Nowadays such clients are effectively impossible, because the XTwitter API pricing is designed for business users only. Some bigger services can afford to pay for the privilege to post via the API (e.g. Buffer I think?), which can work for corporate communications. The prices are such that often it's cheaper to pay a person to do the crossposting manually and do it properly while at it.
I once met a guy who said the same thing and was convinced that this was the usual case, whereas me still getting them as an adult was very unusual (this came up when I got them, apparently his first time seeing an adult do so).
Finally someone says it. I read it like that every time and briefly imagine a Daily WTF style blog about the pitfalls and shortcomings of everyone's favorite IPC system, only to be sorely disappointed.
Why would any of this be a problem from the perspective of those who will own the remaining companies? They won't sell anything to normal humans who have no income anymore, true; but they don't need to, because their machines can produce for them whatever normal humans had been producing previously.
The preprint is interesting in that it predicts that on the way there, one can run into some kind of vicious cycle that leads to suboptimal outcomes even for the company owners. Navigating around this would certainly slow this process down, but I personally don't see it changing the ultimate outcome.
There are 2 outcomes I think possible, both extreme due to just how transformative 100% automation will be: either A[G]I is shared (voluntarily by the "owners", or forcef via revolution) and everyone benefits sufficiently, or there will be massive death from resource deprivation to the point where only the handful with access carry on. So far the latter looks far less likely, given the profusion of open models, so we seem to be in somewhat OK shape at least.
There will be no competition. Resource sharing will become cooperative where there is some temporary scarcity, but for the most part there will be no more scarcity, particularly re necessities. That's an outcome of 100% automation.
I would much prefer for a doctor who isn't sure to signal that fact somehow. It was annoying enough for LLMs to confidently lead you down wrong paths most of the time (they've gotten much better by now), we don't need humans doing it too. For lawyers it makes sense, of course.
There's still the option for the doctor to signal that they confidently don't know everything. When I ask my PCP a question outside her knowledge, she quickly and assuredly sends me to a specialist (or asks one and gets back to me, etc.).
I never get the feeling that she is guessing. She is confident in her sphere of knowledge.
Thank you. I wish they had used a pairwise comparison system like the one built by pil0u [1] for this. If I hadn't looked at all of them in advance, I would've had to go back to "normalize" my previous answers after seeing one that I especially like/hate.
That basic idea is what made SO attractive in the first place, compared to forums where you had to scroll through pages and pages of in-jokes and tangents and animated-GIF signatures just to try and see if there is an answer.
Where they went wrong, in my opinion, is in the implementation details.
It's mostly death by a thousand cuts: Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers deleted as "this should've been a comment". Overeager marking of questions as duplicates, e.g. despite the equivalence between two situations being non-obvious (e.g. someone asks about data type A, and it turns out that it's a subtype of B for which an answer that applies to both exists; that should not be a duplicate, the fact that it's a subtype is the answer!). Endless other decisions like that, which wouldn't have taken any extra effort to implement correctly.
One feature they could've built that would have taken effort but also greatly helped against the common newbie complaint of "hostility" would've been a "newcomer track", which would've been more forum-like and guided them towards either formulating a good question or seeing that's it's already answered. In the latter case, some of the keywords that came up during this process should've been fed back into SEO so that future newbies would become more likely find the answer via a search engine despite using clumsy terms. I think they tried a simpler and worse version of this idea towards the end with "staging ground" but by then it was too late.
> Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers deleted as "this should've been a comment"
Yep, this exactly happened to me. I felt like a taker for always reading SO but not contributing. I saw an answer that was out of date, so I tried to point it out. I couldn't make a comment, so I put it in another answer.
Got banned from answering until I got my points up, and the only way to do that was to ask questions, of which I had none. Never mind that the information I tried to post could have saved someone from going down the wrong path. Totally irrelevant. Rules must be followed.
And then I discovered SO meta. Holy cow. Those people were so far up their own butts, they couldn't see daylight. I was morbidly transfixed.
> And then I discovered SO meta. Holy cow. Those people were so far up their own butts, they couldn't see daylight. I was morbidly transfixed.
It's validating to see that I wasn't wrong in my assessment. The comments and takes under the post which showed the drop in traffic was eye opening. That website was just a walking corpse if they weren't seeing the plain truth and spinning the drop in traffic as a good thing, because apparently it meant that they were not getting stupid questions anymore and those were going to AI now.
Not realizing the kind of mind share loss here. The next generation of developers aren't going to go through a phase where they rely on SO.
Yep, or the top 10 hits on Google all pointing to a "duplicate" that didn't have the answer (or even the same question). Such a squandering of discoverability it's hard to even fathom who thought that was a good idea.
Are you referring to edits? If so, I haven't seen that, and certainly not as a notable issue on the site. Instead, I think I saw closer to the opposite - edits to questions or answers that fixed typos, pointed out that an answer's linked app had been down for years, etc. were often rejected.
From my perspective it wasn’t death by a thousand cuts, it all comes back to just one cut: an over-reliance on volunteer moderators. If they paid staff to run their communities, they could have issued a simple “don’t be a dick or we’ll fire you” rule. But because they relied on volunteers, they had to cater to those volunteers to keep them. And the volunteers drove the site into ruin to make it a better experience for moderators.
>Staging Ground is available to two different types of users on Stack Overflow:
>
> - Users who are asking their first questions
> - Users who want to review and offer guidance on newcomers’ posts
It looks a little different, like a "learn to use stack overflow correctly" type spot. I think what newbies want (I would have loved when I started out) is a "why is my code broken" type spot.
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