Anders429

I have always thought it was something to do with "philosophy" sounding like something you would learn in school, while "sorcery" is very obviously magical. As a kid growing up in the US I had never heard of a "philosopher's stone," and honestly if the book were named that when I was in grade school I may have been more skeptical about reading it.

This is like when a movie trailer shows all of the best parts.

There are definitely several cases where the ages of the older Weasley kids don't add up correctly.

Yeah, that's a fair point. After I posted my previous comment, I realized it probably wouldn't work since the entire point of SO was to create canonical answers to canonical questions. But how do you decide what "instance" gets to have the canonical answer to a given question? Having a central authority host everything makes it a heck of a lot easier.

Yeah, I actually am now seeing quite a bit of activity there. I stand corrected.

This is a really good point. I joined stackoverflow after graduating university a few years ago, and found it really hard to participate. You need karma to be able to vote on stuff or add comments, but the only unanswered questions are often basically unanswerable. I did find some success with adding answers that were better than previous ones, but it was limited, because at that point the site was already declining and there was no one left to upvote my contributions.

I guess the main issue here is that we let some group "own" all of the questions and answers, giving them the opportunity to sell it whenever they wanted to cash out.

Maybe a better solution is some kind of decentralized version of StackOverflow that prevents one person from owning everything. Something like Lemmy and Mastodon, but for questions and answers specifically.

A lot of people seem to be celebrating this, but I personally think this is a net negative for programming. Are people actually replacing SO with talking to LLMs? If not, where are they going?

I've seen an uptick in people using places like discord to get help. But that's not easily searchable and not in the same format that it is in stackoverflow. SO was meant to organize these answers to make asking questions easier. Now it seems like we're walking away from that, and I can't quite understand why. Is it really because SO is "toxic"?

Dang, that community seems kinda dead.

It would be slower to read the value if you had to also do bitwise operations to get the value.

But you can also define your own bitfield types to store booleans packed together if you really need to. I would much rather that than have the compiler do it automatically for me.

I can't understand how anyone attempts to participate in conversation on that site. People will tell you it's "building your network" and that it's "helping your career," but the reality is it's just a bunch of business people jerking each other off over words that mean nothing.