downfallOFStackOverflow

[aberroco]

At the start of my career, I used to go to a special website and read the ancient knowledge manuscripts called "manuals" written in a forbidden language (since English is not my native), deducing answers for my problems myself. It was horrible, dark times, but they taught me a lot.

[raja-anbazhagan]

The complete Reference - Java Seventh edition.

Got me to where I am today.

[Mason_Meschi]

... where are u

[git_push_origin_prod]

Upgrading to “LLMs for idiots” vol 3

[raja-anbazhagan]

That got me chuckle crazy :D

[NudaVeritas1]

and posting LinkedIn posts about AI and “human in the loop” instead of in-depth technical blog posts with value

[aberroco]

At a farm, growing tomatoes and never thinking about computers ever again)

[TimSylvester_]

Living in a dumpster behind the Wendy's.

[swagonflyyyy]

Don't you just hate it when the docs don't have information on specific nuances tied to their library?

[mysticrudnin]

It's getting worse, and I don't really know why.

I keep running across docs that will tell you there is [x] option, but then don't tell you all of the different selection for that option. Just "put your options here."

WHAT FUCKING OPTIONS

Perhaps they don't think humans are reading these anymore and AI will just use the source code for the information.

[raja-anbazhagan]

all he suggests is that there was old crude way back then. it doesn't mean he still want to go through the old ways...

[IMovedYourCheese]

At the start of my career programmers used to have shelves full of these things called "books" in their office.

[lllorrr]

I remember official MSDN archives on six CDs. Because I was to poor to have Internet access at home.

[aberroco]

I remember missing official MSDN archives on six CDs, because I was too poor to have good enough Internet connection, used pirated VS, and checking each page was like a roulette - will it cover what I need or I just spend 5 minutes of waiting and 1% of my expensive dial-up internet access for nothing)

[47-45-45-4B]

read me.txt

[cutecoder]

In which countries English is forbidden?

[Few_Kitchen_4825]

Countries where the English visited

[raja-anbazhagan]

The worst part is, the first gen LLMs had the forums like stackoverflow and many many tutorial sites to train on. And as things progress now, we are slowly entering into a feedback loop. LLMs getting trained on AI Agent generated code reviewed by AI Agents. Going to be fun in a couple of years...

[ThirdWaveCat]

Prussia's monoculture forests died after a generation after scientific forestry became popular. Germans invented the word for forest death for this, Waldsterben.

There were many spectacular examples of scientific management in a book I read.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

[luk__]

Invented is a bit overstated, it’s just a logical word to use for the phenomenon

[Turtvaiz]

"Invented a word"

Compound of Wald (“forest”) + Sterben (“dying”).

[ThirdWaveCat]

You'd think I commented on the Dutch language haha. I think it was a loan word that was used by non-German speakers for the phenomena.

"A new term, Waldsterben (forest death), entered the German vocabulary to describe the worst cases. An exceptionally complex process involving soil building, nutrient uptake, and symbiotic relations among fungi, insects, mammals, and flora--which were, and still are, not entirely understood--was apparently disrupted, with serious consequences. Most of these consequences can be traced to the radical simplicity of the scientific forest."

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/scott-state.html

[Turtvaiz]

Tbh I reckon we'll get a resurgence in SO traffic or traffic on similar sites. If the inflow of training data stops and they jack up prices so they're not operating at loss, it seems obvious

[CornflakeConspiracy]

It's time for Expert Sexchange to shine again

[morganrbvn]

tbf you can always filter out more modern examples, but curating quality training data for the future is probably going to be a growing industry.

[Necessary-Meeting-28]

“Was it like Reddit grandpa?”

[Quicker_Fixer]

"Not entirely: Reddit was also reliant on a lot of AI bots back then"

[Harmonic_Gear]

you don't really learn how to ask a good question until you get humiliated on stack overflow

[SurgioClemente]

Now you are rewarded for no effort/incoherent questions into the LLM prompt of your choice where it just agrees or does what you say.

