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ianbutlerlast Sunday at 12:28 AM3 repliesview on HN

"But losing SO means that we're getting an idiot friendly guy with a lot of credible but wrong answers in place of a grumpy and possibly toxic guy which, however, actually answered our questions."

> "actually answered our questions."

Read carefully.


Replies

akoboldfryinglast Sunday at 12:45 AM

Interpreting that claim as "SO users always, 100% of the time answer questions correctly" is uncharitable to the point of being unreasonable.

Most people would interpret the claim as concisely expressing that you get better accuracy from grumpy SO users than friendly LLMs.

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johnnyanmaclast Sunday at 9:11 PM

Yes, it does answer you question, when the site lets it go through.

Note that "answers your question" does not mean "solving your problem". Sometimes the answer to a question is "this is infeasible because XYZ" and that's good feedback to get to help you re-evaluate a problem. Many LLMs still struggle with this and would rather give a wrong answer than a negative one.

That said, the "why don't you use X" response is practically a stereotype for a reason. So it's certainly not always useful feedback. If people could introspect and think "can 'because my job doesn't allow me to install Z' be a valid response to this", we'd be in a true Utopia.

paganholidaylast Sunday at 12:40 AM

>> Eventually I tried with something else, and found a question on stackoverflow, luckily with an answer. That was the game changer and eventually I was able to find the right doc

Read carefully and paraphrase to the generous side. The metaphor that follows that is obviously trying to give an example of what might be somehow lost.

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