Thread

If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become?

212 points · 100 comments · signa11

pech0rin · 1790486019 · focus · HN ↗
Stack overflow was one of the best ways to learn and mature as an engineer “back in the day”. The meme is that devs would copy and paste and hope it worked. The reality was more like you had an obscure bug, you wrote a detailed and cohesive question, and you connected with people who were more knowledgable and would help you.
It also sharpened your writing and thinking. By responding to questions you solidified your understanding of topics.
It got a lot of hate for the moderation but I think that was mainly in huge communities where literally “dumb” questions got bombarded every minute. Smaller tech like Docker when it first arrived on the scene had communities that learned together.
Spent a lot of time there when I was a few years out of school and still trying to figure out what it meant to be a software eng. It’s sad to see it become a ghost town and I think it’s a net negative for young engineers to have an all knowing entity spit out every answer.
1. fartfeatures · 1790488090 · focus · HN ↗
  My experience was different. I'd post on StackOverflow as an absolute last resort when I couldn't solve my problem any other way. The knowledge there was great, the kindness was sorely lacking. That's what ultimately did it in if you ask me. It got a (deserved in my opinion) reputation for unkindness way before LLMs came on the scene.
  1. Gigachad · 1790488980 · focus · HN ↗
    I think that’s why Reddit and discord haven’t been harmed nearly as much. They have a reputation for being a lot kinder than stack overflow for basic questions. Meanwhile stack overflow was dead pretty much immediately after people got an alternative.
    joe_the_user · 1790491526 · focus · HN ↗
    I think StackOverflow was actually dead before ChatGPT appeared. But ChatGPT was the final nail in the coffin, for the reason you mention.
    And there was a time when I enjoyed answering question on StackOverflow but that time ended long before the end of the site. It started out kind of competitive but ended insanely competitive to the point that answering questions was a waste of time.
2. noduerme · 1790488167 · focus · HN ↗
  You touched on what made it great, along with other forums where devs helped each other: It was a pleasure to read and try to answer other people's questions. NOT for the points! Because you found out so much about the problems other people were trying to solve, parallel to your own. The good questions forced you think what would I do in that situation and become a better coder yourself.
  I may have asked 20 questions on Stack Overflow in 20 years. But I probably answered several thousand. Whatever I was deeply interested in at the moment, there was no better way to learn more than to try to answer those tough questions. It was like a hobby, during a few minutes of downtime, to just cruise around looking for database optimization problems... the way some people might pick up a Sudoku puzzle. It would keep me in the zone.
  A lot of the mods sucked, and they had to deal with deluges of spam from kids asking for answers to CS exam questions... but hunting for the really juicy questions that couldn't be answered with a search was part of the fun.
  I mourn for the generations that will never get to use their brains.
  1. fartfeatures · 1790488580 · focus · HN ↗
    > I mourn for the generations that will never get to use their brains.
    If you aren't using the incredible technology we have around us right now to accelerate your learning then it is us that should be mourning your loss of imagination.
    happymellon · 1790493312 · focus · HN ↗
    > accelerate your learning
    Thats a pretty bold position to take.
    I find asking a question about whether an application should be doing what it is doing, and getting someone's braindead response of "Claude says it does this..." shows that people aren't learning. I know what it is doing, I can read an IF statement, I don't need someone to spit out 3 paragraphs of unrelated nonsense.
    With Claude people aren't learning. They aren't even reading their copy/pasta response to see if it relates to the question.
    noduerme · 1790494784 · focus · HN ↗
    It makes me really sad that my brother, a bit of a celebrity lawyer and one of the smartest people I know, now frequently responds to texts with long-form garbage he gets from ChatGPT. it's somehow both smug and braindead simultaneously, and it's cost a lot of my respect for him.
    JKCalhoun · 1790508314 · focus · HN ↗
    What did he do before? Paste something from a Google search? I mean it might be endemic for this guy…
    noduerme · 1790571068 · focus · HN ↗
    To be honest, he used to paste a lot of links to articles that were only obliquely related to the topic at hand, and which I often suspected he hadn't fully read.
    Thinking about it now, I think the new thing of copying LLM output is worse for a couple of reasons. Although both are a sort of vampirism that sucks all the oxygen out of a text chain, at least pasting articles implies that one has read that article and agrees. Someone can be held responsible ror the selection. With LLM output, there's an implied shrugging off of any responsibility... it's not "here's something I read and agreed with," it's just "here's what ChatGPT said." There's less implicit effort, and less risk of staking one's credibility on something, because saying "hey, that article is junk science and these studies disprove it" would require a response beyond "well, ChatGPT can be wrong".
    Secondly, and maybe more metaphysically or epistemologically, there's a certain decline in cognitive function that I associate with pasting LLM answers that goes beyond what was previously considered a lazy pasting of articles someone had speed-read or skimmed. (It also doesn't help interpersonally that my brother is a speed-reader who can form eloquent opinions on a document within seconds, although apparently it's fabulous in trial).
    So you're right to point that out, but it's also a red flag to me that some sort of mass lead/heavy metal poisoning is happening to our society, to see both credulity and shirking of responsibility from one of the smartest people I know.
    I'm just rambling now, but I also have a cousin who was an engineer for years on the Supercollider in Texas. Also a very intelligent guy. But during covid, he had retired by then, he started spamming the whole family with emails insisting that covid was actually caused by 5G radio waves and that vaccines were poison. I outright attacked him in a full family-wide email, telling him that I had lost all respect for his once-great mind, which I had formerly looked up to.
