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by indeed30 1041 days ago
> At that point, the curve levels off, and as the number of typical questions die off because they've already been asked and answered many times, the number of new questions has to trend downward

Yes, absolutely, and the article addresses precisely that point. But the questions graph shows a drop of about 40% at exactly the point in time when ChatGPT launches, which is much too extreme to explain away like that.
1 comments
TheRealPomax 1041 days ago
Except the graph cuts off before 2023, so it tells us nothing about the actual effect it had, it cherry picked the initial drop off (or worse, they just used https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends, didn't even look at the time axis, and went "this proves our point").

It's Q3 of 2023, if you're going to argue a decline, why are you not looking at the most important three quarters of data?

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indeed30 1041 days ago
No it doesn't - note the axis marks are every two years.
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TheRealPomax 1041 days ago
Ah, true.

That said, some of these are going back up. Java and C#, for instance, are clearly trending up again, as is Swift. Python's down, but by 10%ish, not 40%. And JS is down a lot but that's the one language you'd expect ChatGPT to actually be the best at "helping" with, given that it's the web's own programming language, so it being trained disproportionately more on JS than anything else would be hardly surprising.

And then there's languages for which ChatGPT might as well not exist: Lisp, Go, Rust, etc. Heck, if we were to look at Rust, for instance, ChatGPT did literally nothing. Its rise has been, and continues to be, meteoric. And if we look at arduino questions, you might even conclude that ChatGPT was a factor in driving people to Stackoverflow, not away from it.

Data science is hard, and certainly much harder than most folks (especially those with a programming background) think it is.

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