In my time we didn't paste LLM-generated code we barely understand and hoped it compiled, let alone work. We pasted code from stack overflow we barely understood and hoped it compiled and let alone work, as god intended.
this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
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God has no hand in programming. He's just as confused as us.
I am a better programmer than God, peace be upon Him. This implementation of knees is Exhibit 1.
ok but real talk, knees are genuinely one of the most marvellous pieces of biomechanical engineering. They can withstand decades of constant movement, can allow extension (with a lot of force) even when bent 180°, can withstand - and move - hundreds of kg per knee (with enough practice) periodically also for decades, and can comfortably remain with your entire body weight resting on them at any angle from 0 to 180° for any length of time. It's amazing that everyone doesn't have constant knee pain or have their knees simply fail altogether.
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Oh there's definitely some elder gods involved with programming when I do it.
User Feedback, the Crawling Chaos, the Haunter of the Dark... I feel its tendrils of madness reaching for my mind even now. I am not ready for this. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh caffeine R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! Iä! Iä!
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Look at how shitty our implementation is. We need a full refactoring.
You're young. Back in my day, we bought a book called "Advanced Algorithms for C vol. 3", and we manually typed the code from it if it didn't come with a CD.
When I was a kid I remember copying entire games in BASIC printed in popular science magazines. They never worked because my dads computer had a slightly different BASIC dialect.
Good times.
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Now we're still pasting code from stack overflow we don't understand, we're just getting it from an LLM
At least now I don't have to deal with the rudeners.
I do like the fact that when I ask it a question it actually gives me the answer, and doesn't tell me to refactor my entire code because apparently I'm a bad person.
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I think the same people who run stackoverflow must run a ton of subs on reddit.
"Your post was removed because it uses "the" too much and doesn't contain enough w's and because the moon is in Pisces and it's Saturday. If you think this was done in error please message the moderators."
messages moderator about it, banned from subreddit for no reason given. Or at least that is how i imagine how it would go
INTERCAL's PLEASE Politesse Checking
That's hilarious. I do hope it gets evaluated at run time. That way you could have a program that works most of the time but if some rare circumstance caused it to execute commands in a sequence where the correct level of politeness was not maintained it would get the hump and crash
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well yeah they went all in on ai.
I use SO all the time and I truly had no idea... You mean a lot of answers are submitted by users who used AI?
other way around. they pivoted to offering enterprise solutions based on ai interpretations of their database to business customers. only they were too slow, since everyone had already scraped them.
Stack overflow has always been ego and arrogance. Personally I'd love to see a federated version, we all host shards
You are correct. But without defending Stack Overflow, I feel the need to point out that the arrogance and condescension is by no means limited to their platform. I’ve been on several “support” pages that were the same or worse. For example Evernote’s “support”. It wasn’t “officially” hosted by Evernote, but had the Evernote logo everywhere . The most common phrases I remember from there are the equivalent of:
- “The Evernote devs don’t read this site, so you’re wasting your time trying to appeal to them here.”
- “That’s stupid, why do you have that problem?”
- “No, you don’t want to do that.”
- “No, you don’t want that feature and neither does anyone else.”
- etc.
I can only guess that asking moderators deal with the internet public for no pay is more than reasonable people are willing to do. So we wind up with unpaid people with people skills equivalent to 13 y.o. boys put in charge. Their only compensation being allowed to troll users and feel they have power over some small portion of other people. My guess is they eventually grow older and move on to being in charge of a homeowner association.
Yes please. I tried participating in some StackExchange communities many years ago, but they felt so hostile to new contributors. Like I asked an immigration-related question about my personal situation, and multiple people edited my question to change the grammar and take out the thanks and smiley at the end 🤦 Oh no, we can't have a bit of humanity in there... Multiple similar experiences left such a bitter taste, that I ended up deleting most of my sub-profiles. I found Reddit-style communities much more helpful. Even wikis are typically nowhere near this hostile.
SE seems too heavily focusing on helping a "generic public" rather than the actual people asking the questions. (Or even answering them, with all the reputation restrictions on accounts.) I'm sure I'm not the only contributor they pushed away :/
multiple people edited my question to change the grammar and take out the thanks and smiley at the end
Well, the Welcome Tour tells you that SO is about “just questions and answers”. This facilitates finding a question that’s written as concise as possible, checking its answer, and leaving. SO is deliberately not like a forum.
