Post B1zkFSQpWziCodlrQe by fabio@manganiello.eu
 (DIR) More posts by fabio@manganiello.eu
 (DIR) Post #B1zkFSQpWziCodlrQe by fabio@manganiello.eu
       2026-01-05T21:40:15.745271Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       StackOverflow’s fall is a sign of something more troubling.Sure, if your main metric is the round trip time it takes to solve a technical question then it may not look that bad.After all, instead of asking questions to human experts who may take days or weeks to answer, beginners can directly submit them to an LLM trained on that very knowledge and get answers within seconds - perhaps not perfect, perhaps with a bit of refinement required amid model hallucinations, but in most of the cases enough to get them started.What many seem to ignore though is that the training set that went into the LLM was harvested through tens of thousands of curated answers manually submitted by human experts over years to the StackExchange platforms.We know a lot about all the most obscure use-cases of collections and itertools in Python, or the best composition patterns in SpringBoot, because thousands of human experts put together thoughtful answers and articles on those topics, and they are all publicly available.But technology is never static. Programming languages and frameworks come and go. Where will the knowledge about such future craft live? In a world where humans no longer willingly and freely post such knowledge on StackOverflow or Reddit, how can such knowledge be fed to increasingly hallucinating stochastic parrots?Or do we accept that human craft is only required to feed AI models that haven’t yet caught up with it, and then it can be nicely packaged and provided through chatbots owned by trillion-dollar companies?As if the only added value of developing problem solving skills in science and engineering was just to feed that knowledge to our AI overlords, and then be tossed away like hollow carcasses afterwards?
       
 (DIR) Post #B1zkFUD4v5tsKZLuGu by dabeaz@mastodon.social
       2026-01-05T23:36:56Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @fabio It's not just StackOverflow, but book authors as well.   I spent considerable effort working on books such as the Python Cookbook.  Never again will I be doing that.   Why would I do that just to have it sucked into an LLM?
       
 (DIR) Post #B1zkFVOoUwsi1FqnCa by fabio@manganiello.eu
       2026-01-05T23:49:46.864564Z
       
       1 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @dabeaz same here - Apress never paid that well, but at least I could still say “I do it because I like to teach tech subjects to human readers”.Which honestly opens the doors to an even more frightening scenario.Of course once human experts pull themselves out of the AI-feeding machinery slop and hallucinations around more recent topics and subjects will increase. And of course that will impact their products too.My concern is that then these companies may start hiring experts just to produce (privately, and for their purposes only) enough human curated content to be fed to the machine.Then the knowledge that we take for granted (either as freely available online, or for a modest price in a book) will be owned by private companies, and provided as a service through their products. Which may be a position uncomfortably similar to that held by catholic monasteries in the Middle Ages.