mccHard to imagine a signal that a website is a rugpull more intense than banning users for trying to delete their own posts
Like just incredible "burning the future to power the present" energy here
jonathankoren™@mcc I find it weird that people are waking up to the fact that they were doing free labor for a for profit company. Did they think SO was a charity or something?
The real lesson is to never license. It’s just a shakedown by middle men trying to free money. Scrape everything.
Death to copyright.
LR@jonathankoren @mcc there was no alternative. and it is cynical to say "you have no right to expect good behavior from a service and you are a fool if you do". you're defending the decay.
Crazy PonyTwo words: "Gamification" and "Reputation"
The "Stack Exchange" thing made it for people to get an dopamine rush for beeing succesful, winning the next level of the "Game"
Everyone there is in a race to get more reputation, get "Badges of Honor" and all the things
Its working just as its designed to
@mcc So developers will stop sharing information on #StackOverflow and future #Copilot and friends will be forever stuck in the past, answering questions about historically relevant frameworks and languages.
#LLM #StuckOverflow
#LLM #StuckOverflow
@chris Yeah. But for this to be true, we need a Stack Overflow replacement. And when Reddit went evil, the move to Lemmy doesn't seem to have succeeded as well as the move from Twitter to Mastodon.
@mcc IIRC Mastodon is older than Lemmy and the current move to Mastodon/Fedi happened in multiple waves, so it may be too early for higher expectations.
For stackoverflow I expect some degradation of quality since they accept “AI” generated content. This may additionally frustrate high quality authors and motivate them to leave. We’ll see.
What would a federated stack overflow look like if we were to invent it?
For stackoverflow I expect some degradation of quality since they accept “AI” generated content. This may additionally frustrate high quality authors and motivate them to leave. We’ll see.
What would a federated stack overflow look like if we were to invent it?
@chris I don't know. It's an interesting question because Stack Overflow is inherently more search-focused than Lemmy or Mastodon.
A good model for a distributed/ownerless SO might wind up looking more like bluesky than mastodon.
@chris And, of course, there's the weird element that the SO license *already* does not permit AI on a facial reading, and a distributed SO would probably be *easier* to scrape than the centralized one. So you're not actually preventing AI exploitation, you're only punishing one corporation (SO) for the AI bait-and-switch.
@chris … which is enough for ME to do a bunch of work and change my usage patterns, but may not be for other people.
@mcc I personally see less problem in scraping a federated pool of knowledge but I absolutely hate that stackoverflow now owns this knowledge and can keep people from using it but sell “AI” as a service to them.
@chris I suppose one thing to consider is if a federated pool of knowledge is CC-BY-SA, then we only need a court ruling that OpenAI violates CC-BY-SA and the federated pool becomes AI-safe. Whereas SO can, (or already has) change the TOS so they own rights to relicense all content.
…but of course, CC-BY-SA is also incredibly inconvenient for a SO clone because everyone will generally want to copypaste sample code!
@mcc So we’d be looking for Schrödingers license, allowing and forbidding closed derivative works at the same time :-)
(I have a feeling that a lot of licenses only work because nobody has a close look at how their objects are used.)
@chris If I were actually trying to create a stackoverflow clone, I'd have the default license be something like "all code blocks are CC0 but all human text outside the code blocks is CC-BY-SA". That would I think match the unspoken expectations both contributors and readers have.
@chris I *am* worried about the effect "AI" scraping is gonna have on copyleft in general, tho. I think people have for many years released copyleft on the rule of "hey, why not" and now the answer is "bc AI". (More thoughts: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/112209121196262534 ) Like, my proposed license in the last post would be very AI-friendly.
Matt Palmer@mcc That seems like a good and very straight forward approach, it’s would at least meet my expectations exactly.
@mcc I don't think contract law has (yet) gotten to the stage where a site can change a ToS and make it retroactively apply to people who no longer use the site, making their contributions from many years ago retroactively no longer CC-BY-SA.
@mcc @chris practically speaking, duplicating a single CC-BY-SA code snippet is never going to be practically actionable, because the damages payable would be miniscule. There's also a strong argument to be made that a whole software package is not a derivative work of a small snippet, although I wouldn't want to be the one paying for that judgement.
@womble @chris As a person putting up sample code, I want that sample code to be useful to other people. I think the license should be picked to maximize that utility. The way I see it, one of the ways to maximize the utility is to make the license *unambiguous*. If the recipient has to *wonder* whether they can use the code, I am causing them unnecessary problems even if they eventually do use the code.
@mcc there is that. Finding a licence wording that explicitly allows the "good" uses, without allowing the "bad" uses, that doesn't have a billion unintended consequences, is probably something beyond human capacity. Quick, get an AI to write it!
@womble I actually do generally use CC0 these days if it's meant to be sample code rather than "open source".
Szymon Nowicki@chris @mcc SO publishes database dumps so we could all make a fork and start from there with something more libre
@hey Good idea!
I was wondering if they still did and I expected, that they already stopped doing this.
I had this tool that indexed local copies of SO for referencing but I keep forgetting to reinstall it and update the database.
Thanks for reminding me!
I was wondering if they still did and I expected, that they already stopped doing this.
I had this tool that indexed local copies of SO for referencing but I keep forgetting to reinstall it and update the database.
Thanks for reminding me!
@chris they still do (https://archive.org/details/stackexchange) and still out of their own infrastructure.
