• prole@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    121
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    It’s almost as if there’s an entire class of (inordinately wealthy) people who have no reason to exist in the capacity that they do.

    CEO’s are so important to the functioning of a product that they don’t even have to fucking understand the product itself. Why not give them shitloads of money?

  • sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    99
    ·
    1 year ago

    Stack Overflow has a CEO? WTF for? It’s a repository of information. All the LLMs have already ripped a copy of the site, so where were they planning to generate revenue?

    I hope someone starts a version and integrates it with activitypub and then users can donate towards the hosting costs.

    Stack Overflow is supposed to be the wiki of developers, not a fucking business. I hate these greedy fucks. “let’s make money from other people’s time and effort” 🤮🤮🤮

    • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      55
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      It seems you’re unclear on what a CEO is. Even non profit organizations have CEOs (though stackoverflow is very much a for-profit company). A CEO is just the head decision maker in an organization.

      At the end of the day, SO has server hosting costs, and they have to cover those costs somehow. That makes them a business.

      • Lucien@beehaw.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Ah, wonderful capitalism working as intended. Everything comes down to money.

    • HeartyBeast@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      43
      ·
      1 year ago

      Stack Overflow is supposed to be the wiki of developers, not a fucking business.

      Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood founded it, and it was sold to Prosus, a Netherlands-based consumer internet conglomerate, on 2 June 2021 for $1.8 billion.

      I guess someone would like some of that money back.

      • Moonrise2473@feddit.it
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        19
        ·
        1 year ago

        lol almost $2 billion for a website with almost no ads and that makes almost no revenue? Especially now that they closed the (paid) jobs section?

        ROI in 10000 years?

        • Rakn@discuss.tchncs.de
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          I’m unsure of many people know that StackOverflow also had enterprise offerings. Our company has their own StackOverflow instance with very specific content to our tech stacks.

          • Moonrise2473@feddit.it
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            Yes but they stopped offering that years ago.

            So, no more job classifieds, no saas, only ads from views… I don’t see where it can be profitable like that

        • abhibeckert@beehaw.org
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Valuation is usually based on potential revenue, not actual revenue. A $2 billion valuation would have been about $50 per user. It seems reasonable Stack Exchange should be able to make that much money per user somehow over the entire future existence of the company… if it’s run well. Which doesn’t seem to be happening from where I’m sitting.

          • SavinaRoja@beehaw.org
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            Valuation is usually based on potential revenue, not actual revenue

            How similar this is to how capitalists look at natural “resources”. “This website[wetland] sure is great. Lots of people[animals] are loving it. And it’s a vital part of the development[water] cycle… But it’s just not making me any money!”

      • Feyter@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        And now they also have to pay back like 2 billion dollar of investor money… What sense does this make?

    • arthur@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      That will become necessary soon, since their “business model” lost it’s meaning after the LLM’s

      • rainh@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        19
        ·
        1 year ago

        Lol I doubt it. LLMs are useless for the kinds of questions stack overflow is useful for.

        • fuzzywolf23@beehaw.org
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          9
          ·
          1 year ago

          And no SO means worse LLMs. Chatgpt relies on scrapes of SO, reddit, forums and GitHub discussion pages.

          • smoothbrain coldtakes@lemmy.ca
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            1 year ago

            It’s not like ChatGPT is the only LLM. GPT is pretty broad and general. Remember that MS has Co-Pilot which is literally entirely built on GitHub’s codebase knowledge. Different data sets will produce different kinds of useful predictors.

          • arthur@lemmy.zip
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            And the scrapping stage already happened. A new one will be useful only after enough human-made content is added, or it a major change in tech happen.

        • smoothbrain coldtakes@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          1 year ago

          I’ve had great success with LLMs troubleshooting my code independently without needing to consult a peer.

          It’s easier than looking on StackOverflow because it already crawled the answers there and it’s been programmed to drop the sass unless you ask it to be sassy specifically. All the knowledge without the elitism.

  • HousePanther@lemmy.goblackcat.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    66
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    I’ve found that the case for most CEOs in technology which is why I call them techbros. Arguably, they don’t even know business all that well either.

