[nottheengineer]

Agreed, stack overflow is the place where we stop to find an answer to a question. They should stay focused on that instead of adding useless features.

But I don't entirely agree on LLMs being useless. An LLM could help with avoiding duplicate questions. It could analyze the content of the question and point out stuff like missing logs before the question is submitted to guide beginners through the basics.

If someone manages to turn an LLM into a good context-aware search engine, that would also make sense for SO.

But somehow no one seems to actually use LLMs given how much bullshit they talk about them.

[janalsncm]

I just hope they understand the core value proposition of SO is that answers come from people. That is their product.

If you want answers from a computer, you can get them from chat GPT. The best SO is going to do with that is spend a lot of money to repackage it into a feature people probably weren’t looking for on SO to begin with.

I agree there are other indirect applications of ML models than just generating answers. And I hope ML can help to soften some of the “edges” in UX. A lot of that can be done with BERT or even more primitive statistical methods though.

[hathchip]

It's doubtful that ChatGPT would be able to answer so many tech questions, if it wasn't for the existence of SO.

[a_c]

I don't remember which podcast was it coming from, several years ago there was motion to shut down the US National Weather Service, or is it the NOAA I don't remember, because AccuWeather is all people need. No one seems to question where AccuWeather get the meteorological data. It is from the government service

[a_c]

Found it. Turns out it is an audio book by Michael Lewis, The Coming Storm https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Coming-Storm-Audiobook/B07F43...

[isaacfung]

I use a search engine called phind. For simple problems, usually I just have to pass in a short description of what I am doing and the error message, and it would find the relevant SO posts and summarize several potential solutions. Half the time one of the solution would work and I dont even have to open the SO posts.

[diegoperini]

Try phind.com, it's pretty much what you described. It's an AI search engine for programmers which is able to annotate its results with SO links for every paragraph it generates in case you don't trust the generated text.

[nottheengineer]

Thanks, I'm currently trying to guide two students through the hell of setting up ML on CUDA without doing everything from scratch and they use chatGPT a lot.

This will probably come in handy for all the weird cryptic errors that they get along the way.

[chasd00]

Done and bookmarked. I forget how cool these things are. Now I just want it read to me in Trump’s voice with a very indignant tone and some cuss words mixed in like the presidents discuss anime videos.