Stack Overflow has seen a substantial decline in traffic over the last year that appears to be accelerating. https://observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overflow
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Because forum posts are always full of accurate and helpful information?
In my experience it still makes good suggestions for most things, and is better than trying to phrase things in a way that Google likes, then trawling through irrelevant forum posts.
It’s only there to make suggestions, so if someone is taking its output without understanding and treating it like gospel then they’re an idiot who’s inevitably going to end up in a world of trouble.
If you take the suggestion, verify it with documentation, then make sure you actually understand it, chatGPT is a great tool.
If I'm honest, stackoverflow was always a shortcut for searching documentation to me.
Simple stuff like how do I turn an InputStream to a String again? I can't remember it, but I know exactly what to look for, I'm just to lazy.
For that kind of stuff ChatGPT is almost perfect.
Not necessarily, but at least there's much more opportunity for other people to jump in and correct false info or expand upon something. It's by no means a flawless system, but it's better than only have one source of information
When we use forums there's also an opportunity to correct (or be corrected) on how we deal with problems.
I've seen a few times people asking how to do X while they're actually trying to do Y. ChatGPT would gladly direct them to the wrong path.
I didn't say that people should go on the internet and pick the first forum post either ; that would be like trusting whatever chatgpt is handing you :p
My point was more on the "people are lazy" side of things, but yeah you have to stay critical of both chatgpt and forum posts.
I agree, I just think that those lazy people will do what they do regardless of where they get their info.
To butcher a saying; blame the craftsman, not the tools.
I half expect that, if enough programmers use ChatGPT-written code verbatim, someday it's going to lead to Skynet. I mean, what's to stop ChatGPT from inserting bits of extra code to be used for its own distributed processing botnet?
A lack of intelligence and awareness?
You've never written code, have you?
Sadly there are so many people that take its output as gospel and don't realise it can be wrong. So is a tool that commonly gets abused by people that don't know how to use it.
ChatGPT is a great tool to get you started on stuff. I use it to better formulate my issues in technical terms.
I just started embedded Linux, so there are a lot of stuff that aren't intuitive. ChatGPT has been immensely useful to get around cross compiling for embedded linux, and understanding the quirks of the native libraries without having to go back and forth in a forum and not get an answer after a few days
If you know your stuff already, ChatGPT is not the right tool. If you don't know where to start, ChatGPT is the best tool ever made because you can clarify and ask for more detail in real time. This is like a personal tutor for free.