    • ɔiƚoxɘup@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      42
      ·
      1 year ago

      Of course not. They aren’t technologists, they’re capitalists. Their primary concern is capital.

  • bedrooms@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    1 year ago

    This one actually I don’t understand. SO has a robust voting system to turn down bad answers. Also, many questions suffer from no answer. So, from the OP’s perspective AI assistance is a positive.

    The resistance indeed comes from human moderators and answer-ers. And they are ridiculed by (often novice) OPs on Reddit etc.

    • smoothbrain coldtakes@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      20
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Because the established elite on SO are fucking dicks. You can’t ask a question anymore. It’s literally impossible to open a new thread. Yeah, a lot of troubleshooting has been answered, but do you really think the burden should be on the new user to know literally every single existing thread on the site? No, that’s absolutely absurd, and when some moderator or poweruser comes in and tells the newbie to go fuck himself for lack of research it’s pretty obvious why nobody wants to use the platform when the moderatorship is basically actively antagonistic to anybody seeking information, which is literally the point of the site.

      I’m glad it’s been crawled by GPT. I’m glad because the bot gives me no sass at all when I ask it to audit my code. It does it without any malice or bullshit and it saves me time from doing the research because everything is in the LLM DB already.

      • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        12
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Closing garbage is one of the best features of SO. When I began answering questions on Reddit I was literally answering the same shit every few days. It’s insane. People asking the same shit without doing any research prior is creating a ton of pointless work for people who can answer. Reddit, as well as Lemmy have no better ways to resolve this problem. SO does it via strict moderation. I guess if ChatGPT can find you a good answer from the bajillion duplicates without having to waste a SME’s time, that’s a positive. But yeah, I thank SO’s moderators for keeping it clean. I’d lose my mind as an asker and especially answerer if I had to keep doing this over and over again. I also have feelings and sifting through mountains of duplicates or having to answer the same questions over and over again hurts me.

        • smoothbrain coldtakes@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Yeah stringent moderation is great but you can do it without being absolutely terrible about every interaction. You can run a clean shop without needing to be a dick about everything. When every close is filled with malice and vitriol it doesn’t benefit literally anybody. It’s not healthy for the poster being vindictive, it’s not healthy for the newbies getting into the business, and it’s not healthy for the community overall when the normal thing is berating and belittling.

          Engineers are not good with customers…

      • davehtaylor@beehaw.org
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        1 year ago

        Not to mention the fact that even if a similar question were answered, if that thread is from 2012, the answer will, with 99% certainty, be totally irrelevant now.

        SO has always been a bastion of power hungry dickbags who get off on acting superior and putting others down. They way it’s structured reinforces this. It turned what should have been a great place to help each other into a fucking bloodsport arena.

        Also, fuck LLMs.

                • davehtaylor@beehaw.org
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  5
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  Two wrongs don’t make a right.

                  It’s also totally fucking different when someone on SO asks for help for their homework or for help with an nginx server on their home network, and when some tech firm decides to scrape 15 years worth of information created by countless people, and then spit it back out pretending like it’s some novel solution.

                  As I said in my original comment, I’m no fan of SO. But the behavior of neither the site nor the people who lurk and copy justify what LLMs are doing.

      • JunkMuffler@lemmy.one
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        1 year ago

        I’m with you. It’s amazing how fast ChatGPT has replaced SO for me.

        I’m not sure how this will work long term. How will the model get new training data?

        But honestly? SO can eat a bag of dicks. It doesn’t matter if you’re asking a question that’s nowhere on the site (or the first 3 pages of Google results). It’s going to get closed and ignored.

        I think most people moved to Reddit and Discord a while ago, which is also problematic. We need to get these conversations happening on the open Fediverse.

        • smoothbrain coldtakes@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          What will happen long term is more specialized models for specific applications. MS already has coder facing resources through GitHub Co-Pilot, and they were the key funders for most of OpenAI’s work with GPT so they have also deployed GPT4 inline for Bing, which I find actually pretty useful even though it’s been neutered to all hell.

          The problem with GPT is the G. Generalized. We’ve been building more specific models though. Co-Pilot is already trained on the entire codebase and discussion boards on GitHub. Eventually that’s going to be the tool you want to use over GPT because it’s specifically designed for code above all else.