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Context: The decline started way before AI.
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this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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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.
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
POV you've just clicked on the only relevant-looking search result:
"Duplicate question, use search."
The linked and solved question: does not actually answer my question, or the answer is for an outdated version of the software I'm using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
See also "the Linux community".
ducks for cover
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
I will never feel bad for telling someone to read the source to answer their own question. It's right there, man.
Granted, this is generally in a professional engineering context.
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.
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PEBKAC RTFM
Fr. I went to the fedora discord and after asking a question in the help channel a guy straight up told me to Google it. Wow, so helpful, I wonder why Linux doesn't have more users
TBF, you went to the Fedora discord, which is not officially run by Fedora. Fedora only officially runs their Matrix server and forum.
If I'm being completely honest, IME if you have to use Discord or Telegram for support, you might as well use ChatGPT. Something about those platforms makes people such assholes. People on forums are generally lovely. Matrix can be hit or miss.
edit: also, 4 year fedora user here, if theres anything I can do to help please let me know :)
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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"?
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.
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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.
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?
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"Read The Fucking FAQ!"
The FAQ: " "
I just wonder what the LLMs will be trained on once they put everything else out of business.
We've polluted the water. One active area that LLMs are being deployed is in reading scanned text, so my best guess is that the next few models are going to be trained on a new corpus of previously unscanned written text.
I'm talking legal documents from the 80s, company documents that were never digitized, and anythibg else google books hasnt fully OCR'd.
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I mean... the same data they use now? And presumably other LLM output based on that, which is something that may or may not affect things a lot, nobody really knows.
Even if AIs consumed data when they trained on it so it couldn't be used for training again, which they do not, it's not like code stops being created, stored and datamined by the people who own the creation and storage.
AI gets real weird when you keep feeding it inputs that were once AI outputs. It's a well known fact that the outputs severely degrade.
The whole point is if AI actually replaced programmers wholesale, new code would stop being created by humans.
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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.
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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.
Since the AIs would be used to gather that information, they would learn from their previous prompts.
So if any AI user had that issue before, the AI would know how they solved it since they helped them solve it.
So I wouldn't worry about it too much.
I can't tell you how many times on stack overflow I see someone responding "why don't you do it this way, that requires you to use a completely different programming language and refactor your code base".
Motherfucker, I need to have this ticket done tomorrow or the customer support rep helping the client is going to cry.
The mods and experts don't really care that newbies are asking questions on chatgpt. It makes the mods jobs easier and newbies tend to ask either duplicate questions, or ask out of scope questions.
Stack exchange the company on the other hand care very much that new users come and stay but they've apparently decided to pursue this in the worst way possible, which means the long time users really aren't happy to let them.
The company also has a history of completely disregarding it's moderators which, like reddit, are unpaid, but unlike reddit, are elected community members (also, their privileges are already available to them beforehand, they just gain the ability to use them without a vote).
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