IIRC they made Stack Exchange as a response of entshittication of another Q&A service and when they designed it they made a promise to make the content on open license and publicly available so once they go evil people can move on somewhere else taking the content with them.
Which I guess might be heading into this direction.
Billy Smith@BillySmith @chris Don't look at me. I was part of the exodus from SlashDot to Kuro5hin. Which I thought actually went pretty well actually
@mcc @BillySmith Good times. Though the husk of slashdot is still around but Kuro5hin is not :-/
@chris @BillySmith Yes, which is real unfortunate because some of my best writing is now offline !!! :(
@mcc @BillySmith This is really sad, I’m sorry.
It shows again that information can only persist if it is copied and spread.
That’s why publishing on corporate platform, exclusively is such a bad idea. Just imagine youtube would really successfully lock ‘their’ content away one day.
It shows again that information can only persist if it is copied and spread.
That’s why publishing on corporate platform, exclusively is such a bad idea. Just imagine youtube would really successfully lock ‘their’ content away one day.
Louis Rossman is working on software to get around this. :D
@BillySmith @mcc On top of storing a lot of text over the years I’ve been downloading most videos I consider exceptional for a while. I tried to extend this to everything that I read/watched using tools like https://archivebox.io but this still a crutch because it will only be archived for myself. To me something like peertube looks very interesting as a concept.
I've done the same.
When i looked at the streaming approach, i could see the future enshittification.
Peertube is great. :D
Another approach can be found here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mirlo/mirlo
and
@BillySmith @mcc To me it’s interesting that something that was so interesting to me 25 years ago completely vanished from my perception today. I may remember slashdot about 4 times a year or less. To be fair I may think of kuro5hin about 5 times, but only because I mention “Metamorphosis of prime intellect” to someone, a #SciFi story that was published there.
Chris@mcc every couple years I bother Rusty to post the K5 archive. Nothing yet!
@nightclaw it would be great even if just individual users could get a data takeout of our posted content tbh
David Zaslavsky
caitp
not a martian, honest
Robbert@mjrider You’re right, the bugs in current AI generated content are too obvious to really spread :-)
Ludwig Vielfrass
4am ❧@mcc an article went around recently about "rewilding" the Internet that made the analogy to clear cutting an old growth forest. You get incredible wood, but you can only do it once.
Kevin O'Gorman
marmarta@heretohinder @mcc so unsurprising, and yet so disappointing :(
snakecharmerb@mcc I'm active on SO and ChatGPT is very much *not allowed*, although removing it is not always as straightforward as one might like. There was a prolonged dispute between the community and the company about it last year.
tuban_muzuruI have dealt with novice coders for 40 years. I've told them to steer clear of SO - ask me if you've got a question about anything.
#StuckOverflow isn't entirely bad, but there's enough rat shit stirred into that pudding I would never trust anything trained on its data.
@tuban_muzuru I like Stack Overflow, but the problem with it is that it's so old that many of the questions are from like 2008-2015 and that means that often it gives you an answer that was correct ten years ago but is wrong now. (Sometimes they exacerbate this by closing a new question because it's a duplicate of a 2010 one full of outdated answers!)
So… the new "don't forget, you're here forever" policies will probably exacerbate this problem, if fewer high-quality answers come in after 2024.
Jeremy KahnFukuyama's got nothing on _this_ End of History
That's a really good point - answers don't stay right forever.
Shane Celis@mcc @tuban_muzuru They’ve invited the query rot and nothing seems to suggest they don’t like it that way.
Kevin Boyd (he/him) 🇨🇦@mcc @tuban_muzuru I was never much of a participant, something about the participatory experience soured me right off the bat.
Glad I stayed away.
Dr. Brandon Wiley@mcc @tuban_muzuru I was pondering the world after the demise of Stack Overflow and while I have depended heavily on it's use in my career as a professional programmer, I think the real problem is that we need it at all. The modern condition of programming being mostly copy-pasting Stack Overflow answers is a symptom of a much greater problem. Programming is too complicated because we have made it too complicated, we should all work together to make it easier instead. That's my opinion, anyway!
After a while, patterns are seen, problems revisited, writing a program to spec - the problem isn't complication, often.
When you run across what you think is a needlessly complex solution - you are looking at a compromise. Comment it and ride it through the debugger - but don't rewrite it immediately ....
araly@tuban_muzuru @mcc
i'll always remember taking the time to write a full question, with what i tried and what didn't work, to receive an answer that just said "duplicate, closing", without linking to where the duplicate was.
meanwhile a friend who wasn't a programmer asked the same question at the same time but super vague and with minimal effort. he got answers instantly (that were not usable because too vague).
if you punish effort and only answer the easy questions, i don't want any part of it
i'll always remember taking the time to write a full question, with what i tried and what didn't work, to receive an answer that just said "duplicate, closing", without linking to where the duplicate was.
meanwhile a friend who wasn't a programmer asked the same question at the same time but super vague and with minimal effort. he got answers instantly (that were not usable because too vague).
if you punish effort and only answer the easy questions, i don't want any part of it
Rae PattersonIt's funny how a company's attitude towards LLMs depends on whether it thinks it can make money with them or lose money with them.
Very puzzling . 
Brick Duck@mcc I think the banned people are in the right, but how did OpenAI not already scrape stack overflow? I've seen samples of ChatGPT's slop that told me the exact same wrong answers that were available on stack overflow (and its sister sites).
I wanted to test it and they reverted one of my protest edits almost immediately by Progman
