[HN Gopher] Community Is the Future of AI
___________________________________________________________________
Community Is the Future of AI
Author : mikece
Score : 67 points
Date : 2023-04-17 17:43 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stackoverflow.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (stackoverflow.blog)
| nullandvoid wrote:
| Providing this is opt in i'm pretty OK with it, unless i'm
| missing something?
|
| We trialed a private SO instance at work, and discoverability was
| an issue (now we have to search slack engineering channels, check
| notion, and check SO).
|
| If I could quickly ask, in for example slack, a question in
| natural language and have it query our private SO, slack, notion
| etc, I would be pretty game (providing this data remains
| private).
| throwaway420690 wrote:
| Open AI assistants should really be implemented on open protocols
| with open payments. Nostr is a perfect protocol for that because
| of Zaps which can provide a strong alignment signal to the
| (various different) communities -- not just white "western" men.
| scottydog51834 wrote:
| I was hoping that the title "Community Is the Future of AI" would
| refer to the exciting community that's growing around Generative
| AI in SF. There was an awesome hackathon this past weekend and a
| fun networking event on Friday. "Cerebral Valley" (not sure if
| this is a company or an unofficial org of people from hacker
| houses) is a major (but certainly not the only) source of such
| events [1]. VCs, Twitter influencers, early-stage founders, and
| college grads have all been organizing other events, and so far,
| it's been a magical community (and hopefully this community is a
| net positive for the future of AI).
|
| [1] https://cerebralvalley.ai/
| kolinko wrote:
| Oh damn, I missed the hackathon, and I'm visiting the bay area
| for a short period of time only, and I ended up hacking by
| myself over the weekend :,)
|
| Where was that hackathon announced - I don't see it on the
| website? I would like to not miss the next one.
| andsoitis wrote:
| As of this writing, that entry carries a -11 score. Not sure what
| to make of it!
| esnard wrote:
| I think the vote distribution is more important than the
| absolute score in this context, so here it is:
|
| > This question has received 11 upvotes and 32 downvotes.
| jhack wrote:
| SO is a toxic cesspool, especially for people new to programming
| or just looking to learn. If ChatGPT and other AI tools can get
| the job done without resorting to asking anything from the SO
| "community", that's a victory.
| chx wrote:
| ChatGPT can not do _anything_ especially not in programming.
|
| All it can provide is how the answer would sound or look like.
|
| Be prepared for an absolute avalanche of bugs and security
| holes no one alive would've made. I make my living from
| debugging so I welcome the new job security but it's a massive
| net negative for society, no question about that.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I asked it to write a simple function to copy text to
| clipboard. It unecessarily created a async function and
| forgot to pass down the text as a variable.
|
| Next, it tried to use AlpineJS to create tooltips with NextJS
| which is really not supported and couldn't fix the resulting
| bugs.
|
| For sure, it's better than nothing, but you've got to be at
| least somewhat competent before you start copy-pasting code
| from it blindly.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _All it can provide is how the answer would sound or look
| like._
|
| This includes providing correct answers, because by
| definition, a correct answer sounds exactly like it would
| sound like.
| lewhoo wrote:
| It has also helped me hundreds of times.
| mteam88 wrote:
| Because you asked a question? Or because someone else did?
| lewhoo wrote:
| The latter. But I suppose it's typical. A given problem
| usually emerges for thousands of people so it's not
| surprising I was never the first to ask.
| shanebellone wrote:
| Does the distinction actually matter?
| yeputons wrote:
| For me, both. I search for something generic, either an
| official manual, a bug report or a StackOverflow's answer
| pops up. I have a specific narrow question, I'm unable to
| google the answer, I ask, a more knowledgeable person
| appears and ties all the loose ends together in I way I
| have never thought of.
| ryanbrunner wrote:
| The problem is if you solve the problem of not needing the
| community by training an AI on community content, your
| community will leave and then you're out of training data. AI
| is impressive, but I'm unconvinced it can answer truly novel
| programming questions.
| cle wrote:
| Don't worry, between GitHub and VS Code, there's plenty of
| training data for Microsoft and OpenAI.
| yeputons wrote:
| > especially for people new to programming or just looking to
| learn
|
| Yes, StackOverflow is not for beginners at all. It's for fairly
| narrow technical questions.
