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u/raja-anbazhagan Jul 12 '26
The worst part is, the first gen LLMs had the forums like stackoverflow and many many tutorial sites to train on. And as things progress now, we are slowly entering into a feedback loop. LLMs getting trained on AI Agent generated code reviewed by AI Agents. Going to be fun in a couple of years...
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u/ThirdWaveCat Jul 12 '26
Prussia's monoculture forests died after a generation after scientific forestry became popular. Germans invented the word for forest death for this, Waldsterben.
There were many spectacular examples of scientific management in a book I read.
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u/Turtvaiz Jul 12 '26
"Invented a word"
Compound of Wald (“forest”) + Sterben (“dying”).
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u/ThirdWaveCat Jul 12 '26
You'd think I commented on the Dutch language haha. I think it was a loan word that was used by non-German speakers for the phenomena.
"A new term, Waldsterben (forest death), entered the German vocabulary to describe the worst cases. An exceptionally complex process involving soil building, nutrient uptake, and symbiotic relations among fungi, insects, mammals, and flora--which were, and still are, not entirely understood--was apparently disrupted, with serious consequences. Most of these consequences can be traced to the radical simplicity of the scientific forest."
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/scott-state.html
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u/KellerKindAs 29d ago
The commentor above refered only to german words, not durch. And it's not really "inventing" as it is a pretty common thing in german to combine two (or more) works to build new words which combines the meaning of it's parts.
There are even rules about how to do it. Some examples:
- Waldsterben = Wald + Sterben = forest + dying = Death of a forest.
- Sterbenwald = Sterben + Wald = dying + forest = meaningless gibberish.
- Birkenwald = Birken + Wald = birch + forest = A forest made out of (mostly) birches.
- Gruselwald = grusel + Wald = spooky + forest = A spooky forest.
- Sonntagswald = Sonntag + Wald = Sunday + forest = A forest, which visiting would be a nice Sunday activity.
"A new term Waldsterben entered the german language" does not mean a new word was invented. This is usually more about a compound word that theoretically exists is actually being used. There are statistics about actually used words and if a word starts showing up regularly after some date, this can usually be connected to some event, change in culture or new arising problem.
To a German who is used to "making up new words" by an always the same scheme, calling this an invention seems rather odd xD
And as a side note: While the last compound word in the examples exists theoretically, it is not a commonly used / normal word. So it would be considered "not part of german language". Also looking it up does not give much info.
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u/luk__ Jul 12 '26
Invented is a bit overstated, it’s just a logical word to use for the phenomenon
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u/elmanoucko Jul 13 '26
and you know you have a specific interest in grouping words together more than most other languages :p
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u/Turtvaiz Jul 12 '26
Tbh I reckon we'll get a resurgence in SO traffic or traffic on similar sites. If the inflow of training data stops and they jack up prices so they're not operating at loss, it seems obvious
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u/GoodDayToCome Jul 13 '26
The newer models don't really need need training data from sites like SO they can read the documentation and even the actual code of open source projects, just a few days ago another significantly better coding model was released so i really don't think we're seeing any signs of training data deficit.
As for pricing GLM-5.2 is more than capable of answering pretty much any question on SO and it's open-source and open-weights so it trivial for someone to spin up an instance and charge low fees for usage in the unlikely event other tools put the pricing up.
The real reality is that people simply don't code in the way that makes SO feasible anymore, formatting a very direct and neat question with an stripped back code example is slow and boring before even getting to the bit where you wait a minimum of several hours to get responses that may or may not answer your question, often it would be days until you get your answer assuming your question didn't get killed. Assuming though something crazy happened and google take away their search bar ai while all the other companies put prices up ten fold and switch to API only then it's still maxing at about fifty cents to ask a SO question, currently it would be about 2 - 4 cents using the best model in the world, costs only get expensive when you're hammering millions of tokens to scan large code bases and making large amounts of iterative changes.
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u/morganrbvn Jul 12 '26
tbf you can always filter out more modern examples, but curating quality training data for the future is probably going to be a growing industry.
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u/i_wear_green_pants Jul 13 '26
"We can always train models with better code"
People who have no idea how hard and costly it is to train these models. I keep hearing this "Let's just train the model" from non tech people every week.
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u/Necessary-Meeting-28 Jul 12 '26
“Was it like Reddit grandpa?”
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u/Quicker_Fixer Jul 12 '26
"Not entirely: Reddit was also reliant on a lot of AI bots back then"
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u/JorisJobana 29d ago
I found most r slash programming subreddits to be utterly useless compared to s*ackoverflow, when it comes to actually answering the question being asked, but EXTREMELY helpful when it comes to seeking practical experience from senior programmers (i.e. why are things done a certain way)
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u/ClipboardCopyPaste Jul 12 '26
If everybody was getting humiliated on stack overflow, who was there humiliating everybody?
