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Although we have seen a small decline in traffic, in no way is it what the graph is showing (which some have incorrectly interpreted to be a 50% or 35% decrease). This year [2023], overall, we’re seeing an average of ~5% less traffic compared to 2022.
And yet they didn’t show us a rectified or accurate graph.
They’re lying
Says who? ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is lying too, and is also really confident about it.
Says corporations trying to protect their investment.
Is this a facts or feelings response?
Is this a trust a company to announce it’s dying response?
You got evidence for that bold statement, ooooor
An ML trusting a corporation, orrrr?
The irony of it all is SO making deals for AI to scrape their site for machine learning but in doing so more people are using chatgpt and copilot more because it’s easier and just as accurate. AI/ML is really going to destroy these websites and yet it’s the websites signing off on their own death sentences.
I think they see the writing on the wall and they’re trying to make a buck while they still can.
It’s called selling out. I doubt they have any illusions about the future of these platforms, they just don’t care as long as they can cash out.
What I’m still not sure of is this… When these websites die will the LLMs stagnate with no new data to use for training or will they somehow keep up with new technology and eliminate the need for certain basic questions that would originally have required human input?
The ideal result? LLMs are just early versions of much better things that come later.
The unlikely result: we develop a separate human curated internet somewhere, complete with verification that a human wrote every bit. Basically verifiable digital id and signing on everything. Maybe.
The probable result: the internet turns to shit as AIs are trained on content created by AIs.
Down voted. If you’re just going to post a screenshot, you must include a link to the source. This is a link sharing platform.
I thought I was going to be rickrolled but this is better.
Closed as duplicate
Now that’s just a signal for training reinforcement
It will recover when AI learns sneering condescension.
I’ve been on SO like ten times altogether since ChatGPT came out. It’s so much nicer than the condescending pricks of Stack Overflow. My favourite is when some genius links a question as a duplicate of something that’s vaguely similar.
This question was already answered 10 years ago in a completely different version of the programming language to the one you’re using, and we know it doesn’t work anymore, in fact hasn’t for 8 years, but we’re going to close it anyway because screw you.
Also you should be doing it in Rust anyway
The problem is that fewer people are generating the new content for gpt to slurp up.
Free information stops working when people stop caring about creating it.
Yeah, I’ve thought about that as well. Doesn’t mean I’m gonna miss Stack Overflow specifically. Perhaps something better replaces it when AI gets poisoned by its own output too much.
I think not. The problem isn’t in a service, the problem is in people.
Sure, that’s why a good service doesn’t create an environment which supports people being dicks. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what SO does with the way it works.
Yup. Stopped answering questions as soon as they did that.
my first thought about it too
What do you ask ChatGPT? I rarely get a correct answer really, it’s all made-up bullshit usually.
I usually have good answers with only minimal bullshit when it comes to coding. If not, it at least points me in the right direction.
Wonder where chatgpt will get its training data in the future, as it’s known not to extrapolate well. Where will it learn new frameworks, languages, … from?
Its going to starve itself.
Let it die
I doubt it ever scraped SO, otherwise all the answers would be smth along the lines: “I cannot answer this question due to low quality effort!” closes browser window
The documentation?
The docs. It’s what it does now a lot of the time I’ve noticed.
Auto generated docs since devs don’t document?
Chatgpt, look at this repo and write docs
Somebody already did that but it wasn’t with chat GPT and honestly the docs were fine.
It didn’t do that thing that a lot of humans do when writing documentation which is just declare that something is true without explaining why it is true. So you end up in random PHP like land, when things just work like that okay.
Honestly it’s petty good about doing that. Already had similar tooling options but it does a generally good job of making docs for non devs assuming good naming are used in the methods
Yeah the smaller the project the less effective this is.
But even learning from the source code is pretty effective.
That works when the docs are good and clear. Otherwise, we’ll have to revert to communicating with each other for brief periods while the chat-bots train themselves on the new data.
A lot of models are being trained on “synthetic” data now, right?
Even when a parrot learns to parrot a parrot, the first parrot still has to be taught.
Armies on paid personal generating content?
I see absolutely no problem with that.
It’s also around the time they did away with their jobs board thing isn’t it? I got a job through it in 2021 and somewhere after that they sunset it, which was an insane business decision because it was the best job search platform out there.
Isn’t this when Safari and Firefox started blocking third party trackers by default?
That wouldn’t stop page views from being counted.
Just wait until there’s no stack overflow to scrape.
I think it goes further than that. There’s two things happening with regard to AI and software development.
1: Stack overflow has become less common as a resource to solve problems. This, as you say has a problem of input into LLMs for future problems to solve.
2: Junior developers are being hired less because of AI. I assume the idea is that seniors will use AI in the same way they would usually use juniors. Except, they’ve done what business always does. Not think one bit about the future. Today’s senior developers are yesterdays junior developers.The combination of AI performance drop due to point 1, and the lack of new developers because of point 2 makes for potentially, a bad future for the profession.
