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Moderator Guidelines
spoiler
Context: The decline started way before AI.
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.
Wait. They actually tried to gelp you rather than closing your thread and pointing you to an irrelavent one?
"Read The Fucking FAQ!"
The FAQ: " "
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.
why it so many peeps here swearing?... >~<
Already answered, closed
The linked and solved question: does not actually answer my question, or the answer is for an outdated version of the software I'm using
L + skill issue + just Google it + downvoted to oblivion
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.
If closing as "already answered" it should really be "already answered by [link to other thread]
That's actually how it works.
So what's lacking it's any ability for someone familiar with the problem to point out that it's not actually the same
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.
Yeah, I like how gitlab/hub issues link to the merged issue.
POV you've just clicked on the only relevant-looking search result:
"Duplicate question, use search."
See also "the Linux community".
ducks for cover
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.
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!
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.
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
To be fair you would not believe the amount of times people have asked me things that are written in the man pages (for Linux problems). I think it's only fair to ask that kind of thing (though with BSD I would expect a slightly higher level of expertise..
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.
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.
It's getting better! There are now distros for normies who don't want to have to do anything besides press the power button.
I just installed Fedora and if I hadn’t been a coder I would have given up at least twice (the ISO writer app requires Visual C++ SDK to be installed, and tells you this by complaining about missing dlls).
I used Rufus and it was pretty seamless
PEBKAC RTFM
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"?
And the dreaded "why would you want to do that?"
You're asking [A] but have you tried addressing [B] instead. It's unrelated BTW
I would enjoy an AI to call me stupid for my code and a "here's how to do it properly" attached to it.
Too bad it just keeps hallucinating python libs that don't exist.
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.
posts a link to something completely unrelated
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.
I just wonder what the LLMs will be trained on once they put everything else out of business.
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.
LLM companies hire people to create information. They already hire math majors to work on high quality math data, for example.
This is a fair point. Although it'd be fun in the absolutely extreme scenario people are presenting here where all the coders would lose their coding job but get coding jobs generating random AI training data instead.
Some of the ways both critics and shills present the future of this technology are kinda nuts.
I actually work on generating and evaluating this data.
The more I see, the less I fear real coding jobs going away. The amount of work required to get good quality training data that can keep up with evolving technology is enormous.