Recent submissions

Comment · 10 months ago
dw, you're not alone in this. Researchers like this are extremely impressive, but it seems like an absolutely massive misallocation of his brainpower. Sure, people can say the same about art/literature/chess/etc., but I would argue that more people benefit from viewing or experiencing the latter than will benefit from working through all 119 pages of this paper. This guy could be doing medical or other scientific research, but instead is working on some contrived problem. Even here, let's assume there is some remote application for a nanobot for targeted drug delivery transiting a capillary... "rough" computational solutions will be more than adequate, especially when taking into account wall elasticity and other variables. I do wonder why some of the top institutions in the world like KIAS are even funding this.
Comment · 10 months ago
Had the same experience with rif/res, and on X. If you go into algorithm-heavy sites with the intention of actively curating your personalized algorithm into your areas of interest, the sites can work quite well. One click blocking of subreddits and topics/posters sends strong feedback to the algorithm to readjust. I really don't know how people can use sites in any other way. For YouTube, I have filters and blockers set up such that I don't even get recommended any videos, and don't see any videos to click on unless I type in a search query or receive a notification from a channel to which I am intentionally subscribed. Facebook was/is broken beyond all repair, though. I recall that you could not remove posts from random groups and people from your feed, even if you were not friends with them or members of those groups.

Sometimes, I will see a screenshot of someone using reddit or YouTube "unfiltered" and it's night and day, full of slop and ragebait everywhere. No thanks!

My only difference of opinion with you is that I don't find positive content boring. I find positive things exciting and engaging! Negative content just makes me want to tune out, for the most part, unless it's some cathartic or amusing scenario like the recent thread here about SO imploding lol.

Comment · 10 months ago
Emotionally charged? No, just pointing out a statement of fact that conversing with you is like attempting to have a reasonable discussion with a brick wall. That's not emotional, just objective... you are perfectly suited to SO!
Comment · 10 months ago
I am fully aware that it's split off. My entire point of mentioning it was that even a bit of extra fun got excised from the site.

>The issue is that code golf didn't fit well into the intended design

Exactly! The intended design of SO was to be a hellhole, even though it was able to stave off this fate in its infancy by virtue of having too many optimistic new users.

Comment · 10 months ago
Comment · 10 months ago
AI didn't necessarily kill SO because it was strictly better at giving technical answers (and it certainly wasn't better when GPTs initially burst onto the mass-appeal scene several years ago), but that it provided an alternative (even if subpar) where users could actually get responses to their questions (and furthermore not be ridiculed by psychopaths while doing so was the cherry on top).
Comment · 10 months ago
One might even say that Joel and Jeff created their very own puts on shades coding horror yeaaahhhh with SO, and it is indeed ironic that them building Discourse has created far better communities than SO ever was.
Comment · 10 months ago
hahaha, I almost forgot about that! "stop talking about edge cases and other things pertinent to this topic in comments about this topic!! reeeeeeeee!!!!"
Comment · 10 months ago
>StackOverflow was a pub where programmers had fun while learning programming. The product of that fun was valuable.

I really like this description. I and others here who are talking about negative experiences there seem to decry how we enjoy programming (you see words like "fun" and "passion" used in these posts), and how SO decided to take this good faith and cheer and bludgeon users for often opaque reasons, just so they could power trip. As much as I have many reservations about LLMs, I can ask LLMs to be as emotionless (or even emotional but chipper/happy) as I want. On SO, you needed to prostrate yourself and self-criticize to even have the opportunity to be bludgeoned further by the moderators. Who tf would want to spend their time contributing there? Even if you contributed a decent or even great amount to the site, you would still get whacked over the head if you dared to ask a question of your own.

This is why people jumped to LLMs, even when they were far less capable than they are now. Most people (SO moderators don't view others as "people", as is apparent in this thread) would rather receive mid-tier answers from an LLM (though LLMs have now exceeded this level of quality) while still having fun, than get castigated and "closed as duped" on SO.

Comment · 10 months ago
Fellow OG! And it's been happening on HN since the mid-2010s, too. Moderation went out of control everywhere, but at least this site isn't branded as some strictly technical site. Can't believe I'm even saying this, but moderation on a site that encompasses a cornucopia of topics is their prerogative. The mind-boggling thing to me about SO was that the moderation used non-technical criteria (such as failing to recognize why certain problems were asked and were not dupes, and later to shoehorn in political and sexual ideologies) to shape a technical site.
Comment · 10 months ago
>this whole chain-of-interaction is a wonderful reminder of why I left SO

They've become parodies of themselves to such an extent that this topic should be a new sterling example of Poe's law hahahahaha

Comment · 10 months ago
Exactly... I'm getting a laugh out of this thread because it's so easy to spot the power-trippers who are enraged at how their fiefdom is rapidly going extinct.
Comment · 10 months ago
He's demonstrating in real-time to other contributors here why SO is toast hahaha

The feeling you are getting when talking to that arrogant brick wall was the prototypical SO user experience.

Comment · 10 months ago
+
Comment · 10 months ago
>Do you not realize how the proposal must sound to someone who is not already in the SO in-group?

The fact that you even have to point this out to them, and how they still don't understand the root of the problem, is precisely why SO is finished.

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