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Yeah once I progressed past junior level work the value of asking questions on SO fell off a cliff. At that point most of the problems I got really stuck on were more niche than how to do $standardThing with $CommonLibrary, and there just weren't many people answering oddball questions like that. Even with popular languages like Javascript and Python most of my questions would get zero useful answers, so I pretty quickly stopped writing them. I think it's true that SO really didn't do much to encourage folks who would write answers like that to stay active on the site.

It stayed useful as a reference tool for quite a while, for when I needed to look something up that was fairly common but that I wasn't personally familiar with. But as others have said, the way they handled dupes and supposed opinion-based answers was really poor and meant that the top answers got more and more out of date each year. By the time LLMs came around they were strictly better for those kinds of lookups. Strictly better for now at least, LLMs will themselves get enshittified in the coming years.

Obama deported at least as many people as trump, but did it in far more competent way.

If the goal was actually just about enforcing immigration laws we wouldn't see armies of masked thugs beating the shit out of people in the streets. That's counterproductive because it drives local governments away from cooperating, which is essential to actually getting things done in a productive way.

Look at how this administration handles cases where ICE agents murder non-threatening people. They lie relentlessly and blatantly, even when there is clear video evidence showing up happened. Then they absolutely refuse to investigate any violent misconduct and even go out of their way to block other governments from investigating or trying to hold violent incompetent agents accountable.

The message should be clear to everyone. Fascists love a good spectacle. This is about that, and developing a paramilitary force that operates outside of the rule of law.

They already are. A majority of ICE detainees have no criminal record and that has been true for most of this administration.

Give me a break. Dems weren't throwing people in foreign torture prisons for not wearing a mask at the grocery store. Or throwing them in internment camps and stripping them of their citizenship for simply expressing an opinion.

A core principle of a free democratic society is that everyone has obligations to more than the whims of a wannabe fascist dictator. ICE agents who do things like violently assault peaceful citizens are in the wrong, both morally and legally. The fact that the current president wants to destroy the pillars of our society means there won't be immediate consequences for that kind of behavior, but that doesn't make it any less despicable or immunize them against future consequences.

This is totally wrong. Accounting for partisan non-response bias is a standard part of a pollsters job, not some insurmountable gotcha. Some are better than others at this. Polls aren't oracular, nor are they claiming to be. It's almost always better to look at an average of polls rather than a single one.

There is a lot of public data on past elections that anyone can analyze and see exactly how accurate polls have been in the past. If you're expecting polls to be a perfectly accurate prediction then you are misunderstanding their purpose. What they are great at is giving a probabilistic estimate of the outcome, within a certain range.

It's likely that any key race you care about next week will end up within 4 points of the current polling average. It's extremely likely that it will end up within 8 points. That's useful information!

Bird watching is something that my younger self would have never ever believed would be appealing, but it's actually really enjoyable! Getting out and exploring the natural world is great and I highly recommend it, but even for people without the opportunity or inclination to get out there birding is still extremely accessible.

Everyone can see birds around their home or work. Getting started can be as simple as noticing which birds you see regularly and figuring out what kind they are, and how the males and females differ in appearance (or don't). Usually males are the prettier more colorful ones, which is an effective signal for fitness.

Common birds will be easy to identify. Figuring out unusual birds or behaviors can turn into quite the detective project.

From there you can start to recognize calls and behavioral patterns. Once you learn a little bit in those areas it can be like seeing in another dimension. It's neat to hear a particular call and immediately know that there is a hawk in a nearby tree, or a cat behind a car.

Well when the alternative is someone who is openly in favor of violently overthrowing fair elections it's hard to get too upset about someone winning fairly, even if it is their fourth time.

It's wild how closely Brazil's politics have mirrored the US in recent years, at least at a high level. They literally had their own Jan 6 insurrection. Lula, like Biden, was competent enough for a time but ultimately outstayed his welcome and ran for another term when they should have gracefully retired. Unlike Biden, Lula actually imposed some consequences on the people trying to destroy his country's democracy.

It's a really bad source compared to what? Downdetector is not perfect, but is usually correct when I check it. Official status pages on the other hand are usually wrong when I check them.

That was hardly a one-off. Just off the top of my head...

There was the massive amount of CSAM it produced for weeks that wasn't an oopsie, the company adamantly refused to do anything about it for a long time despite the outrage.

Plus there has been all of the monkeying with the system prompt to push random propaganda elon wants.

Also the weird fixations on white genocide, election lies, and other nonsense.

On top of all that any data or funding sent to this company directly supports the ongoing destruction of US democracy and state capacity.

The guy literally owns a business in this space and has a huge financial incentive to push passkey adoption. Technically he has an "industry connection" just like millions of other people who work in tech and happen to know about passkeys through other work, but conflating the two is wildly misleading. His perspective is as far away from unbiased as possible.

Research funding is hardly perfect, but most of the people studying climate change are doing actual research and trying to draw evidence based conclusions that hold up under peer review. Their incentives are not the same as a tech founder who could potentially make generational wealth if one particular outcome is realized.

The ones who are actually good at investing largely do. The vast majority of investment managers soliciting new accounts are pure sales roles, not investors. Their job is to get as many assets under management as possible; that's how they get paid. They will fluff up the presentation with some nice charts and stuff but the actual "investing" will just be tossing the money into some generic funds.

Are you under the impression that all current and future shady business transactions are public knowledge?

To give a specific example of where I've seen this utterly fail... A few months ago one of my pets had an unexpected reaction to a new medication. It was late at night, well past our vet's hours. Google's AI response was basicaly "They are going to die, rush to an emergy clinic now".

But nothing else matched that. I was looking up all kinds of resources and that hadn't been the conclusion from any of them. It turned out Google AI was just wrong and put us in a bad spot for even looking at those results.