|
| Maybe AI may assist in asking a good question or breaking down
| a big question into narrow on-topics ones.
| jedberg wrote:
| I don't think I've ever seen a post on SO with that many
| downvotes before. That's pretty telling how the community feels
| about being used as training data (especially backed up by the
| highly upvoted reply saying such).
| fabian2k wrote:
| That's nothing for a meta post with an unpopular announcement,
| there are quite a few with hundreds of downvotes. But yes, this
| does likely indicate something about how the active SE users
| feel about this. It doesn't help that the blog is written in a
| way that is much more likely to appeal to shareholders than
| software developers on SO. But ChatGPT has been a quite
| significant moderation issue, and the blog post doesn't address
| any of this (it is kinda devoid of content in general beyond
| "SE will do something with generative AI, updates later this
| year").
| penjelly wrote:
| meta forums on SE sites see disagreement a lot more often than
| the regular answers areas. These are usually longtime SE users
| with a minimum of site credit to participate. So while these
| are _are not_ the bulk of SE users their voices should ring
| louder imo.
| shagie wrote:
| score:-2000..-500 is:q brings out some of the greatest hits.
|
| https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=score%3A-2000..-500+...
|
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=score%3A-2000..-500+...
|
| The range is tinker able.
| develatio wrote:
| Oh, there is at least one that I can think of! Puneet
| Mulchandani (director of Product at SO) announced "Jobs &
| Developer Story" sunset. It got more than 4200 downvotes.
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/415293/sunsetting-j...
| bluedino wrote:
| SO has jumped the shark
| adventured wrote:
| Years ago. AI bots like ChatGPT will make SO almost entirely
| worthless (worth so little there won't be enough demand to
| sustain a large service, it'll collapse except for being an
| archive).
| bitL wrote:
| So he wants unpaid volunteers to do all the work to provide
| training data for some AI? What an MBAesque idea!
| yeputons wrote:
| Here is a discussion of the post at Stackexchange Meta:
| https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/388401/new-blog-pos...
|
| Some comments may refer to that discussion post instead of the
| original blog (e.g. ones talking about downvotes) because it was
| a separate submission to HN whose comments were moved to this
| page.
| suyash wrote:
| StackOverflow has been sold to a private equity company in 2021.
| I doubt they care about community building, just using the
| community for their own profits:
| https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/02/stack-overflow-acquired-by...
| [deleted]
| qtzfz wrote:
| The fact that this post by Prashanth Abd al-Rahman (SO CEO) is so
| downvoted makes me think he's onto something. This is like when
| artists cry because of how good Midjourney is and they'll have to
| switch careers. If programmers are complaining about AI it's
| because it's good.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _downvoted makes me think he 's onto something_
|
| This is a bad heuristic, strengthening your priors based solely
| off rejection.
|
| Nobody questions LLMs can write code. The question is whether
| Stack Overflow has a place in that future. The community's
| rejection, and CEO's ham fistedness, suggest the data he has
| are the data he's got. Which makes him uncompetitive vis-a-vis
| _e.g._ GitHub or any IDE.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Damn, you're right! My career of StackOverflow question
| answerer is done!
| bitL wrote:
| No, the AI can only replicate what some other human figured out
| before and wrote down. Right now LLMs aren't really creative
| problem solvers. Therefore he needs a bunch of
| idealistic/stupid/unaware devs to keep sharing novel solutions
| that can be used to improve whatever AI he wants to have and
| sell it to companies which will fire those same devs that
| figured out those answers.
| devnull3 wrote:
| > Prashanth Abd al-Rahman (SO CEO)
|
| The name is Prashanth Chandrasekar or am I missing something?
| endisneigh wrote:
| Isn't it obvious that the new AI gods will require our regular
| offerings in the form of text, pictures, music, and anything else
| that can be manifested in this existence we call reality? Create,
| and praise the transformers.
|
| Amen.
| nicbou wrote:
| Yep, we do the legwork, they profit from it. We get nothing,
| not even credit.
| [deleted]
| narrator wrote:
| Transformers and AI will discover that 98% of human expression
| is just a rehash of something else. That 2% of original
| expression will become 50x as valuable instead of getting lost
| in the noise. This may lead to unpredictable disruptions in the
| extreme regularity of human behavior as people start to realize
| how boring and unoriginal everything they've ever thought and
| done is.
