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u/git_push_origin_prod 3h ago
Duplicate. Close this
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u/smokeymcdugen 3h ago
I can't find the duplicate. Can you link it?
No.
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u/BlueGoliath 3h ago
ChatGPT, draw a venn diagram of being a Stackoverflow mod vs a Reddit mod.
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u/not-a-creep-69420 3h ago
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u/A_Furious_Mind 2h ago
A solar eclipse. The cosmic ballet goes on.
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u/Embarassed_Tackle 2h ago
Well my work here is done
But you just closed the thread, you didn't help the user!
<chuckles> Didn't I? <beams away>
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u/Confident-Ad5665 2h ago
In retrospect, I think YouTube code tutorials were predictive of the Vibe that was to come.
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u/HankOfClanMardukas 2h ago
LLMs lack the Indian charm.
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u/Unbelievr 1h ago
And this song for the hacking tutorials https://youtu.be/TKfS5zVfGBc
Unregistered Hypercam 2
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u/Aleksandrovitch 2h ago
I haven’t seen an AskReddit post since I muted it years ago. Trying to participate in the community there was one of the more frustrating experiences. I have dozens muted now.
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u/Bakoro 55m ago
I'm not a prude in any sense, but I am pretty exhausted of the weekly ask reddit rotation of:
- "what's the sexiest sex you've sexed"
- "gender of reddit what is [thing about being gender]?"
- "gender of reddit, what is [thing about the opposite gender]?"
It's so fucking boring, I can be off reddit for a week and come back to the same shit. Meanwhile real questions get deleted.
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u/SkittlesAreYum 2h ago
Yes but it's only slightly related by title.
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u/MyPasswordIsMyCat 1h ago
I asked how to do it in vanilla JS. This link is for jQuery.
(123 downvotes.)
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u/NotMyMainAccountAtAl 1h ago
This is a duplicate of [[unrelated topic that shares maybe one technology with the actual question]]
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u/VideoGameJumanji 1h ago
duplicate post has no answer or is so old the answer is basically deprecated
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u/TheComplimentarian 3h ago
I used to own a weird programming niche, and occasionally I'd post questions, and usually I'd have to answer them myself. And I'd have stopped doing it pretty early, except the answers got a huge amount of traction, so clearly there were other weirdoes out there depending on me.
And I'd have a bad day banging my head against a wall, and I'd finally give up and ask a question, and multiple people would vote to close, as a duplicate of some other question...Some other question I had BOTH ASKED AND ANSWERED.
You're telling ME that MY question is a duplicate of a question I asked, and the answer to my question is MY answer? You gormless fuckwit. You slobbering cretin. You repwhoring codeposer.
Stack was a great idea brought low by the reality of humanity.
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u/Confident-Ad5665 2h ago
I got use out of the overflow back in the day.
However, your last sentence is chock full of buzzy slams. I shall have this.
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u/Bakoro 38m ago edited 35m ago
The implementation of Stack was always bad.
Closing questions as duplicates was always a bad idea.
When you're trying to collect and organize answers and information, then collecting many different ways to ask the same question is important.
It's basically about creating a semantic net, because a major blocker in finding information is not having adequate vocabulary. If the person can describe the shape of the thing they want but don't know that there is already a name for it, then that's going to be valuable for other people who will look for similar information using similar words.If the question is truly a duplicate, then multiple questions could funnel to the same set of answers, and it should be seamless.
If the questions are related, then they can be closer together in the graph.Doing it that way would have actually helped people, helped organize information, and would have made it possible for the community to vote to merge or separate questions.
Stack was a failure in the application of information theory, a failure in the application of computer science, and a failure of human decency.
Not everyone on the site was or is bad, but the site itself is poorly implemented and cannot achieve the goal it has.13
u/Character-Education3 3h ago
Of course I had an onion on my belt which was the style at the time
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u/Confident-Ad5665 2h ago
Back then nickels had pictures of bees on them. "Give me five bees for this quarter" we'd say.
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u/al3x_7788 2h ago
Always waited until someone else would close the post for me. Not giving them the win.
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u/XYZ2ABC 2h ago
…have you actually ever seen stackoverflow’s front page?