As a senior developer I have no idea how I’d get an AI to autonomously keep a small subsystem maintained. If I was replacing junior developers, that’s what it has to do.
Everybody in my team gets to own something. What you own depends on your capability. You learn by doing. No dogsbodies doing busy work.
Everybody in my team gets to own something. What you own depends on your capability.
This is a point I try to constantly make when people don’t understand why 2 people have the same title but don’t really have the same job, especially in technical fields.
No two people have the same set of skills, so we all end up taking on the tasks we’re more capable of than the next person.
I don’t think developers are doing it. It’s managers making this kind of decision I’d say.
Everybody in my team gets to own something.
Oh I like this.
It works great if nobody ever leaves or dies or takes vacation. We try to discourage siloization of projects and emphasize cross-training - it makes the job more interesting, gives people more/better tools to solve problems with, etc. And anytime the business objects we mention the project where X left and how painful it is to get new anything added/enhanced because none of those tenets were involved.
However, all bets are off with offshore contractors. Some want to learn, some simply don’t care and will do the bare minimum.
We try to discourage siloization of projects and emphasize cross-training
This is how my work has been and it allowed me to touch every part of the repo while still a junior dev and gain lots of experience. So I also like that. But lately I’m trying to specialize more and go deep into things, and I like the idea of being an expert on something. So I appreciate the trade-offs.
all bets are off with offshore contractors. Some want to learn, some simply don’t care and will do the bare minimum.
As a guy who was replaced by offshore contractors, and who hasn’t had a single interview in 7 months while offshore contractors are (probably) still getting lots of work… I find this observation both heartening and disheartening.
One of my bosses has a concept of “T-shaped developers”, which means you know everything a little, and have depth on one thing.
7months: ouch, sorry to hear. I wish I had some words of wisdom to share.
Junior developers are being hired less because of AI.
Where are you seeing this? I’ve not seen any evidence of that, yet.
I’ve been told about companies in the same field as mine with a hiring freeze on juniors. So it’s kinda second hand.
Im a consultant senior dev and devops engineer. Ive worked for over 100 companies in the last 10 years on various engagements. Ive worked for multiple companies and clients at the same time through some consulting agencies. Ive worked for startups and FAANG companys. Ive also worked as a technical PM and EM for these same companies and hired hundreds of engineers.
Junior dev market is 100% in its last death throws before finally officially being pronounced dead. The job market has vanished so thoroughly between AI and offshoring in a high fed-rate economy, even though we just started rate cutting, by the time we feel the effects, AI will have further killed juniors without ever returning.
I dislike it, because i want to train people not machines, but the average junior dev is so bad its insane and not only have companies found that out, senior engineers have too. Many people like to TALK about mentoring new engineers… the reality is, few actually do. It takes significantly less time to correct chatgpt and claude code then it does to have a junior take 2-5 days and write it all wrong, and they interrupt your work to ask you a million questions again and again.
I just had a contract with a startup company… 40 million series B company with a simple fucking CRUD app… their engineering team? 35 SENIOR ONLY engineers. The least senior of which was an IC3 our of IC6 senior engineer.
This does tally up with what I’ve been hearing. Where I’m at there’s been a few hires straight into senior. I’ve not heard of an official junior freeze. At the same time it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a new one.
The problem, as I commented prior, is that if we no longer bring in junior devs to gain this kind of experience, we lose the flow of junior -> senior. But in most places, the people making the decisions won’t consider anything beyond the end of the current fin year.
I think the quality content contributors are probably not the ones moving to chatGPT…
Guilty <-
Chat GPT is wonderful as a search engine for SO. It regurgitates the answers in a format easier to incorporate into your own project.
The thing I’m worried about is a lack of new answers. You need data to train an LLM, what to do if nobody is producing it?
It already uses the docs and API references
I typically visit stack overflow when encountering edge cases and bugs not covered by the documentation.
If it has learned from the source code you’d be surprised how good it is at that as well.
For docs it’s better, for other stuff it’s way worse than a human.
It’s a shame so much stuff is locked up in discord these days.
yeah, discord the the true black hole of information
Do you mean trained on the source code, or having the source code in context?
Trained on the source code.
Yeah could also clone the repo and use copilot against it.
But who writes the docs now
Ha! I have an AI for that! Gotcha!
…
On, but the AI trains now on other docs that I used an AI to write…
…
Oh shit…
But can ChatGPT downvote answers into oblivion?
No it’s the one it replies with
Do they actually publish this data?
Yeah. When I need additional insights on a difficult technical configuration, it’s nice to be able to speak to an artificial insufferable dipshit, rather than a real human insufferable dipshit.
The AI ones continue helping me even after I explain to them how they come across to real humans. (I do my best not to mention it to the insufferable Human dipshits, of course.)