| ericmcer wrote:
| That would be a hilarious future if humanities job was to
| upload our creative offerings to AI and it dispenses some
| trivial amount of crypto based on how much it learned.
|
| Your 8 year olds cat drawing has been subsumed for 25c. Your
| essay on Philip K. Dick has been subsumed for .32c.
| 8note wrote:
| A bunch of the comments seem to be of the opinion that "using
| LLMs in S/O" === "LLM answering questions"
|
| But that isn't the only task available for fancy auto-complete.
| Eg. The LLM could help novices make better questions, or include
| more/less context in an answer, with the person still being the
| arbiter of truth.
| mteam88 wrote:
| I have used LLMs before to understand broken English. Being
| able to read someones words without stopping every few lines is
| a major benefit to interlingual communication.
| KabaKun wrote:
| One of the biggest frustrations for people on SO is struggling
| to find a question that already exists - and then people get
| really angry when their question is closed as a duplicate...
| but what if the LLM could take proposed question text and point
| the person at an answered question so they don't even have to
| wait for an answer or a duplicate? It'd be much better than the
| current duplicate finder.
| ryanwaggoner wrote:
| Has there ever been a case of a company the size of SO deciding
| that, given their skills and culture, they're just going to wind
| the company down rather than try and compete in a new technical
| arena that they're entirely unsuited for? I'd respect that.
|
| I don't know if what he's suggesting here makes sense (I tend to
| think no), but I'm automatically a little skeptical of the
| typical response to a serious threat: "no way, y'all, this is
| actually _good_ for us!"
|
| Imagine google coming out right now and saying the future of AI
| is search ads.
| gumballindie wrote:
| "Just as tractors made farmers more productive, we believe these
| new generative AI tools are something all developers will need to
| use if they want to remain competitive."
|
| Yeah it also put a lot of them out of jobs. At least the tractor
| doesn't steal people's work to resell it, it's just a tool.
| collaborative wrote:
| Funny thing I just realised I have contributed absolutely
| nothing to SO since ChatGPT came out. I wonder if others have
| done the same. I also wonder if open source zealots are enough
| to keep these regurgitators up-to-date or if their quality will
| decline as the dead internet approaches
| gumballindie wrote:
| I am not updating or pushing any more code to my humble open
| source repositories, nor am i answering questions on reddit.
| If the plan is to put us out of jobs they can reingest their
| own content. Like the HUMANCENTiPAD.
| [deleted]
| fabian2k wrote:
| I would suspect that the company is too small to train their own
| LLM from scratch. But Stack Overflow probably has too much
| traffic to just pay for something like the ChatGPT API and built
| something on top of it. I'm not sure how many good options there
| are in between, can you realistically create your own LLM for
| this kind of specialized area without the kind of resources
| OpenAI/Google/Microsoft have?
| dzink wrote:
| Online discussion happens at the edge of what is known and that
| is where AI learns from. Yes, humans talking in a scrape-able way
| is needed for the future of AI, but there should really be some
| way for the teachers of AI to get compensated for their efforts
| in improving it. If Stack Overflow trains a model on contributor
| data it should not call the contributors community, but investors
| with proper compensation.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| >>Just as tractors made farmers more productive ...
|
| really, that is example used? If AI will do to development was
| tractors did to farming there is not going to be many developers
| left.
|
| >>today's AI the potential for the loss of certain jobs, yes, but
| also, if history is a guide, a future in which a great variety of
| more highly skilled work
|
| Ag -> Industrial -> Information transitions were all supported by
| a mix of massive expansion in population, mass migration of
| populations, and globalization of economies
|
| information -> automation / AI transition does not seem to have
| these 3 things in the same way. Globalism is slowing or reversing
| into protectionism. Migration is still high but seemingly for
| different reasons (geopolitical) as people displaced for war,
| crime, or climate and critical for this discussion population
| growth as SLOWED way down, and it expected to reverse about 2040.
|
| This means people looking at the historical models for how these
| tech disruptions played out are very flawed in their "everything
| will be just fine because Farmers became factory workers, and
| factory workers became developers"
|
| Current economic models may not play out like they did in the
| past. History may rhyme, but it does not actually repeat.