SE seems too heavily focusing on helping a “generic public” rather than the actual people asking the questions.
This is just another consequence of not being a forum. Of course SO wants questions to be helpful to as many people as possible. I don’t see how that is a bad thing.
If you want a laxer approach to handling quality, consider if you’ve ever found useful information on yahoo answers.
I understand it's not a forum (though tbh I can't remember a welcome tour, but it was more than a decade ago, so could have just forgot), but even with that I just find the whole atmosphere kinda cold and elitist. Not a community that invites participation, like Wikipedia does. But each to our own :)
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I’m sure I’m not the only contributor they pushed away
Yeah. I found myself not adding a potentially useful comment, more than once, due to reputation restrictions on a SE community despite me having enough rep in the ones I regularly use.
And I am one of those that aligns well with the Question & Answer style format of their site.
So, I just leave, knowing that - some answer is incomplete - or - some question is not worded well enough to attract the correct answerer. I prefer suggesting fixes to the question rather than changing it myself, which would otherwise be assuming that I have understood correctly.
Individual tools already often host their own Q&A or forum systems. We just need to encourage more of that.
Thanks Cloudflare for giving me a moment of reflection on why the fuck I am heading to Stack Overflow so I can close the tab before I get there.
CF: We defended your website from 69,420 bots today!
The 65,000 users: 👁️L👁️
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Oh thank god, I thought it was just me and that my IP had been flagged for some reason.
I wouldn't call stackoverflow reliable. It is only partly reliable, if you are lucky.
Thread closed because that's a stupid question and you should feel bad about yourself.
I do. Let me delete my account and come back tomorrow with the same question.
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On a serious note, last year I felt so pathetic after reading a comment on a question I posted on stackoverflow that I went over the edge and attempted suicide and like everything else I failed. Not saying that SO was responsible or anything. One guy pushed me over the edge, when I was already under a tremendous stress.
Good riddance. Whenever I search for a programming question I'd always hope for a) an official documentation page or, failing that, b) a page on a dedicated forum for the tool that I was using that covered the problem. I'd only ever click on SO links if I had no other choice.
And, of course, I'd never search for a problem on SO itself.
I hate that so many projects are moving from public support forums to fucking Discord channels. God forbid a tech project be expected to maintain a public indexable forum and website. You can't search it unless you join the channel, it's not well organized at all, and the invite link probably expired 3 months ago. Fuck you if you didn't join while it still worked I guess.
Eh, I hate its culture, but I regularly find useful excel or regex answers on StackExchange.
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I almost always prefer SO answers because there was chance someone had the same issue I was seeing. Documentation only shows how things should work and dedicated forums are very hit or miss.
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Not necessarily about stack overflow. But i just got myself in a situation where the first search result I found for a problem was clearly AI generated. And the solution it provided was not at all technically possible. The AI decline is really terrible...
That said, does anyone know of an extension or block list for those terrible AI slob websites? Or a way to filter it from duckduckgo?
THAT is the problem... we cannot filter them out. The real enshitification of the web has barely began.
I understand it will be a cat and mouse game. But surely its possible to make a curated list of big offenders akin to advertisement block lists?
IMO, this would be more ironic if the post was closed automatically by a bot. But that's not the vibe I'm getting from this.
Anybody remember what it was like 16+ years ago when "most questions" hadn't already been asked yet?
PS: lol https://web.archive.org/web/20090330211513/http://stackoverflow.com/
Yeah, that site was good before they started rejecting every useful question.
It used to be much better than anything else that came earlier. Nowadays the odds are even that you'll find your answer on the experts-one.
I spent a lot of time there the first couple of years, mostly answering questions. I was in the top 20 or so of users for a while - I remember when Jon Skeet was right below me in the rankings and I thought "huh, I'll show this guy". I did not in fact show that guy. I'm still in the top .1% but I haven't done anything there in almost a decade.
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Mods be thinking that if they dig SO's grave deep enough it will emerge on the other side of the world.
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