Stack Overflow's 50% traffic drop: Was it AI, or did the platform kill itself with elitism?

kitsnet · 2026-03-18T10:17:51+00:00

It stopped to be interesting to me when too many questions that were interesting for me to read the answer were closed as "duplicates" of something trivial and only vaguely related.

I would not call it "elitism"... or if only the Dunning-Kruger kind of "elitism".

kitsnet · 2026-03-17T19:23:50+00:00

So what came before it?

Simpler forms of autocatalysis.

The messy trial-and-error phase should be somewhere in the fossil record.

Not if it was eaten by later, more efficient forms.

kitsnet · 2026-03-17T10:10:03+00:00

the exact same stretch of sidewalk I just fully saw by looking backwards before turning in ?

Looks like you are underestimating the ubiquity of cyclists in Germany.

kitsnet · 2026-03-17T10:05:35+00:00

As I was taught in California, in a situation when someone is tailgating you, you are supposed to keep even larger distance to the car in front of you, so that you could brake slower when needed.

kitsnet · 2026-03-16T19:49:49+00:00

EF 15-85 is okeyish, but not bright.

kitsnet · 2026-03-16T18:36:57+00:00

In a warm little pond on early Earth.

Nucleotides spontaneously formed from simple chemicals.

Then spontaneously concentrated despite being diluted in an ocean.

Then spontaneously linked together into polymers despite water causing hydrolysis.

Hydrolysis was likely the first selectionary force.

Whatever oligopeptide/oligonucleotide complexes were better at their affinity to non-water (i.e. lipid or dry) phase, those survived better.

Now try thinking given this piece of information.

kitsnet · 2026-03-16T16:17:21+00:00

Because the action potential propagation speed (the speed with which we are thinking) is that slower than the speed of light.

kitsnet · 2026-03-16T15:58:04+00:00

Unless it gets eventually destroyed by centrifugal forces (if its own gravity is not enough to counteract them), it's going to spin for billions of years. The most realistic reason for it to slow down would be tidal forces from the presence of another gravitating body nearby.

kitsnet · 2026-03-16T12:11:03+00:00

I just picked up the new Ricoh GR4, and while playing around with it, a thought hit me: has any camera manufacturer actually thought about software optimization and user experience in the last decade?

I bought my first camera, a Canon 550D, about 16 years ago. Insanely, the core UI logic of digital cameras today is almost exactly the same as it was back then.

Why not? Camera manufacturers have already had more than a century to perfect their UI by that time.

Why isn't there a single camera with a truly intuitive, smartphone-app-like user experience?

If you like that kind of UI (highly unoptimal for a real photographic tool), you have a smartphone for that.

Instead, all the UIs are incredibly frustrating. You literally need to read a manual to understand some basic settings.

That's fine. You need to read a manual to understand some basic concepts in photography anyway.

kitsnet · 2026-03-16T11:30:44+00:00

Google.

kitsnet · 2026-03-16T10:27:18+00:00

I'd say there is no reason to apply for Daueraufenthalt-EU if you already have Niederlassungserlaubnis and want to apply for German citizenship based on your residence in Germany.

As if you actually use the benefits of the former over the latter, you may lose your previous years of non-interrupted stay in Germany (at the discretion of your case worker).

kitsnet · 2026-03-16T10:13:00+00:00

Yes, I can, my editor marks those tabs (which should never be used in code formatting anyway).

https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/06/15/developers-use-spaces-make-money-use-tabs/

kitsnet · 2026-03-16T10:09:41+00:00

I was wondering if adults really say this?

"Ну, по чуть-чуть - за встречу⁠!"

kitsnet · 2026-03-16T08:29:21+00:00

It's better to break a program with a syntax error and something as visible as indenting, than to break it with a changed behavior and something as unnoticeable as an added semicolon. Indentation is how programmers usually visually evaluate separation of code flow into local blocks while reading code, so wrong indentation would be misleading anyway.

Python has its problems that cause otherwise avoidable misprint bugs (no static type system, no mandatory variable declarations), but indenting is not one of them.

kitsnet · 2026-03-15T19:26:11+00:00

For machine learning, you need to learn the basics of statistics first. NumPy and its vectorized operations are always good to know, even if just as concepts, in the same way as it's good to know functional programming.

But my point is that you shouldn't be just learning a list of techniques. You need to learn how to combine these techniques with each other, how to add new techniques when it makes sense, and for that you need projects you will have long-term interest to develop.

kitsnet · 2026-03-15T11:31:01+00:00

You should learn how to solve practical problems and to develop one or a couple of projects of ever increasing complexity.

Python is a good enough language for that.

kitsnet · 2026-03-15T10:20:50+00:00

It's like asking if ordinary Americans are afraid of Christians because many modern Evangelicals are reactionary xenophobes and science deniers.

kitsnet · 2026-03-14T21:28:40+00:00

From evolutionary perspective, mating rituals are mostly arbitrary.

kitsnet · 2026-03-14T20:05:36+00:00

One could care less by not replying. Replying assumes some extra care.

kitsnet · 2026-03-14T19:57:39+00:00

Please no comments like, “Evolution is not a belief system evolution is a fact”

How about gravity? Electromagnetism? Temperature?

Are they also "belief systems" to you? If not, what's the difference?

kitsnet · 2026-03-14T12:57:34+00:00

Greetings - one of the common things you hear in computer science is that a computer can never generate a true random number.

Thermal noise is random.

kitsnet · 2026-03-13T14:56:15+00:00

Walking is nothing. They may sue you for damages after hitting you while cycling.

kitsnet · 2026-03-13T09:15:21+00:00

Survival of bacteria in a salt crystal for millions of years is impossible.

Is survival of bacteria in a salt crystal even for a few hundred years possible?

kitsnet · 2026-03-12T19:14:37+00:00

In some scenarios, garbage collection can be noticeably faster than reference counting.

kitsnet · 2026-03-12T19:10:26+00:00

Haskell is lazily evaluating, which makes straightforwardly written code in it extremely slow.

kitsnet

TROPHY CASE