|
| Also lets not forget the terrible way society in general handled
| these previous transitions that resulted is massive amounts of
| suffering for the people displaced. "Learn to AI" can not become
| the mantra of the day like "Learn to Code" did....
|
| My prediction is we will see a MASSIVE increase in wealth gaps,
| and extreme decrease in standard of living in most of the
| industrial world (we are already seeing this in a limited way)
| leading to more and more political instability
| dahwolf wrote:
| Yep. Farm. Factory. Office. The end. There's nowhere to go, not
| for this amount of people.
|
| The idea that rather than losing jobs, it will compliment us
| and even enable millions of new "non-programmers" to start
| programming, I'm puzzled where this demand actually would come
| from? What would they even "build? And can you imagine the
| absolute nightmare of millions of people producing "code" with
| zero background in programming?
|
| In a sane world, this could be a humanitarian moment where we
| redirect our human capital to things of a less commercial
| nature, say human care. We don't live in that world though.
| troupe wrote:
| > it will compliment us and even enable millions of new "non-
| programmers" to start programming
|
| You say that as if understanding and stating requirements in
| a non conflicting way isn't the primary skill of a programmer
| anyway.
| anonylizard wrote:
| Electricians, plumbers, nurses, construction workers,
| manufacturing, there's an absolute ton of blue collar jobs
| out there short of people.
|
| Where do you think all the renewable energy is coming from,
| its coming from large teams of crews installing those wind
| turbines and solar panels in the wilderness.
|
| Every electrical transformer in the US is going to have to be
| upgraded, to accomodate for surges in demand from EVs.
|
| The housing price crisis, once regulation is fixed, people
| will still have to build them. Robot construction workers
| ain't coming any time soon.
|
| All of these are massive sources of employment. If AI really
| does automate a large chunk of white collar jobs, corporate
| profits will skyrocket, and so will government tax and
| private investment (Profits generally end up in investment
| funds somewhere), and the above sectors will absorb that
| investment.
|
| Now, will the transition look pretty? Will your office
| workers make an easy transition to physical labour? No. But
| neither did the coal miners find 'learning to code' easy.
|
| Time to buckle up, the tsunami comes. Also, if you can use
| AI, you are already safer than most of the white collar jobs,
| so we shouldn't be the ones crying the hardest.
| dahwolf wrote:
| You're absolutely right about blue collar needing a
| revival, there's an enormous amount of work to do there,
| and it's a type of work near impossible to replace with AI.
| Further, I'd say that we need to better appreciate these
| jobs, in compensation and work conditions.
|
| That said, I don't see this mass transition happening from
| white collar to blue collar for a very sizable part of
| existing white collar. In many developing countries, white
| collar is a of a considerable age. There's
| skill/capability/physical issues as well as a
| social/cultural aspect. You're telling people that their
| educational investment is now worthless and are hereby
| demoted to the working class. May be correct, true and
| just, but expect social unrest.
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| Don't worry, nanobots will take that over next. They
| already have bots designed that fish their way through
| pipes.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| >>Electricians, plumbers, nurses, construction workers,
| manufacturing, there's an absolute ton of blue collar jobs
| out there short of people.
|
| and most of them do not pay even a fraction of what
| information jobs pay. The 100K welder that I see tossed
| around all the time is like the $300K dev, sure they exist
| but that is not the median.
|
| >>Every electrical transformer in the US is going to have
| to be upgraded, to accomodate for surges in demand from
| EVs.
|
| Which is ironic given there is an extreme transformer
| shortage in the US, and the manufacturing supply chain that
| builds many of the components for transformers is actively
| being reallocated to build things for EV's
|
| >>The housing price crisis, once regulation is fixed,
|
| HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA good one... I hope you are not serious
|
| >>Robot construction workers ain't coming any time soon.
|
| I dont know about that, Several innovations from Concrete
| printers, to rammed earth homes look very interesting. Then
| there is a "FlatPack" home trend, and several other
| innovations that could very well reduce the number of blue
| collar trade jobs as well
|
| >>All of these are massive sources of employment.
|
| Employment yes... High Income No, they also destroy the
| body so you really need to be in a supervisory, manager, or
| other such role by the time you are 50-55.
|
| >>and the above sectors will absorb that investment.
