Have AI chatbots killed off question and answer website Stack Overflow?

Showing all posts tagged: trends

Have AI chatbots killed off question and answer website Stack Overflow?

22 May 2025

Activity at question and answer website Stack Overflow is at an all-time low, according to a recent article in The Pragmatic Engineer. Question levels are presently similar to what they were in 2008, the year Stack Overflow launched. Although the decline in use could be attributed to a number of factors, AI appears to be the main culprit. If people have a coding or application development question, it seems they are now going to ask a chatbot for the answer.

A graph charting question activity on Stack Overflow, compiled by Marc Gravell, makes for compelling viewing. Activity reached an all time high in 2014, but slowly began falling away.

Maybe this could be ascribed to the presence of competitors in the question and answer space, such as Quora, GitHub, and of course Reddit. Aside though from a surge of activity in 2020, when more people were working from home as a result of COVID lockdowns, and unable to brainstorm solutions to problems in the workplace, use of Stack Overflow has been declining ever since.

Some people seem to be suggesting the website may close. I’m hoping it doesn’t come to that. Stack Overflow has been a great help to me over the years, and is just about the first place I turn to when I have a website or coding question. Almost without variation, someone else has had the exact same difficulty, and I have just about always found a tried and true solution.

I’ve tried using AI for some code-related queries I have, but so far the suggestions made there are not as sound, or are simply no use at all. Hang in there Stack Overflow.

Cafes in the United States seek to discourage remote workers staying all day

22 May 2025

Some coffee shops in the United States have begun cracking down on people who use their place for hours, maybe even all day, as an office. Some store owners are imposing time limits on remote workers, switching off WIFI, or blocking access to powerpoints.

Fair enough too. Australian cafe operators are acutely aware of the challenges of running a profitable business, and having someone hogging a table all day, only makes matters worse.

Some owners hope a table will generate perhaps forty dollars an hour, on the expectation several parties occupy that table over the course of an hour. It seems doubtful to me that a remote worker, sitting at a table for, say, eight hours, would even spend forty dollars all day.

AI coding tools will make vibe code output a thing of the past

14 May 2025

Mark Sullivan, writing for Fast Company:

Google DeepMind research scientist Nikolay Savinov said in a recent interview that AI coding tools will soon support 10 million-token context windows — and eventually, 100 million. With that kind of memory, an AI tool could absorb vast amounts of human instruction and even analyze an entire company’s existing codebase for guidance on how to build and optimize new systems.

When a developer uses an AI technology to produce some code, but has no regard for the quality of the generated code, there you have vibe coding.

It might be bad code of the worst sort, but who cares? Not that particular developer. Future coding tools however will eventually — one day — be so proficient that all the code they create will be top notch. Bad code, and vibe coding, will be a thing of the past.

Or will it? The super-duper code these super-duper AI tools generate will be so good, no one will need to worry about its quality any more. That will be vibe coding, but an entirely different form of vibe coding. If you enjoyed the joke, you can start laughing now.

The birthday effect: you are somewhat likely to die on your birthday

12 May 2025

The birthday effect is a thing it seems. Russell Samora, writing for The Pudding crunches the numbers. It looks like quite a few people expire on their “special day”.

Why is there a birthday effect at all? One popular idea centers on the psychological impact of death postponement versus anniversary reaction: Does the looming birthday cause people to postpone death until after they’ve celebrated their special day, or does the birthday itself somehow trigger mortality?

I’ve never liked birthdays, and now I know why…

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mathematics, trends

Generative AI does not reduce work, it creates more. Fiverr workers excepted

9 May 2025

Benj Edwards writing for Ars Technica:

A new study analyzing the Danish labor market in 2023 and 2024 suggests that generative AI models like ChatGPT have had almost no significant impact on overall wages or employment yet, despite rapid adoption in some workplaces.

It’s early days of course, and AI technologies are really still only seeping into workplaces. But the suggestion here is, by taking care of other tasks, AI leaves us free to do other things. Things it presumably can’t yet do.

Yet we’ve been here before, The arrival of successive technologies over recent decades, computers among them, were meant to reduce our workloads, freeing up more time for leisure activities. Here we are though, spending ever more time working, because with new technologies doing more grunt work, we can do more, I don’t know, meaningful workplace tasks.

But Micha Kaufman, CEO of Fiverr, sees the picture differently. In an email to staff, he warned AI is “coming for” the jobs of everyone — including his — at the online freelance marketplace:

It does not matter if you are a programmer, designer, product manager, data scientist, lawyer, customer support rep, salesperson, or a finance person — Al is coming for you.

