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submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by OpticalMoose@discuss.tchncs.de to c/onehundredninetysix

spoilerContext: The decline started way before AI.

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[-] Phegan@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

I can't tell you how many times on stack overflow I see someone responding "why don't you do it this way, that requires you to use a completely different programming language and refactor your code base".

Motherfucker, I need to have this ticket done tomorrow or the customer support rep helping the client is going to cry.

[-] Taleya@aussie.zone 12 points 1 day ago

Very clearly laid out what i was trying to do in a batch file, the desired goal and the syntax i was having issues with.

Fucking responses i got was like trying to use yahoo search. Reading comprehension is absolute bullshit on that site.

[-] SnortsGarlicPowder@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 day ago

Wait. They actually tried to gelp you rather than closing your thread and pointing you to an irrelavent one?

[-] Taleya@aussie.zone 1 points 1 day ago

they wanted the points for answering. didn't mean it had to be a valid answer..

[-] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 2 days ago

"Read The Fucking FAQ!"

The FAQ: " "

[-] lars@lemmy.sdf.org 23 points 2 days ago

This is just so fucking nice to see.

I felt like a little kid in high school there, and the users were the kind important-acting assholes who took out their insecurities on those with less than 500 points. As StackOverflow dies, it is I who shall rest in peace.

[-] kittenzrulz123 98 points 2 days ago
[-] i_dont_want_to 7 points 1 day ago

The linked and solved question: does not actually answer my question, or the answer is for an outdated version of the software I'm using

[-] kittenzrulz123 4 points 1 day ago

L + skill issue + just Google it + downvoted to oblivion

[-] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 47 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

On the one hand I agree with them because having a Q&A site full of repetitive beginner questions will ruin its usefulness as a resource. On the other hand they handle it in the worst possible way. Instead of leaving around a bunch of “corpses” of closed questions they should just merge the beginner’s question into the original, already answered question. Just n Move it to the bottom of that question’s discussion thread and redirect the beginner to the answer at the top.

The way they decided to do it essentially codifies all the things people hated about asking for help on IRC and later Discord.

[-] femtech@midwest.social 8 points 2 days ago

Yeah, I like how gitlab/hub issues link to the merged issue.

[-] hildegarde 18 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

There are so many times I've tried to look up an answer to a technical problem I had. And I click the top result and it's a forum post. Someone asked the exact question I was looking for, and every reply is: "already answered," "learn to use the search box," and "wow your'e dubm for not already knowing this you n00b."

Search engine doesn't know, it just sees a thread with the search terms and lots of engagement so it becomes the top search result. I wish everyone who acted that way on forums a very pleasant long walk down a very short pier.

[-] psud@aussie.zone 17 points 2 days ago

If closing as "already answered" it should really be "already answered by [link to other thread]

[-] Gladaed@feddit.org 6 points 1 day ago

That's actually how it works.

[-] psud@aussie.zone 3 points 1 day ago

So what's lacking it's any ability for someone familiar with the problem to point out that it's not actually the same

[-] Malgas@beehaw.org 29 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

POV you've just clicked on the only relevant-looking search result:

"Duplicate question, use search."

[-] MudMan@fedia.io 101 points 3 days ago

See also "the Linux community".

ducks for cover

[-] Speculater@lemmy.world 53 points 2 days ago

BSD is by far much worse than any Linux community. "Have you read the man pages."

Yes mother fucker, that's why I'm asking here!

[-] MudMan@fedia.io 34 points 2 days ago

It's bad enough when people spend longer berating the OP for their question-asking etiquette than it would take to answer the question.

However it's nothing compared to the absolute deviants who do provide an answer but do so in a deliberately oblique fashion that requires much more research to understand than the original problem.

It's volunteer tech support, not testing that I'm pure of heart so I can access a mystic sword, you can just say the thing.

[-] vivendi@programming.dev 24 points 2 days ago

BSD was never meant for the faint of heart.

I am not shitting when I say I go look and trace the actual source code long before I step onto the forums.

BSD forums are filled with people who have been using UNIX since the 1980s, like fucking grand wizard shit, and they don't have time for your stupid ass

/UJ they're not that bad tho

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[-] meh 34 points 2 days ago

the .world autist community has gotten a couple linux questions and you know what happens. people answered the question, in the info dumpy yet polite and helpful way possible. maybe we just need to spin up an 'ask an autist about linux' community somewhere. "we'll answer your question along with 12 others you didn't even know you had" kinda thing.