|
| That has never been true in the history of humanity, and it
| will not be true here.
|
| >>>Will your office workers make an easy transition to
| physical labour? No. But neither did the coal miners find
| 'learning to code' easy.
|
| This is one of the worse misconceptions people have, very
| few if any "coal miners" learned to code.. This does not
| happen. That is not the transition
|
| The transition from Mining to Information was a
| generational thing, a family that was 3 generations of
| miners, well the 4th generation learned to code.
|
| The miners move to other blue collar jobs, they became
| truck drivers, plumbers, welders, factory workers, etc.
|
| >>Also, if you can use AI, you are already safer than most
| of the white collar jobs,
|
| You are delusional if you think that.
| jeffdn wrote:
| In 1985, there were about 170,000 coal miners in the United
| States -- the peak of over 800,000 was in the 1920s. There
| simply isn't a comparison in the scale there.
| anonylizard wrote:
| Coal miners weren't the only blue collar workers
| replaced, there were 20 million US manufacturing staff at
| its peak, now its down to 12. All offshored. That's 8
| million alone.
|
| The US is already spending $1 trillion on infrastructure,
| $1 trillion can hire 10 mil people digging ditches for a
| year, and when subsidizing gainful employment (ie, only
| subsidizing 20% of the wages), can probably generate 50
| mil jobs. If AI is that impressive, expect the government
| coffers to swell so much it can spend $1 trillion on
| infrastructure every single year.
|
| The US can easily absorb $30 trillion in total of
| infrastructure investment + housing construction,
| rebuilding itself to say Chinese standards. This wasn't
| possible previously because of cost and labour shortages.
| Now it is.
|
| The future isn't all roses, but pretending it'll be some
| sort of apocalypse, is just another form of coping,
| excusing yourself to understanding the reality.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| >>The US is already spending $1 trillion on
| infrastructure,
|
| No the US is not. I urge you to read the damn bills not
| the Headlines. No where in any of these "infrastructure"
| is even 10% of the money being spent on actual
| infrastructure...
|
| >>If AI is that impressive, expect the government coffers
| to swell so much it can spend $1 trillion on
| infrastructure every single year.
|
| Where on earth do you get this.... Where in the history
| of anything has that been true. Where do you expect this
| money to come from... Corporate Taxes. Please ...
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Stop telling people to find new work and start talking
| about UBI and short work weeks. No one needs to work 40
| hours now, and AI makes that even more useless.
| penjelly wrote:
| seems folks are mad because Stack exchange ceo wants to use their
| own LLM to provide answers on their site. Which is something that
| other SE sites have banned as answers previously.
| ryanwaggoner wrote:
| It sounds like he's suggesting that AI will open up a huge new
| pool of amateur developers, and those developers will need a
| community to turn to to know how to leverage AI.
|
| But that kinda ignores the impact that AI will have on the
| concept of the SO community, or whether they'll even be a need
| for it.
|
| I honestly think his take is a misread of what kind of
| "community" SO has. My use of SO has always been 99% functional
| and borderline mercenary. I'm not getting to know anyone, I'm not
| building relationships, I just need a question answered. There's
| nothing sticky about this community other than it being a good
| place to get those questions answered. As soon as AI can do that,
| I'll never return to that "community", and I'll miss it as much
| as I miss Yahoo Answers.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| the use and abuse of the term "community" to mean things
| convenient to for-profit content aggregators. What could be wrong
| with the New Digital Feudalism?
| [deleted]
| dahwolf wrote:
| "Community is the future of AI"
|
| Comedy gold. So first AI takes content created by human labor
| without permission or compensation. Then it centralizes the sum
| of it and monetizes it exclusively.
|
| But wait, it gets better. You will now also supply your labor for
| free to fix/curate the current AI errors. Which will make the AI
| even better and more profitable, and yourself ever more obsolete
| over time.
|
| Picking our brains to create a giant private for-profit brain.
| Why would anybody willingly contribute to this scheme with their
| free time, in a backdrop where their own relevancy is at stake?
| There is no community without human incentives, every community
| will starve and die. You can extend this doom scenario to all
| open (web) content.