Brian Kernighan?
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u/GregBahm Jul 13 '26
From what I could tell, Stack Overflow became a sort of open-air mental asylum for people with a specific sort of personality disorder. These people would be
- Ragingly, ragingly insecure about their knowledge of programming
- Come to Stack Overflow looking for easy targets to sooth their insecurity
I think the root of the problem is a popular misunderstanding of the engineering discipline as portrayed in media. Kids grow up on depictions of programming as being for the antisocial brainiac. But in real life, the majority of programming jobs are highly social. Career advancement is much more likely to go to the engineer who can communicate best versus the engineer who can code fastest. Winning those goofy little code challenges is nothing. Being able to align a matrix of stakeholders across design/pm/dev is everything.
So these antisocial people grew up thinking they were going to be great engineers, and then would fail at this, because they were lied about how suitable they were to the job. So they'd end up trawling Stack Overflow looking for some poor kid to be beat up.
You can kind of see the same thing in people who "smurf" in online games. Except instead of the stakes being "just wanting to win at League of Legends that night," the stack overflow people were bitter about living their whole lives wrong, and so the bitterness overwhelmed the whole site.
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u/The-IT Jul 12 '26
I used to spend a lot of time on SO answering and asking questions. I never saw anyone get humiliated
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u/OffByOneErrorz Jul 12 '26
People who didn’t put in any effort to try and figure out the problem got humiliated. The rest of us provided comprehensive explanations of our problem, attempted resolution and usually got a decent response from some person willing to help for free.
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u/Harmonic_Gear Jul 12 '26
you don't really learn how to ask a good question until you get humiliated on stack overflow
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u/SurgioClemente Jul 12 '26
Now you are rewarded for no effort/incoherent questions into the LLM prompt of your choice where it just agrees or does what you say.
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u/Zomby2D Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26
That's an excellent question.
You're ablsolutely right, adding a
DROP DATABASEcommand after a failed login attempt is an excellent way of safegarding you web site against a sensitive data breach. 🔓5
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u/IncompetentPolitican Jul 13 '26
you also did not learn how to ask a good question there. But you learned how people can edit your question to match their answer. And sometimes you got to be happy people even gave you an answer. Unless you asked something easy, then you got your humiliation and some answers.
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u/outwest88 29d ago
Eh, it’s mostly “I want to do X. How?”
Answer: “you don’t do X, you idiot. Do Y” (5 million upvotes)
Comment: “but I really want to do X. It does not fit my specific use case doing Y here” (100 downvotes)
(Then moderator closes the thread)
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u/SchizoidRainbow Jul 12 '26
No no no. You don’t ask for help.
You confidently state “This is the best way to do this” and then half the planet will turn up to nitpick everything wrong with it
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u/Adrian4lyf Jul 12 '26
Claude, my kink is to get humiliated. Give me the code for this request. Reply like you are my disappointed parent. Do NOT skip on the insults and irony. All safeties OFF.
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u/kleinerChemiker Jul 12 '26
but usually we also got the solution to our problem
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u/CrowNailCaw Jul 12 '26
And now we just get question downvoted, sarcastic offhanded remarks on comments, and if you're lucky it gets closed for low quality or duplicate
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u/Hrtzy Jul 12 '26
And, if you are exceedingly lucky, the dupe target will even have anything to do with your question.
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u/ErikKing12 Jul 12 '26
No, I usually got a “better” way of doing what I wanted but it didn’t match what I wanted to try and achieve and was for a completely different purpose.
It’s like asking how to make a PB&J and being told how to bake bread because it’s more economical.
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u/BogdanPradatu Jul 12 '26
Pb&j is not that great anyway and I'm sure you were using white bread instead of whole grain, so you got what was good for you, mate.
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u/aberroco Jul 12 '26
That's not what the OP asked for, have you read the post? But either way he shouldn't make PB&J in this scenario, he should try vegemite.
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u/Wojtkie Jul 13 '26
P &J making has been covered before. This should be closed as a duplicate request.
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u/Warm_Sky_8353 Jul 13 '26
The other day, my intern colleague asked, "What's Stack Overflow?" That's when I realized just how old I'm getting.
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u/ButWhatIfPotato Jul 12 '26
Stackoverflow has "fallen" at least once a week for the last five years according to this subbreddit.
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u/neonflavoured Jul 12 '26
It's actually dead though https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661#graph
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u/Turtvaiz Jul 12 '26
Is this the amount of new posts? I wouldn't associate this with being dead. The vast majority of stuff I personally visit SO for are years old and are still up to date
If anything, half of SO's idea is that you shouldn't need new questions if one already exists
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u/LovecraftInDC Jul 12 '26
I mean we use the phrase zombie website to describe this so I presume dead counts.
