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The erasure of Luigi Mangione
(substack.evancarroll.com)
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this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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Technology
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Stopped using stack overflow ages ago because of how many assholes there are there.
I got a decade old question closed as a duplicate.
You don't want to go to Pornhub then
You'd probably get better coding advice in the comments.
I also stopped posting there years ago for much the same reason. You could feel the strangulation of the community as duplicate questions started getting shouted down, posts got turned into "community wikis" against your will and your own questions started getting edited to better fit someone else's plans and ideologies. The company was sold shortly after, so maybe animals can sense their pending extinction (some of them anyway)?
I miss those days when writing an answer genuinely felt like helping to grow the global community of friend developers. It's a shame no technology has been discovered that will let the small amount of collective good in us all work together against the assholes, but alas it seems the opposite is always true.
What's even more annoying is when their refinements end up putting an objectively wrong answer as the authoritative record.
I found a question where someone new to electronics was how to get more current from a USB power supply.
The "correct" answer that was posted before the question was closed was that a source can't limit current and the questioner should learn more about electricity.
The actual correct answer - and probably what the questioner was looking for - is to short the data lines together because a compliant USB charger will only supply 500mA by default, not it's stated max current.
What drives me mad is when a question is closed as a duplicate, and when you look at the duplicate it's either for a different version of the product and thus the answer isn't relevant, or the question straight up wasn't answered there either.
Increasingly, I find the answer is in the comments, or not at all
"How do I get this working in 22.04?"
"Previous question answers this." Tagged as best answer
"No, the previous question answers it with a method that was removed in 22.04"
silence
More likely the changes were made to improve the "saleability" of the website.
One of the promises of the internet was, supposedly, that it couldn't really be monopolized because the barriers to entry were so low. But what we've seen is the influence of the Networking Effect as a means of consolidating user bases, combined with a cartel-style censorship that limits the degree to which word-of-mouth can influence a nascent community's growth.
And now the AI comes to fully alienate us from each other, leaving even the more token communities with a "am I talking to a real person or a computer facsimile" lingering dread with each passing year.
That hits hard for me. Not that someone changed the spirit of my answer but that someone completely reworded it without my permission. It was almost like they were trying to steal my idea without running afoul of copyright or something.
Plus AI is actually happy to answer your random questions, with an immediate response. Stack overflow will quickly become obsolete as AI gets better
AI is just regurgitating old stack overflow. It's not going to get better.
AI is going to get worse, while stack overflow will be superceded by better resources in the future.
It would be pretty neat if Sal Kahn created an alternative, but that's very different from his existing project.
You can just ask an AI anyway since it's training set will basically just be stackoverflow.
Just tried this and the AI told me my question was a duplicate and my post was removed.
the entirety of stackoverflow is not enough data to make the AI work properly. They need terabytes of text, stackoverflow has about 50-100GB of useful data at most