|
| More pragmatically speaking, StackOverflow is royally screwed. It
| was already on its way down for various reasons but this is a
| shock. AI coding assistants are rapidly spreading and improving,
| making it inevitable that programmers will have less need for a
| direct visit to SO over time. Worse, those actually keeping the
| site running is a small group of hardcore volunteers that you
| just alienated.
|
| The future is even more bleak for their enterprise product.
| Having your private copy of some data and training it for
| internal use is rapidly being commoditized. Many companies have a
| Microsoft contract, giving them (potential) access to Azure
| OpenAI that allows you to do just that.
|
| But that doesn't take it far enough and is just an intermediary
| step. Soon you'll simply point your enterprise AI at everything.
| Your Wiki, your documents, your SharePoint, your email. All of
| the companies' knowledge will be at your fingertips from any
| contextual UI, whether this is Word, Excel, Outlook or your code
| editor.
|
| And not just that, this enterprise intelligence will be combined
| with the world's intelligence. In such a future, would one
| seriously need a private copy of StackOverflow? The future I
| describe is about a year away.
| [deleted]
| voz_ wrote:
| This guy is a wordcel, disregard him. He cannot rotate a cow in
| his mind.
| [deleted]
| moffkalast wrote:
| > At Stack Overflow, we've had to sit down and ask ourselves some
| hard questions. What role do we have in the software community
| when users can ask a chatbot for help as easily as they can
| another person? How can our business adapt so that we continue to
| empower technologists to learn, share, and grow?
|
| Yes, why would one subject themselves to the toxic SO community
| when a bot can give you a tailored answer in seconds and doesn't
| close your question as duplicate.
| andrepd wrote:
| It gives you a tailored answer _from stackoverflow_ :)
| rtuin wrote:
| I'm getting the point of the post, but confused to what it means
| for community/public SO.
|
| Is the essence really: "Please contribute manual qualitative
| solutions to public SO, so we can use it to train GenAI for our
| enterprise customers", or have I misread?
| andrewstuart wrote:
| This is the person who cancelled SO jobs.
|
| SO jobs should have been an absolute gold mine, instead he
| cancelled it.
|
| Makes no sense to me. If you can't make a ton of money on job ads
| on Stack Overflow then you're not trying.
|
| It's true that SO was doing SO jobs wrong, but it should have
| been fixed, not cancelled.
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| SO was phenomenal for sourcing engineering talent. No board I
| ever used since gets close to the level of incoming candidate
| quality. I am still sorry it's gone, and I'm especially sorry
| every time I need to interact with LinkedIn hiring instead.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Can confirm. I used to use it for hiring high quality
| engineers.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > SO jobs should have been an absolute gold mine
|
| job websites I can think of off the top of my:
|
| hired
|
| indeed
|
| linkedin
|
| ziprecruiter
|
| google shows jobs
|
| websites google recommends:
|
| monster
|
| glassdoor
|
| simplyhired
|
| yes none of these are customized like stackoverflow but, don't
| you think that competition is stiff enough?
| the_only_law wrote:
| LinkedIn's job board is could almost be usable if it didn't
| stuff the results full of "promoted" crap.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Maybe SO management figured it should be more lucrative to
| have those job sites/brokers bid on ads placed on SO rather
| than becoming a competitor to their customers.
| smt88 wrote:
| Those competitors should all lose to SO because SO is a site
| every developer visits many times per week even if they
| aren't job hunting.
|
| Indeed can't find me devs that don't know they want to leave
| their current job yet.
| andruby wrote:
| Sure, there's lot's of competition. But: the market is also
| really huge, and SO had a good way to differentiate.
|
| Every business is recruiting and willing to pay hundreds or
| thousands to fill each spot.
| polalavik wrote:
| The arena is saturated, but the quality is garbage. Lots of
| 3rd party recruiters hiding company names posting the same
| job everywhere.
|
| If you can keep the quality high for a small-medium group
| there is money to be made, I imagine (i'm trying to start a
| job board myself for a tiny group). But just look at anything
| Pieter Levels has built (remoteok.io) dude has a huge monthly
| MRR. granted hes a solo founder and SO probably employs many.
| Also look at Dice.com. They allegedly bring in near
| 150Million/year! To have a targeted audience in the palm of
| you hands and throw it out the window is just bad business.
| SO is really just throwing away money.
| cinntaile wrote:
| You really don't think SO had a leg up for dev jobs?