    Somehow I feel like the lack of analytical discrimination, logic, and above all effort is the common thread here.
    noduerme · 1790494369 · focus · HN ↗
    Can you name anything you've learned from an LLM? Start your essay with what you've learned from AI as your opening paragraph. Write by hand as if you had been educated to do so. List one or more specific instances in which an LLM gave you knowledge which you would take forward and use productively, as your own integrated knowledge, in such a way that you would be consistently able to apply it to novel problems and circumstances on your own.
    I won't down vote you, because you simply misunderstood me. Of course I'm using this incredible technology to accelerate writing code.
    If you never learned the value of learning itself, for its own sake, you have everything to gain from a world in which skills like learning and thinking for yourself are useless. I can hardly blame you for that.
    But as someone who has learned by teaching others, people who in turn will learn by teaching others, I don't find your belief in someone else doing the work for you to be particularly sustainable. Or convincing. Regardless of whether I think it's contemptible, lazy, or damaging to your mind, which isn't my problem.
    Const-me · 1790509607 · focus · HN ↗
    > Can you name anything you've learned from an LLM?
    Not GP, but here’s some of the things I have learned in the last couple weeks from LLMs while asking LLMs to review parts of my code and documentation. I wrote the code and documentation without LLMs.
    Linux user permissions is a fake because by design, the owner has permissions to write these 3 bits. A good way to reliably deploy a readonly file is owner=root, assign the read permission to the group.
    chown command follows links by default, -h switch disables that.
    In Linux, resetting environment variable in a long-lived server process doesn’t erase much data because /proc/{pid}/environ is a snapshot taken on process startup.
    If my server crashes (or manually killed by a root to test things on staging VM) and Alpine’s supervise-daemon restarts it, the start_pre() function from the OpenRC service script won’t be called again. A fix is use OpenRC to run a launcher shell script as root, in that script manually downgrade the account with `exec su-exec svc:svc /the/server/elf`
    This last one is irrelevant to my use cases but still interesting. AES GCM may fail catastrophically when different message encrypted with same password and nonce. For 12 bytes of random nonce, the stuff is only safe up to approximately 4E+9 messages using the same password, beyond that birthday paradox ruins things.
    fartfeatures · 1790530630 · focus · HN ↗
    Absolutely, this week I learnt about:
    - Kalman Filters
    - Bayesian Tracking
    - Hybrid Logical Clocks
    I was able to ask questions and understand the current state of the art.
    runarberg · 1790568298 · focus · HN ↗
    How do you know the explanations were correct?
    fartfeatures · 1790583172 · focus · HN ↗
    How do you know any explanation is correct from any source? That is not unique to LLMs.
    runarberg · 1790603178 · focus · HN ↗
    You find sources written by experts and vetted by peers.
    This is not very hard, and we all used to know how to do this not 3 years ago.
    fartfeatures · 1790641996 · focus · HN ↗
    The LLM is citing it's sources and I follow up on them. Your attempt at a gotcha is interesting in that I think it says more about your relationship with AI than mine.
    [deleted] · 1790642454 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    runarberg · 1790717499 · focus · HN ↗
    This is the story I hear over and over again when an expert evaluates using AI for an introductory course inside their own field. The thing is full of mistakes, bad or wrong information, and unhelpful advises.
    <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdj_Fm4XM60" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdj_Fm4XM60
    If a person writes a textbook, a tutorial, a blog post etc. which is that bad it won‘t be recommended by peers and a beginner will either not know it exists, or find see the bad reviews from peers. The beginner will then look for a different textbook, tutorial, blog post etc.
    When self learning with AI, you don‘t get that. The best advice a peer can give you, is simply, do not use AI to learn stuff you don‘t already know.
    fartfeatures · 1790762641 · focus · HN ↗
    I'll wank my way and you wank yours.
3. margalabargala · 1790488185 · focus · HN ↗
  > I think it’s a net negative for young engineers to have an all knowing entity spit out every answer.
  I agree with the rest of your comment, and I sympathize with what you're saying here, but really this only applies when measuring engineers against a yardstick that frankly is rapidly in the process of no longer existing.
  As an industry rather than an art form, software is measured by its output.
4. stackghost · 1790490798 · focus · HN ↗
  >The meme is that devs would copy and paste and hope it worked. The reality was more like you had an obscure bug, you wrote a detailed and cohesive question, and you connected with people who were more knowledgable and would help you.
  Au contraire, the reality was more like you had an obscure bug, you wrote a detailed and cohesive question, and it was immediately closed as a duplicate of something unrelated but with a superficially-similar name from 5 years prior, and then you were threatened with a ban.
  StackOverflow was easily one of the most toxic communities on the internet and I don't miss it.
5. jjav · 1790495349 · focus · HN ↗
  > It got a lot of hate for the moderation
  I can say that easily over 90% (pretty close to 100%) of the most useful answers I would find in stackoverflow back in the day, were from questions/threads that were locked as bad questions (forget what term they used) by those horrible moderators.
  It was literally a joke. Every good question with thoughful useful answers, was always poo poo'ed by the moderators.
  The only reason stackoverflow remained useful is that those questions and threads remained available and were a treasure trove of useful information. If they'd actually deleted the threads moderators declared useless, there would have been zero useful content on the site.
  It is really a monument to failed moderation policies.

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