[-] OpticalMoose@discuss.tchncs.de 20 points 2 days ago

OMG yes. I left the Linux community a couple of months ago and my mental health improved almost immediately. I still use Linux; just left the community.

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[-] rumba@lemmy.zip 5 points 2 days ago

Every other post in the Usenet days used to be RTFM. Eventually, enough ExpertsEx/StackEx/Reddit posts (or youtube videos) answered it well enough to drown that out, but you still need a level of proficiency to know what to ask, and there are precious few newb forums.

I think the worst of it now is ethos problems. People are coming in from Windows, wanting to do it the Windows way, and they catch a lot of shit for it. How do I do A without the terminal, Linux is shit because you have to use the terminal. Linux is too hard. The second worst is infighting over distros like they are sports teams. Next up is the all or nothings, You can't game on linus vs you can absolutely play anything worth a damn on linux.

[-] vivendi@programming.dev 12 points 2 days ago

PEBKAC RTFM

[-] Dagnet@lemmy.world 12 points 2 days ago

Fr. I went to the fedora discord and after asking a question in the help channel a guy straight up told me to Google it. Wow, so helpful, I wonder why Linux doesn't have more users

[-] Turret3857@infosec.pub 23 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

TBF, you went to the Fedora discord, which is not officially run by Fedora. Fedora only officially runs their Matrix server and forum.

If I'm being completely honest, IME if you have to use Discord or Telegram for support, you might as well use ChatGPT. Something about those platforms makes people such assholes. People on forums are generally lovely. Matrix can be hit or miss.

edit: also, 4 year fedora user here, if theres anything I can do to help please let me know :)

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[-] drolex@sopuli.xyz 72 points 3 days ago

Is ChatGPT already able to mimic SO behaviour by answering "please research before asking dumb questions", "this should be obvious" and "closing, already answered somewhere else"?

[-] Quill7513@slrpnk.net 52 points 2 days ago

posts a link to something completely unrelated

[-] Turret3857@infosec.pub 12 points 2 days ago

It does do this. I'll admit I do sometimes use copilot.microsoft.com, and if you check the source it links, its usually completely unrelated.

[-] rumba@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 days ago

Not sure about GPT, but copilot is starting to give you less depth in answers. If I asked it something a year ago about a config entry, It would give me what I needed and a sample of it in use. It's now pretty minimal in it's answer, which is ok, but it was kind of nice to get more context. If you ask it to add debug statements, it'll often just list a few lines without context of where they go. It's kinda nice to ask something to create debug statements in a couple hundred lines of code rather than manually going back through a bunch of nested loops.

[-] treesapx@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago

And the dreaded "why would you want to do that?"

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[-] Smorty 4 points 1 day ago

why it so many peeps here swearing?... >~<

[-] GammaGames@beehaw.org 2 points 1 day ago

Because they don’t understand how SO works and had their feelings hurt by curation

[-] Smorty 1 points 20 hours ago
[-] GammaGames@beehaw.org 1 points 20 hours ago

Stack Overflow

[-] Fenrir@lemmings.world 1 points 1 day ago

That's enough Internet for today, grandma

I just wonder what the LLMs will be trained on once they put everything else out of business.

[-] tetris11@lemmy.ml 20 points 3 days ago

We've polluted the water. One active area that LLMs are being deployed is in reading scanned text, so my best guess is that the next few models are going to be trained on a new corpus of previously unscanned written text.

I'm talking legal documents from the 80s, company documents that were never digitized, and anythibg else google books hasnt fully OCR'd.

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[-] Artyom@lemm.ee 5 points 2 days ago

I've been really worried about this. You can re-train a smarter model on old data, but what happens when our software changes and those old answers are obsolete? Then the AIs won't be accurate, and we've killed our tried-and-true tool to address the issue.

[-] Honytawk@feddit.nl 1 points 1 day ago

Since the AIs would be used to gather that information, they would learn from their previous prompts.

So if any AI user had that issue before, the AI would know how they solved it since they helped them solve it.

So I wouldn't worry about it too much.

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this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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