| BoorishBears wrote:
| How many of those sites has one millionth the brand equity
| that StackOverflow has with developers?
|
| Every single site you mentioned is filled to the brim with
| low quality low effort Contract to Hire recruitment spam.
|
| StackOverflow could have been _the_ way to get real tech
| jobs, but they squandered it.
| [deleted]
| sharemywin wrote:
| I just wonder what a future with AI looks like that doesn't suck.
| dahwolf wrote:
| "It might be in the self-interest of each developer to simply
| turn to the AI for a quick answer, but unless we all continue
| contributing knowledge back to a shared, public platform, we risk
| a world in which knowledge is centralized inside the black box of
| AI models that require users to pay in order to access their
| services."
|
| A shared, public platform you say? The type of platform that AI
| will scan and train on? Therefore by contributing to such
| platform, you actively participate in AI centralization, no?
| gumballindie wrote:
| And the sweat you put in can now be monetised even more
| efficiently. Think about it, once ai replaced us and we'll all
| be unemployed, we'll have nothing better to do than sit and
| post on SO to make these dudes rich.
| dahwolf wrote:
| I assume the CEO is intentionally vague. He knows what's up.
| There's very few people whom enjoy interacting with SO, most
| just want to get to the answer.
|
| If AI code assistance has that answer, it's game over. Not
| even leeching SO would be attractive, let alone contributing.
| chx wrote:
| Prashanth Chandrasekar was brought in as the hatchet man to
| facilitate the sale after destroying Rackspace. Fired the beloved
| community managers and the community became much more hostile
| since. Why are any of you surprised he is out of touch with the
| community?
|
| SO should be ran by a foundation funded by tech companies
| enlightened enough to realize the massive productivity gains it
| produces (with SE as a side goodwill project). In this era, this
| counts as wishful thinking. Instead we got a 1.8B sale, that's
| not pocket change, now the profit must flow.
|
| This is what Cory Doctorow calls enshittification.
| https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
| jollofricepeas wrote:
| There are enlightened tech companies?
|
| Tech is no more enlightened than the robber barons were 100
| years ago.
|
| There's only three real options for platforms like SO:
|
| - Mozilla
|
| - Wikimedia Foundation
|
| - Internet Archive
| the_third_wave wrote:
| Only one really, this being Internet Archive. Mozilla [1] and
| the Wikimedia Foundation [2 - talking about Wikipedia
| specifically] are too ideologically tainted to be seen as
| "enlightened". I have not heard of similar problems with the
| Internet Archive so I hope that sanity prevails in that
| organisation so that internet history is recorded regardless
| of the ideological bent of what is archived.
|
| [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-
| deplat...
|
| [2] https://unherd.com/thepost/wikipedia-co-founder-i-no-
| longer-...
| andrepd wrote:
| > Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they
| are paying and who is being targeted.
|
| > Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms
| so we know how and what content is being amplified, to
| whom, and the associated impact.
|
| Can't really argue with that, even though I also frown at
| the tone of the test of the post.
| majormajor wrote:
| The Internet Archive that just risked their existence on a
| why-did-we-think-we'd-get-away-with-this blunder
| (charitably you could call this ideological blindness, at
| best?)?
| Karunamon wrote:
| In addition to the problems you listed, Wikimedia spends
| money like it was water, and Mozilla's handling of their
| main product, Firefox, could be charitably described as
| mismanagement. Neither organization deserves trust.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| What about Blender foundation?
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| Let's Encrypt is an example of such construction
| chx wrote:
| I did say this counts as wishful thinking...
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Automattic? they got a bargain on tumblr
| JoeJonathan wrote:
| Whenever someone begins a piece with, "Throughout history," you
| know it'll be intellectual gold.
| Jupe wrote:
| In a way, Community may be the past of AI... Meaning the "Great
| Pause" [1] could happen, not by decree/law/agreement, but by
| people who will (out of self-preservation?) stop adding quality
| content to the free data sources that are SO, GitHub, etc. If
| ChatGPT and others end up "stuck" with data up to 2023, and the
| data afterwards are wacked-out conspiracy theories and SEO padded
| recipes, we may just end up with a "usefulness" limit of
| transformer AIs in general.
|
| [1] https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-
| experime...
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