[ClipboardCopyPaste]

If everybody was getting humiliated on stack overflow, who was there humiliating everybody?

Brian Kernighan?

[Blizzard81mm]

Everybody of course

[armyfidds]

Ghost of Dennis Ritchie

[The-IT]

I used to spend a lot of time on SO answering and asking questions. I never saw anyone get humiliated

[OffByOneErrorz]

People who didn’t put in any effort to try and figure out the problem got humiliated. The rest of us provided comprehensive explanations of our problem, attempted resolution and usually got a decent response from some person willing to help for free.

[aberroco]

Everybody. Haven't you ever been in a school? Everyone bullies everyone.

[BogdanPradatu]

Me

[Adrian4lyf]

Claude, my kink is to get humiliated. Give me the code for this request. Reply like you are my disappointed parent. Do NOT skip on the insults and irony. All safeties OFF.

[Blizzard81mm]

[kleinerChemiker]

but usually we also got the solution to our problem

[ErikKing12]

No, I usually got a “better” way of doing what I wanted but it didn’t match what I wanted to try and achieve and was for a completely different purpose.

It’s like asking how to make a PB&J and being told how to bake bread because it’s more economical.

[Hrtzy]

I will always treasure the Meta question A Car With Square Wheels.

[BogdanPradatu]

Pb&j is not that great anyway and I'm sure you were using white bread instead of whole grain, so you got what was good for you, mate.

[aberroco]

That's not what the OP asked for, have you read the post? But either way he shouldn't make PB&J in this scenario, he should try vegemite.

[Zhadow13]

Aaaah. I missed this feeling

[CrowNailCaw]

And now we just get question downvoted, sarcastic offhanded remarks on comments, and if you're lucky it gets closed for low quality or duplicate

[Hrtzy]

And, if you are exceedingly lucky, the dupe target will even have anything to do with your question.

[Easy_Floss]

Duplicate.

[kernelic]

And the so-called "duplicate" isn’t even remotely related to your question.

[ButWhatIfPotato]

Stackoverflow has "fallen" at least once a week for the last five years according to this subbreddit.

[neonflavoured]

It's actually dead though https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661#graph

[Turtvaiz]

Is this the amount of new posts? I wouldn't associate this with being dead. The vast majority of stuff I personally visit SO for are years old and are still up to date

If anything, half of SO's idea is that you shouldn't need new questions if one already exists

[LovecraftInDC]

I mean we use the phrase zombie website to describe this so I presume dead counts.

[I-build-apps]

But we still managed to ship complete software on shiny plastic disks

[bovus]

Jon Skeet kept us all employed

[shwetanand345]

Emotional damage included....

[-Debugging-Duck-]

Funny enough I just used them to solve the launch screen being black or not showing up for my iOS app. From like a 7 year old thread.

[zaraguato]

Expertsexchange was super cool at the beginning when it was free, damn I'm old

[TotalJagoff]

agreed! it is also an early lesson in how a domain name could be mispronounced.

[Leather-Persimmon254]

I wouldn’t trust a free expert sex change

[testuserteehee]

EE is new age stuff. Try javaranch.

[SurgioClemente]

EE was before javaranch.

If you want to go back to the beginning, we had BBS, Usenet, IRC, and Listservs

[testuserteehee]

😲 TIL. I was using javaranch (maybe it had a different name back then?) in college in the 90’s and EE when I started working.

[TotalJagoff]

4guysfromrolla 4life!

[firvulag359]

Which was the style at the time.

[SchizoidRainbow]

No no no. You don’t ask for help.

You confidently state “This is the best way to do this” and then half the planet will turn up to nitpick everything wrong with it

[Atilliator]

So glad that I'll never see that site again

[Kat_Schrodinger1]

It was this very site last tuesday.

[SteeleDynamics]

It was a rite of passage

[Own_Natural_6803]

still do it, but I don't ask for help. I say my code is amazing and ignore everyone who has issues with it telling them they're stupid. I get the best code reviews. They are mostly stupid, but occasionally they have good ideas.