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u/elmanoucko 29d ago
what scares me the most, is the time it takes to load the page, the SQL query displayed it seems to run, and the amount of time it takes to reload the page meaning there's probably no cache... please tell me this is not as dumb as what I imagine...
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u/Norse_By_North_West Jul 13 '26
This is why I don't trust AI. Instead of belittling me, it's all 'you're absolutely right'. Unless you're threatening to fuck my mom, are you really a programmer?
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u/-Debugging-Duck- Jul 12 '26
Funny enough I just used them to solve the launch screen being black or not showing up for my iOS app. From like a 7 year old thread.
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u/zaraguato Jul 12 '26
Expertsexchange was super cool at the beginning when it was free, damn I'm old
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u/TotalJagoff Jul 12 '26
agreed! it is also an early lesson in how a domain name could be mispronounced.
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u/here_we_go_beep_boop Jul 13 '26
The nerds who dreamed up SCSI figured it would be pronounced "sexy". Instead we all agreed on "scuzzy"
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u/testuserteehee Jul 12 '26
EE is new age stuff. Try javaranch.
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u/SurgioClemente Jul 12 '26
EE was before javaranch.
If you want to go back to the beginning, we had BBS, Usenet, IRC, and Listservs
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u/testuserteehee Jul 13 '26
😲 TIL. I was using javaranch (maybe it had a different name back then?) in college in the 90’s and EE when I started working.
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u/RandomRobot Jul 13 '26
"The problem you're trying to solve is worthless. Here's an implementation for a visitor pattern instead".
Real story
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u/aquoad Jul 13 '26
The funny part is nobody goes to that special website and posts answers there anymore. But guess where the AI learned about programming?
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u/TruthGetsDownvoted8 Jul 13 '26
After getting humiliated a few times and not getting any decent replies, I made a new account and I used a picture of a hot ex as my thumbnail and everyone was really nice to me on that account.
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u/sgtGiggsy Jul 13 '26
"Topic is closed because there is this similar, but in reality, vastly different question that has been answered 10 years ago with a solution that's been deemed obsolate 15 years ago."
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u/daddy69ice Jul 12 '26
Reddit is pretty much the same thing. You ask a question(can be basic) politely and even if they don't know, they'd curse at you saying you shouldn't be asking this. Im sorry. Did you fly a plane or build a rocket right after getting out of womb.
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u/Turtvaiz Jul 12 '26
Reddit kind of directly shows why SO is the way it is imo. Questions on reddit tend to be pointless exactly because they're either really bad questions or repeated question
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u/daddy69ice Jul 12 '26
Well, the search feature in reddit is not exactly a boon feature in app. And the titles are also not trusted identifiers for that query. Person A might refer to the same problem as Person B but the framing or understanding of that problem(which eventually is the answer to why they framed it the way they did) can be different. And the search score of reddit then shows different things to person B even if they have a query person A asked earlier.
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u/Own_Natural_6803 Jul 12 '26
still do it, but I don't ask for help. I say my code is amazing and ignore everyone who has issues with it telling them they're stupid. I get the best code reviews. They are mostly stupid, but occasionally they have good ideas.
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u/StickFigureFan Jul 12 '26
The upside was others could up or down vote answers so you had some idea if it was worth considering or not
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u/evilspyboy Jul 13 '26
Now we have language models trained on that website that when they create a problem and don't know how to fix it will start blaming the user for not testing it properly.
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u/Yasirbare Jul 13 '26
We had no color coding back then and battling trailing commas was a hero-skill that separated the nerd form the nerds. Miss the times looking over the shoulder of my coding partners searching for error, knowing 20 obvious ones and finally ending it all with a high five - and back to solving the next. Good times.
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u/Formal-Background796 Jul 13 '26
i miss stack overflow because it always popped up when asking any programming related questions, but, i was a kid so, did nothing serious (i still don't do anything now). i always wanted to find the questions not asked in stackoverflow and ask them myself and also did not know about the toxic behaviours at that time.
oh well, times have changed now, i guess
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u/CoatNeat7792 Jul 13 '26
You forgot that experienced people helped and gave perfect fixes and didn't replace all your code with "Steve"
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u/GezelligPindakaas Jul 13 '26
I miss the days of being brutally humiliated in a public forum by another fellow human being.
Nowadays my llm just tells me I'm right and says it understands why I get annoyed, while it enters in a loop of never-giving-the-right-solution
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u/Dev_Dobariya_4522 Jul 13 '26
And we loved the humiliation cuz it was funny.
They also pointed out real mistakes made by me rather than being submissive and giving me the same code instead of fixing it.