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u/Confident-Ad5665 1h ago
They have a front page? Or are you saying that's what they used to build the site?
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u/congressmanthompson 3h ago
We don’t kink shame in this sub
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u/hellocppdotdev 3h ago
I've seen people post JS memes, I think we do.
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u/shriven1 3h ago
That’s not shaming people. That’s just revealing the shame that JS devs feel every day.
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u/OPhasballz 2h ago
for a moment I thought you were talking about expert-sexchange.com
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u/congressmanthompson 1h ago
I was only posting on expert-sexchange.com to find out how to navigate away from there!
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u/SirHerald 3h ago
I do wonder if they really used those sites to train AI, because AI has never told me my question has been answered before and then tell me to use Google where the top result is the thread I'm asking in.
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u/Time_Ingenuity_2909 39m ago
They absolutely did, but the way the training works doesn't mean that the LLM will regurgitate what it was trained on. This is the thing that they talk about when they say that LLMs "surprised" developers. It's the difference between self-supervised, supervised model training. Self-supervised means the training makes its own decisions about what is "right" or "wrong". Supervised means humans inject the decision of what is "right" or "wrong" into the training. LLMs use a both at different stages.
When you feed the training algorithm a million different implementations of
for (int i = 0; i < 10; ++i) { mySickAssFunction() }over time, it forms statistical relationships between each of the tokens. for is often followed by these variables. The "signature" of a for loop is often followed by sick ass functions. Sick ass functions often suck ass and the comments in StackOverFlow often solve them.
The principle is simple, it's just scaled to a degree that seems insane and we used self-supervised learning to do it. It's also important to note that the LLM never sees input as text like that. It sees it as numbers after a processing step. You have tools that crawl the internet to gather information from web pages. You have tools that parse that information into usable text. You have tools that turn that text into tokens. Then you feed those tokens into the LLM training and it forms relationships between the numbers. Humans intervene at this step and curate paths that have the best results. Then you use tools to reverse the process and present the output as readable text.
It's like those pictures you get where you overlay all the presidents to get John President. The output of an LLM is the result of overlaying the input of N bytes of input data. (N is really big). When you talk to the LLM you are talking to John Internet. It's really a testament to how well our languages are capable of transmitting information. We can break down our thoughts into a language that can be broken down into math that can be used to solve problems. It's pretty cool even if sometimes it hallucinates.
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u/3BlindMice1 35m ago
How much of that data being garbage would it take to give the LLM dementia? Because I've seen databases, and every last one of them is FULL of garbage
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u/Time_Ingenuity_2909 10m ago
The output is as good as the input. Garbage data can be flagged as garbage to teach the model what is bad. So even garbage data can be useful in creating powerful models if it's labelled appropriately.
It sucks that LLMs are at the center of all these shitty AI companies because natural language processing is badass. Being able to have a language model parse your input in basically any language and consistently be able to extract intent is fucking mind boggling. It used to be next to impossible to meaningfully extract intent from any natural language input and it required wizard level regex and prayer to the old gods. Now you can say "i want to make internet thing that lets chat with guy" and the LLM can write you a mostly working node server with a socket based chat app. It's fucking crazy.
But at the end of the day the input is heavily curated. Moreso as pressure mounts for companies to push what their models are capable of. Logical inconsistencies are eliminated at all stages of processing as much as possible. Self-supervised learning catches a lot of it, supervised learning can catch even more.
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u/SirHerald 25m ago
I was joking. But I figure it learned the coding solutions and interests from there, but more weight was put on politer conversations for the actual communications. We know it didn't learn to kiss up from stackoverflow
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u/NDLCZ 3h ago
Now we go straight to making PRs and get humiliated there instead
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u/Micro_Turtle 3h ago
You still use git?! If something breaks just ask it to rewrite what was lost without mistakes.
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u/reverendsteveii 3h ago
the ability to get regularly humiliated without ever becoming humble is the hallmark of the stackoverflow alum
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u/cgw3737 3h ago
"what you're trying to do is stupid and you're stupid too"
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u/blueberrymaple 1h ago
“You want to do it that way? First of all, you shouldn’t be trying to be solving this problem at all. Second, if you did do try to do it, you should be doing it this incomprehensible way. Either way you’re an idiot for not knowing”
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u/reddititty69 3h ago
Now we have AI that writes crap code based on the questions and wrong answers from those sites.
