Stack Overflow has seen a substantial decline in traffic over the last year that appears to be accelerating. https://observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overflow
In the past I tried to submit something to it, but didn’t have enough reputation or whatever.
In general though, I’ll try to use copilot first
Can you give an example how you use copilot? Why is it better than using chatgpt and how exactly do I use it?
chatGPT is more for asking questions… IMHO, I haven’t really seen it solve anything that Google won’t anyway.
However, Copilot is basically a really advance autocomplete. So, if I write something like function LinkedList.Init() it will try and fill in the gaps. Whereas, in the past, I might have gone to stack overflow for basic algorithms
It used to be total rubbish, but these days its good for a lot of smaller things.
Depends on your use case though. But, I just haven’t seen the need for ChatGPT at all for what I’m doing (but stuff which is more natural language like journalism, or product summaries, it might be more useful).
Also, on an unrelated note, Dall-E SUCKS at generating Logos (it can’t even generate text)
I I have been programming with Matlab for 8 years and am switching to Python. I’m focusing on deep learning applications and have been using ChatGPT to answer general questions about Python as interactive documentation. Would you say Copilot would be better for this use case or only better when I am a bit more advanced with Python?
It’s funny how if everyone just went and “read the documentation” like they tend to obnoxiously tell you to do… stackoverflow wouldn’t exist. Personally I go and look for things I can answer if someone asks a question that I know will get obliterated but I can tell they just need some help. I’ll try to answer it before it gets downgraded and they get banned
Have you ever wanted to do something from the uncharted area? Encountered bad documentation? This is what it’s supposed to be for, not handholding.
Uncharted is quite subjective. I used SO most when I was starting out in SE. Looking back through the questions I posted, most of them were very much beginner questions that I would just know nowadays or know where to look for. That was what I used SO for. Beginners asking veterans for help. The least of them were due to bad documentation or exploring uncharted territory. As I grew more confident in the field, I stopped using SO more and more. The latest only for best practices on simple problems I don’t want to reinvent. And exactly those cases GPT now solves faster and I’d be surprised if not even better than SO posts.
Stack Overflow reached its maximum “duplicates”. So new users arent engaged on asking anything because it is of course already a duplicate of xyz.
Isn’t it a good thing if your question is marked as a duplicate? That means you now have lots of answers readily available which already answered the question.
But then would you be like “Oh boy let me get slapped next time too”
I’d be like “Oh boy let me get redirected to lots of useful answers to my question next time too”.
I don’t understand why you would frame that as being “slapped”. Does having your question marked as a duplicate hurt your feelings?
Is there a fediverse alternative yet?
Also, if you are a technical person I urge you to start a blog where you document problems you solve. It’s a great ressource for others and a resumé for you.
IDK what shitoverflow gets out of being so fucking toxic. I asked one dumb question and I’m basically banned from posting on the website.
It feels like they’re trying to be a sort of “wikipedia” of every programming problem and solution. The problem is that eventually everything will be posted, and everyone will be banned from the website.
It feels like they’re trying to be a sort of “wikipedia” of every programming problem and solution.
That is exactly what stackoverflow is supposed to be. It’s not there to answer your question about “why is my IF statement not working”, it’s there to be a resource for all developers. How is a question about your specific problem gonna helps anyone ? If you haven’t, take the time to read the “how to ask” section, it describes what kind of questions are acceptable and what kind are not.
There is, obviously, some proper questions that should not have been deleted, but most of them are not suited for the site, as they don’t bring anything to the rest of the community.
If SO supposed to be wiki, then why there no clear way to update the answer with new information? Why only the person that asked the question can mark answer as correct? Clearly some person with more expirience should have possibility to mark answer as correct.
“You should be making a wiki page instead of a forum.”
- SO user on SO business model, thread closed Aug 2008
All questions have obviously been answered.
I bet this is directly related to ChatGPT
I thought chatgpt is kinda shit now since the newest updates
People prefer having something generating shitty code and not checking it, instead of asking or searching on internet for a substantially better solution
Because forum posts are always full of accurate and helpful information?
In my experience it still makes good suggestions for most things, and is better than trying to phrase things in a way that Google likes, then trawling through irrelevant forum posts.
It’s only there to make suggestions, so if someone is taking its output without understanding and treating it like gospel then they’re an idiot who’s inevitably going to end up in a world of trouble.
If you take the suggestion, verify it with documentation, then make sure you actually understand it, chatGPT is a great tool.
If I’m honest, stackoverflow was always a shortcut for searching documentation to me.
Simple stuff like how do I turn an InputStream to a String again? I can’t remember it, but I know exactly what to look for, I’m just to lazy.
For that kind of stuff ChatGPT is almost perfect.
