Programming

Oh Reddit who's going to protect you from the AI invasion after you removed the mods?

Lol, imagine if they included escape keys for various languages. Then reddit would really never be able to sell the data.

What’s the point of those bots? There’s no karma to farm on Lemmy.

As i argued in another comment, there are many useful bots for certain niche communities that I really think have a place here, even though I am generally wary of AI accounts infesting the fediverse as well.

Good examples for good and very useful, yet not mod work related bots are on TCG/CCG subs like magic the gathering and hearthstone to provide context to card names, or convert deck codes into a nicely formatted table of the used cards. Or on the Lego sub, returning any set number as a link to the proper bricklink entry. This kind of bot should be allowed and even encouraged to be used where appropriate.

Then there are the plenty of irrelevant and annoying bots we really can do without, like the alphabetical order bot, haiku bot, the dozens of bots quoting LOTR or Star Wars characters, and so on. Like most reddit jokes they stopped being funny fairly quickly and now add nothing to the conversation, but are being kept around for karma.

And then there are the more insidious bots that are about to become widespread, being harder to detect the more their refinement advances. It is going to be a constant arms race between bot detection and bot deception skills.

There already is some ChatGPT bot and I see people bringing it into threads sometimes. I downvote almost every person who does so, as I've yet to see a single case where it was actually asked for or meaningfully contributed.

I want more communities to have rules against unsolicited AI comments and for them to better enforce them (one of the cases I'm referring to was in a community that already had a rule against AI comments, but the comment had still been up for a while and had been upvoted).

I think the majority in the fediverse would just move to an instance that defederated meta, at least I know I would and I have a feeling that I am a typical fediverse user

Yeah I have the feeling that sign-up should probably default to be manually moderated, to avoid a bot-swarm taking over accounts (and well probably a lot of bot instances need to be blacklisted then as well).

I'm not sure how dirty the game of big social media is/will be, but if they really feel threatened, they may start something like that (might make sense to be legally secured in that case...).

What should meta possible change about Lemmy or programming.dev? They have no power here even if we federate with them.

Yeah he's kinda a wannabe Elon, but I think he hasn't really found a fan base as Elon has, I'm not sure anyone really likes him lol

To be fair, new programmers generally don’t know enough to construct a proper Google query either. And yes there are some lazy people who just don’t try. But sometimes you know what you want to achieve but any query you try seems to be unhelpful. For example, if I want to learn how to store settings in c++ the first link for me tells me to use boost. Now I need to learn about linking libraries and 300 other boost-isms. While anyone with any basic knowledge could recommend reading strings line by line and splitting the string on the equal sign.

I had some lengthy period of time where I enjoyed regularly helping folks in r/learnprogramming. But it got exhausting fast. For every person putting in a good attempt at learning, there was 10 people who couldn't do the most basic level of googling and content was often extremely repetitive as a result.

The sub also faced a constant stream of people who just wanted to self advertise their own YouTube videos for teaching programming, as if the lack of such was the barrier to learning.

Oh, and soooo many people who clearly just wanted to be told the answer to their homework questions and weren't even hiding that.

We'll have to prove we're a human every time and log in every time we use a service to be sure it doesn't have bots. But AI will get better and better at those too. Is captcha the next level above Go? Lol