Mark Zuckerberg says social media is no longer social media

30 April 2025

Kyle Chayka, writing for The New Yorker:

Facebook was where you might find out that your friend was dating someone new, or that someone had thrown a party without inviting you. In the course of the past decade, though, social media has come to resemble something more like regular media. It’s where we find promotional videos created by celebrities, pundits shouting responses to the news, aggregated clips from pop culture, a rising tide of AI-generated slop, and other content designed to be broadcast to the largest number of viewers possible.

In other words, social media is no longer social. The Facebook co-founder, and CEO, states what many of us have known for at least a decade. Zuckerberg’s comment was made a few weeks ago, during anti-trust proceedings led by the United States Federal Trade Commission, against Meta.

Starbucks turns its fortunes around in Australia

29 April 2025

American coffee chain, Starbucks, is enjoying a surge in popularity in some parts of Australia.

Starbucks, put simply, had to stop chasing the mainstream market — metropolitan city coffee purveyors who savoured the neighbourhood cafe experience.

This is a far cry from their Australian nadir in 2008. To continue the good run though, they’ll need to retain the cafe-style business model, where customers can sit down and socialise. This rather than converting shops into glorified fast food collection points, apparently the norm in North America.

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Australia, coffee, trends

Move over Oxford commas, em dashes a tell tale sign of AI use

23 April 2025

Another punctuation mark I’ve been a long time user of — the em dash — is apparently synonymous with text created by AI chat bots. Marvellous. You can see two instances of em dashes in the first sentence of this post. Last October I learned the presence of Oxford commas hinted at the use of AI to generate written work. If that is indeed the case, at least AI, by choosing to use the venerable punctuation mark, is showing its intelligence.

Even if that, as an Oxford comma fanboi, makes me look bad.

But back to em dashes — which you’ve probably noticed I apply incorrectly here, by placing a space between it and a word, instead of joining them up like this—the observation em dashes were indicative of AI’s presence, was made by LinkedIn influencers. LinkedIn influencers? Are they even a thing? According to these influencers however, the presence of em dashes can only mean text they feature in was generated by an AI technology.

Real people, it seems, use hyphens instead. How bizarre. Hyphens, of course, serve a completely different purpose. They are used to join words together. Em dashes are used to add a different, but possibly related, idea to a sentence. Why on Earth then use a hyphen in place of an em dash? But the LinkedIn influencers may be onto something. On most keyboards, the hyphen shares a key with the underscore symbol. In my experience though, there is no dedicated em dash button.

On my writing app, called Writer, I need to type in two colons, with three (oh, the irony) hyphens — or minus signs — in the middle, like this: :- – -: to render an em dash. Other word processors might allow this by, say, pressing the ALT key and entering a sequence of numbers, or trying the Insert, Special Character command, in the app’s menu bar. The point here though is hyphens are a little easier for a person to add, than are em dashes.

Therefore, the only possible conclusion that can be reached, by LinkedIn influencers I grant you, is that em dashes could only be the work of an AI app, never a lazy human. Certainly not one who won’t tap out a few extra key strokes, or copy and paste an em dash that may be elsewhere on the same document. But I doubt any of these thoughts crossed the minds of the LinkedIn influencers.

They were probably trying to chase down their next this-idea-might-go-viral post. If only creating viral content were as simple as selecting some random punctuation mark, and making up some absurd claim about it.

Discord trails face scanning to verify the age of members

23 April 2025

The scanning technology, which is said to gauge a person’s age to an accuracy of one to two years, is being trialled in Australia and the United Kingdom (UK). Members of Discord — a popular communications and community building platform — can also choose to scan in a proof-of-age document, such as a drivers licence, if they don’t want to go through the face scanning process.

Is this the way things are going? Online safety laws in the UK will shortly require platforms to have stringent age-verification processes in place, while in Australia, people under the age of sixteen will soon not be able to access certain social media channels. As far as these platforms are concerned, face scanning may be the easiest way to verify a potential user’s age.

The suggestion here is face scanning will eventually be the only way to confirm a person’s age (and identity it seems), when it comes to signing up to an online platform. This is something all of us might be subject to one day.

Australian Electoral Commission posts new guidelines for influencers, content creators

11 April 2025

The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has issued an updated set of guidelines clarifying the role of content creators and influencers.

The move comes in the wake of mild controversy surrounding a recent interview Sydney based podcaster Abbie Chatfield recorded with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Some listeners felt the interview constituted what is considered to be electoral material, something that requires an authorisation statement from the political entity issuing said material. These are usually adverts, that variously promote a party candidate, or policy, although they can take a number of forms.

The AEC however concluded the interview did not breach any regulations. The revised guidelines come in addition to a publicity campaign being run by the AEC, warning people to be cautious about material relating to the upcoming Australian Federal election, they may encounter on social media, and, no doubt, blogs and websites.

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