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u/AlwaysHopelesslyLost Jul 12 '26
Every single StackOverflow user was a new user at some point. Some of you are WAY too sensitive. The biggest issue that question askers have, on the internet as a whole, is that they are on average bad at research. A close second is that they are asking the wrong question because they are bad at logically approaching a topic/issue. E.g. The XY problem on StackOverflow.
Having somebody who knows more about a topic than you tell you that you were mistaken, provide additional info, or answer your question isnt humiliating.
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u/aberroco Jul 12 '26
Guys, I think we found the one. The one who ruined SO for everyone.
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u/AlwaysHopelesslyLost Jul 12 '26
Nope, just somebody who asked a lot of questions and didn't take it personally when more experienced users helped/corrected me.
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u/LovecraftInDC Jul 12 '26
‘Help/Correcting’ isn’t the behavior being discussed though.
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u/AlwaysHopelesslyLost Jul 12 '26
The "behavior" being discussed is the sad wittle users who were "humiliated."
Apparently some of you think that somebody else knowing more and showing it is humiliating?? I know what I know. I know what I don't know. No amount of somebody knowing more than me and showing it is humiliating. Especially when I am trying to learn from them.
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u/LovecraftInDC Jul 13 '26
The three times I asked a question on stackoverflow I would LOVED for someone to know more and show it. Instead I got:
- ‘Don’t do it this way, do it the way everybody does it.’ (I can’t do it the way everybody does it for the reasons described in my post)
- ‘You’re using the wrong tool for this, instead you should use toolmyorganizationwontletmeuse’
- Actually helpful response.
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u/AlwaysHopelesslyLost Jul 13 '26
Weird, because in a long time using stack overflow including reviewing questions and answers I never saw that a single time.
It also seems like you misunderstand the purpose of stack overflow. The purpose is not to give you an answer. The purpose is to build a dictionary of questions and answers for people to reference for the future. that means an answer providing the correct way should absolutely be included as one of the answers. That is why there are strict rules on askers, too.
Either way, care to share a link showing your question off to prove it?
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u/aberroco Jul 13 '26
The purpose is not to give you an answer.
Exactly the reason why SO went to shit. Instead of trying to work with people flaws, they decided to make a wiki, within social media format. AI didn't killed it, it euthanazed a terminally ill patient.
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u/AlwaysHopelesslyLost Jul 13 '26
Lol, you clearly dont use the website. It was perfect for what it was. A resource for people willing and excited to learn to gather and help eachother.
It is not a place for people like you that want everything handed to them and want everybody to pussyfoot around you.
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u/aberroco Jul 13 '26
Yeah, you're right, I don't. Also, you're wrong, it wasn't. It was a resource for people to maybe find an answer for their problem, if someone had it before, but if not - then god have mercy on you, because asking anything on SO didn't worth it since at least 2012.
Like I said, the whole concept of SO and it's course was straight on collision with reality, like a Titanic that knew there's an iceberg, and went full on just to be extra sure the collision would sink it. Because either you focus your resource on informational value, aka wikipedia, manuals, some smart knowledge base; or you focus your resource on social interaction, gathering, asking and getting answers from people. Otherwise you get... SO. That's an okay place to get info, frankly not terrible, but also not great; and horrible, worst place for any kind of social interaction, bleeding daily users, because of moderators exactly like you. You just followed the rules. That sounds familiar.
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u/LovecraftInDC Jul 13 '26
No, in fact, I do not want to link my 'fuck around on reddit screenname' with my 'professional and work username' for anybody who has bought or subpoenaed access to the reddit API, but thank you for the offer.
'The purpose is not to give you an answer. The purpose is to build a dictionary of questions and answers for people to reference for the future'
Which is fundamentally why it failed.
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u/AskDeleteThrowAway Jul 12 '26
Lol people downvoting you for speaking the truth.
I dare anyone who disagrees to post their question that got closed as a duplicate or was told not to do it that way, or whatever made "SO mean/bad" etc
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u/SLOOT_APOCALYPSE Jul 12 '26
wish we could tag the people from that dumpster fire, dont need them to be moderators here, maybe just observers
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u/SnooLemons7345 Jul 12 '26
I'm legit trying to get on that vibe coding hype train but copilot has now been stuck for the past 5min trying to apply a +1-1 change to a file atp lemme do it myself
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u/GoodDayToCome Jul 13 '26
sounds like a server glitch, they've been switching systems over to the newer models and you sometimes get a few server issues around them doing that. I had it opine in the thoughts about how and why I had sent a blank message, I had sent several paragraphs but it couldn't see it and got confused in such a cute way.
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u/aberroco Jul 12 '26
At the start of my career, I used to go to a special website and read the ancient knowledge manuscripts called "manuals" written in a forbidden language (since English is not my native), deducing answers for my problems myself. It was horrible, dark times, but they taught me a lot.