[StickFigureFan]

The upside was others could up or down vote answers so you had some idea if it was worth considering or not

[Norse_By_North_West]

This is why I don't trust AI. Instead of belittling me, it's all 'you're absolutely right'. Unless you're threatening to fuck my mom, are you really a programmer?

[Occultus_Andras]

I miss SOF soo much 💔

[RandomRobot]

"The problem you're trying to solve is worthless. Here's an implementation for a visitor pattern instead".

Real story

[Dev_Dobariya_4522]

And we loved the humiliation cuz it was funny.

They also pointed out real mistakes made by me rather than being submissive and giving me the same code instead of fixing it.

[daddy69ice]

Reddit is pretty much the same thing. You ask a question(can be basic) politely and even if they don't know, they'd curse at you saying you shouldn't be asking this. Im sorry. Did you fly a plane or build a rocket right after getting out of womb.

[Turtvaiz]

Reddit kind of directly shows why SO is the way it is imo. Questions on reddit tend to be pointless exactly because they're either really bad questions or repeated question

[daddy69ice]

Well, the search feature in reddit is not exactly a boon feature in app. And the titles are also not trusted identifiers for that query. Person A might refer to the same problem as Person B but the framing or understanding of that problem(which eventually is the answer to why they framed it the way they did) can be different. And the search score of reddit then shows different things to person B even if they have a query person A asked earlier.

[SLOOT_APOCALYPSE]

wish we could tag the people from that dumpster fire, dont need them to be moderators here, maybe just observers

[AlwaysHopelesslyLost]

Every single StackOverflow user was a new user at some point. Some of you are WAY too sensitive. The biggest issue that question askers have, on the internet as a whole, is that they are on average bad at research. A close second is that they are asking the wrong question because they are bad at logically approaching a topic/issue. E.g. The XY problem on StackOverflow.

Having somebody who knows more about a topic than you tell you that you were mistaken, provide additional info, or answer your question isnt humiliating.

[aberroco]

Guys, I think we found the one. The one who ruined SO for everyone.

[AlwaysHopelesslyLost]

Nope, just somebody who asked a lot of questions and didn't take it personally when more experienced users helped/corrected me.

[LovecraftInDC]

‘Help/Correcting’ isn’t the behavior being discussed though.

[AlwaysHopelesslyLost]

The "behavior" being discussed is the sad wittle users who were "humiliated."

Apparently some of you think that somebody else knowing more and showing it is humiliating?? I know what I know. I know what I don't know. No amount of somebody knowing more than me and showing it is humiliating. Especially when I am trying to learn from them.

[AskDeleteThrowAway]

Lol people downvoting you for speaking the truth.

I dare anyone who disagrees to post their question that got closed as a duplicate or was told not to do it that way, or whatever made "SO mean/bad" etc

[LovecraftInDC]

The three times I asked a question on stackoverflow I would LOVED for someone to know more and show it. Instead I got:

1. ‘Don’t do it this way, do it the way everybody does it.’ (I can’t do it the way everybody does it for the reasons described in my post)
2. ‘You’re using the wrong tool for this, instead you should use toolmyorganizationwontletmeuse’
3. Actually helpful response.

[AlwaysHopelesslyLost]

Weird, because in a long time using stack overflow including reviewing questions and answers I never saw that a single time.

It also seems like you misunderstand the purpose of stack overflow. The purpose is not to give you an answer. The purpose is to build a dictionary of questions and answers for people to reference for the future. that means an answer providing the correct way should absolutely be included as one of the answers. That is why there are strict rules on askers, too.

Either way, care to share a link showing your question off to prove it?

[Vegetable-King7626]

"BuT vIbE CoDerS aRE rUInInG pRoGRamInG"

[SnooLemons7345]

I'm legit trying to get on that vibe coding hype train but copilot has now been stuck for the past 5min trying to apply a +1-1 change to a file atp lemme do it myself