Izkata

Sure didn't cause any problems when usage was rapidly rising in the early 2010s. That was not a new policy.

> But it only took 3,000 reputation to cast a close vote, and 15 to flag to close a question (prioritizing it for consideration by the first group).

Quick context for anyone who isn't aware, rep there doesn't work like karma here: your question getting upvoted is apparently now +10 (used to be +5), your answer getting upvoted is +10, either getting downvoted is -2 (and costs the downvoter, they get -1), plus a few others.

I was a SO user from 2011 or so and have not experienced it. I'm with GP and GGP where whenever someone does post an example, it almost always shows them having misunderstood the site or misrepresented the situation, and should have been closed even in the good early days.

For example, one of the uses for closing a question is to give the asker time to improve it based on feedback before people start piling on irrelevant answers (such as including more detail showing why it's not a duplicate of another question). IIRC doing so automatically makes it eligible for reopening, without even having to ask.

Another is that duplicates are meant to point at the best version of the question/answer. Usually this is caught when the new question is posted and it's closed as a duplicate of the older one before answers are posted, so you don't see GGGP's situation, but if it's not caught by someone who knows about the older question the new one can become better and then, by design, the old one is closed and pointed at the better new question.

> SO had been flatlined since 2014 and declining since 2017.

During this peak popularity period, they were actively trying to stop people from flooding the site with low-quality "do my homework"-style questions.

> Why doesn't it move the question to the other site and then make a stub link? More awful, user-hostile experience.

It's to teach the user where it belongs, so they don't make the same mistake again, by making them actually go through the action of going to the other site. Otherwise by auto-migrating it they'll learn to just keep posting on the wrong site and someone else will do the work for them.

> Some later Trek shows (e.g. Voyager) turned captains into geniuses who knew more about everything than all of their underlings.

Not everything. Picard was command track his whole career, I think the same was true for Sisko. But Janeway started as a science officer before switching to command, and Archer was a test pilot. Their experience in those fields would sometimes be useful. It's similar to how Picard's interest in archeology was sometimes useful.

In the US, I also only say summer time/winter time because I can never keep straight which is which.

...so go to sleep while I'm still at the office at 4:30pm?

I see that example as the opposite, people just like to sleep in in general, and later sunrise/sunset gives them more light in the times that matter. They don't cancel out, doing both gives the best result.

You have to know ahead of time whether people value their sleep over sunlight, or sunlight over sleep, to know which version makes the most sense.

Go further back and it just meant happy or cheerful.

I can't help but read it as "la-tinks". And then I think of Tinkerbelle, who has the nickname Tink.

Approval voting has all the upsides and none of the downsides, with the added bonus that it's simple to count and easy to explain to the average person.

> > Maybe new models training on the previous generation’s synthetic output is compounding the effect? LLM Ouroboros.

> This is an interesting failure-mode to me, and I've been interested in how accurate it is since the inception of these models.

The term you want to look for more information on this is "model collapse".

The square bracket version tells the reader it's required, the .get version tells the reader it's optional. Kind of the reason both exist in the language (the .get version has an optional second argument to return instead of None when the key is missing).