, or something like that. So I’ve set a reminder for the date…
Although we have seen a small decline in traffic, in no way is it what the graph is showing (which some have incorrectly interpreted to be a 50% or 35% decrease). This year [2023], overall, we’re seeing an average of ~5% less traffic compared to 2022.
They’re lying
Says who? ChatGPT?
Says corporations trying to protect their investment.
ChatGPT is lying too, and is also really confident about it.
Is this a facts or feelings response?
Is this a trust a company to announce it’s dying response?
You got evidence for that bold statement, ooooor
An ML trusting a corporation, orrrr?
And yet they didn’t show us a rectified or accurate graph.
Chat GPT is wonderful as a search engine for SO. It regurgitates the answers in a format easier to incorporate into your own project.
The thing I’m worried about is a lack of new answers. You need data to train an LLM, what to do if nobody is producing it?
It already uses the docs and API references
But who writes the docs now
Ha! I have an AI for that! Gotcha!
…
On, but the AI trains now on other docs that I used an AI to write…
…
Oh shit…
I typically visit stack overflow when encountering edge cases and bugs not covered by the documentation.
If it has learned from the source code you’d be surprised how good it is at that as well.
For docs it’s better, for other stuff it’s way worse than a human.
It’s a shame so much stuff is locked up in discord these days.
yeah, discord the the true black hole of information
Wonder where chatgpt will get its training data in the future, as it’s known not to extrapolate well. Where will it learn new frameworks, languages, … from?
The docs. It’s what it does now a lot of the time I’ve noticed.
Auto generated docs since devs don’t document?
Yeah the smaller the project the less effective this is.
But even learning from the source code is pretty effective.
Chatgpt, look at this repo and write docs
Somebody already did that but it wasn’t with chat GPT and honestly the docs were fine.
It didn’t do that thing that a lot of humans do when writing documentation which is just declare that something is true without explaining why it is true. So you end up in random PHP like land, when things just work like that okay.
Its going to starve itself.
Let it die
The documentation?
I doubt it ever scraped SO, otherwise all the answers would be smth along the lines: “I cannot answer this question due to low quality effort!” closes browser window
A lot of models are being trained on “synthetic” data now, right?
Even when a parrot learns to parrot a parrot, the first parrot still has to be taught.
Armies on paid personal generating content?
I see absolutely no problem with that.
I hope every contractor and employee who has ever worked for that shit hole goes bankrupt, loses their home in a foreclosure auction and spends the rest of their life begging for handouts on the street.