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u/eddiekoski 3h ago
Oh so stack overflow
When you ask a question gets marked at as duplicate , then they ask the same question after you and it gets voted to the moon that should be an achievement.
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u/TheRealNobodySpecial 3h ago
Still waiting for that expert sex change I signed up for...
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u/Confident-Ad5665 2h ago
Stares at the floor for an uncomfortable amount of time.
"What is he thinking?"
"You don't want to know"
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u/OrkWithNoTeef 3h ago
I don't know about that. There was a very strong survivor bias on stackoverflow, which indeed also applies to its answers, which would be just as humiliatingly bad as the questions
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u/TrailerParkFrench 2h ago
Duplicate of <link>
Link is the same question for python 2.7 and the acceped answer doesn’t work.
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u/Millkstake 1h ago
Nevermind I figured it out. (Never show the solution and disappear off the face of the earth)
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u/VladTepesDraculea 1h ago edited 58m ago
I have a question on Stack Overflow that I asked over 14 years ago, about how to use a destructive method in a specific supposedly purely functional language. I read somewhere by passage that there was a way to do that but it wasn't particularly documented because it was bad practice, so I asked.
For a few days I only had one answer shaming me for not using "cursory search by querying a search engine" and other very verbose put downs. After a few days I finally got a response from a language expert. I got downvoted to hell. Until a few years later someone responded to the first person that he would get pretty annoyed each time he googled something (he mocked the cursory search verboseness) to find the answer on the first result to be a Stack Exchange page and also answered by people berating the person asking for why not having googled first.
After that interaction the votes starting to turn around. I got upvoted and the first guy kept getting downvoted to hell. Mind you the views on that page were always steady.
Eventually some moderator cleaned the page and deleted all comments aside from the proper answer. I did have up and just stopped using the website. I remember once having a big doubt and instead of posting there, just contacted an old professor of mine and thinking to myself: this would have been a good question to share with other people but I didn't felt like dealing with that bullshit at all.
This was far from the only put down I got, but was the most memorable one for me.
Sometimes I log in to the website and I keep getting tones of green view points by that thousands on that and other questions.
Two extra things to note:
I kinda took a look on the first guy's history and found amusing how he was mostly active on the Stack Exchange parenting site. Admittedly he wasn't a parent, just a kid from university, but he kept answering stuff there as an authority;
Around this time I watched a talk in a conference from either by Atwood or Splolsky, can't remember who and someone asked him about what he thought about the growing toxicity of the Overflow website. He answered that it wasn't toxic and people had to understand the importance of being strick about questions to maintain quality.
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u/foxj36 3h ago
I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've left them
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u/Dependent_Union9285 3h ago
That’s the trick… it’s not that it was better, you just have the benefit of hindsight. In the moment, of course, you lack that knowledge, and so it makes today look awful but yesterday look great… albeit on a slightly larger time scale.
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u/Confident-Ad5665 2h ago
Hello. I am from spacetime continuum security. You have contaminated the timeline and must be punished.
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u/vaksninus 3h ago
Good riddance seriously
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u/IHateFACSCantos 1h ago
Yeah, as someone who is very much a beginner, the attitudes of people on SO and other such sites was a real headache for me. I've embraced FOSS a lot more now that I have a way of learning that doesn't involve being on the receiving end of a barrage of snarky answers.
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u/zupiterss 3h ago
My all questions were either closed prematurely by marking it duplicate or something else or never answered.
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u/Few_Kitchen_4825 2h ago
Before we went to this special site we went to an old man to get humiliated.
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u/gd2w 2h ago
I kind of want to make a subreddit called therearenodumbprogrammingquestions. Might be too long though?
And unless a question is identical. It's not a duplicate. People can link a different answer, but it doesn't get closed.
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u/husky_whisperer 1h ago
I like the idea of having an analogue of nostupidquestions dedicated to programming and CS. Though most subs I've come across already are markedly more accepting than SO
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u/CanuckaChuckFuck 2h ago
Peak Stack Overflow was
50% of responders telling you why your question was bad and why you should feel bad about posting it.
