Posted by secretslol 16 hours ago
What happened is that as the corpus of useful info increased, the need to pose new Qs decreased. AI much accelerated that decline by making available an 'oracle' trained on that corpus.
And they killed maybe one of the most side features of it : https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/415293/sunsetting-j...
So yeah metakill your own brands with stupid policies.
- the downfall of junior devs
- bad hiring market
- layoffs in practically every sector
theres a ton of things where AI took credit for a trend that had already started before it started being even halfway capable.
I think if you actually look at the data for these trends rather than asking AI what it thinks you might experience some cognitive dissonance.
>There's no reason to believe that we would see a rapid coordinated decline in all of these things at the same time without AI
It's called hiked interest rates. The economy is not doing so great for several reasons but the main one is wars.
My answer doesn't change. Against the background of other phenomena already causing various trends, we see acceleration of those trends consistent with a testable hypothesis about the effects of AI adoption in industry. In most fields of science that's good evidence in favor of the model.
And no I didn't ask AI about it, this is my own opinion and my own perspective.
Goodness of Fit 0.911, Kurtosis -0.849, Skewness: 0.073
It's very much a bell curve
I'm going to assume this is bait...
The fit does not prove causation, but it does show that the decline was already well described by a trend that began years before generative AI. If the claim is that 2023 created a separate structural break, it's different claim then the title describes
> Without AI they might have lasted at least a couple more years
Nah, their decline was already readily apparent before AI. You only need to go through old discussions and other people noticing it. AI may have accelerated the decay, but the decline happened already largely prior to AI.
At the same time, this is graph is something that really should not look anything like a bell curve. So the format is probably just a coincidence.
Except if the "all the questions have been asked" hypothesis is correct. What I really doubt.
That's a very big word you're using there for what is basically making shapes out of clouds. A bell-curve is the amortised function of a random variable with a mean and standar deviation. What does that have to do with a timeseries dataset?
The general notion of a bell-shaped curve is broader than that. Wikipedia has a reasonable overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell-shaped_function
> “typically continuous or smooth, asymptotically approach zero for large negative/positive x, and have a single, unimodal maximum at small x.”
You are doing that implicitly by fitting a Gaussian curve.
* Moderation went bad. I stopped moderating/flagging after it was deemed unhelpful?! I know it's hard to moderate a platform like that, but giving me a slap in the face when I volunteer my valuable time is not the way to do it.
* Questions closed because they weren't "programming questions", but obviously about tools devs use every day. Again and again, they were the TOP google results. You'd click on it and found a old question closed because it was considered off topic. As a business, you seriously need to ask yourself some hard questions when you fend off users like that.
A lot of what we have today was built with help from that community
Digging my way through old SO posts has tought me so much... but now, it's AI time and I find myself pasting my questions into a prompt most of the time, rather of thinking about what the correct keywords to google would be. Which, in a way, is faster, but at the same time I now feel like I'm not learning anything new anymore...
Now do a graph for the money.
https://www.wired.com/story/google-deal-stackoverflow-ai-gia...
Sure there is, number of questions halved from 100K in first of November 2022 to 50K exactly one year later.
Contributors responded by going to delete their own respective contributions en masse. Upon doing so, were banned by the platform mid-process which then led to people going back to revise their contributions to be false rather than deleted.
I guess that’s “LLM related”
Instead I directly go on the project github page and ask the question directly to the mainteners.
Today I'd expect even when someone is googling and a question is relevant that most people will just read the AI overview.