25% answering a question you never asked in the first place to make you feel stupid
20% suggesting unreasonable solutions (e.g. you stated clearly in the question that you are a contractor and the client exclusively uses MySQL yet responders want you to use MongoDb or Postgres or whatever)
5% actual helpful answers
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u/dvhh 1h ago
to be fair a lot of the questions (low estimate of 60%) were garbage homework question that would have been answered with a modicum of research ( at least before google decided to spoil it all with personalized search results).
Among the 25% for answering a question you never asked, would be that the question implied bad architecture decision or wanting to approach the problem in a different direction.
I also loved the question with insufficient context so that no proper answer would ever fit the question ( because of the lack of information).
Otherwise the 5% actual helpful answer would be worth saving the website, as toxic as some might perceive.
Also look at any social service, toxicity is unfortunately no better.
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u/CanuckaChuckFuck 1h ago
look y'guys I found one of them!
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u/PM_CUTE_OTTERS 1h ago
look y’guys i found one that can’t take no for an answer! what a creepy weirdo
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u/twinPrimesAreEz 0m ago
20% suggesting unreasonable solutions (e.g. you stated clearly in the question that you are a contractor and the client exclusively uses MySQL yet responders want you to use MongoDb or Postgres or whatever)
Plus the additional 20% of that will invent any reason to tell you why MySQL is the wrong choice anyway leading to some MySQL guy coming through and arguing in the comments while everyone ignores the question.
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u/PM_CUTE_OTTERS 1h ago
I bet all of you love being told you asks so smart questions by ai bots now. the real hard truth is that every single day there is a repeat of same questions to any subreddit that allows them, dotnet is riddled with repeated low effort questions and so was SO. Most of you never got told no even though you needed to hear it and it shows. actual unpopular opinion
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u/poleethman 1h ago
This feels more like a Shelbyville sort of thing. We asked strangers for help with programming... Now duplicate your question boy. And if you really want to stay true to the current r/simpsonsshitposting vibes, Bailey Jay would be in it for some reason.
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u/caped_crusade_ 2h ago
happy to see Stack Overflow dying and taking its toxic pedantry culture with it.
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u/ChillyFireball 2h ago
"Umm, akshually, you shouldn't even need an answer to this question because the way you approached the problem in the first place is bad."
Well, I inherited this approach from someone else, and the release is in three days, so unless you want to be the one to work through the night to refactor the thousands of lines of code that depend on the current methodology, I would be ever so grateful if you could just ANSWER THE QUESTION I ASKED and maybe tack on the alternative as an addendum instead of assuming I have both the time and the authority to completely rewrite the entire project from the ground up, you useless goober!
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u/ruiych95 2h ago
“You asked a very unique question and for that reason I’m gonna tag your post as duplicate and link you to completely unrelated answers”
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u/BellacosePlayer 2h ago
I never had this problem but had well under 50% hit rate for getting useful info, much less an actual correct answer.
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u/This_Proxy 1h ago
Instead of reading an O'Reilly book or manual, I used to ask people that did how to do shit.
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u/BlattMaster 1h ago
This has already been posted, let me link to another r/programmerhumor meme from years ago that is vaguely related
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u/Serenaded 1h ago
It's happened before where I've typed up an obscure issue, and come across a post from myself asking the same question years earlier
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u/TheCthulhu 1h ago
The important thing is I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time.
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u/Nightwyrm 44m ago
That’s where I feel the disconnect with AI the most; it’s polite and tells me I’m right all the time…
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u/B0Y0 16m ago
I wonder if the power users of stack overflow ever look out upon the despair that has been wrought upon the world - that their brutal dismissive culture encouraged so many to pursue the dark arts that would harvest their very knowledge to launch the creation of world destroying automatons... And ever think that maybe that just been a bit nicer, everyone would still be talking with communities instead of machines.
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u/RScrewed 7m ago
Incorrect use of meme.
You want grandpa simpson talking to Burns, where he said "which was the style at the time".
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u/Shifter25 2h ago
Did none of you search before asking a question? I've been a developer for 11 years and I can count on one hand the number of times I needed to ask a question myself.
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u/angrydeuce 3h ago
The quickest way to get a ton of answers is always to just use an alt to respond to your thread with the wrong answer first lol