One million seconds is 11 days, a billion seconds is 31 years.

Thanks! But same here imho:

              1,000 seconds =          ~0.01 days (~17 min)
          1,000,000 seconds =         ~11.57 days (~12 days) 
      1,000,000,000 seconds =     ~11,574.07 days (~32 years)
  1,000,000,000,000 seconds = ~11,574,074.07 days (~32k years)

It all seems quite logical once you put everything into the same unit, I think.

Maybe it's just our human calendar/time unit rollercoaster (60*60*24*30*12) that's playing tricks on us here.

Of course it is logical, we are not discussing the math.

But it isn't intuitive, you're not used to numbers that big or that grow that fast.

Few things go from a million to a billion, especially when related to time.

It’s the units that make it seem unintuitive. 12 days is roughly 0.032 years, and 17 minutes is likewise 0.000032 years. It’s relative to how we were taught to view smaller lengths of time. Of course you could argue measuring time by the rotation of heavenly bodies is more intuitive than counting on your fingers for the hours in a day and days in a lunar cycle.

Going from a million to a billion isn't some special relationship. It's just * 1000. It's the same as going 11000 or 101000.

I find it frustrating that people seem to think that someone going from 1M to 1B is somehow different to other numerical operations. It's not. It's 1000 times bigger, it's not a huge deal.

And any exponential growth is also a multiplication, it's not a big deal, just giving example on what they asked before.

Somehow people are interpreting this as some kind of math trick.

It's not a trick, our brains are not wire to deal with numbers growing quickly, but we do understand the math.

Only abstractly. If you are living in the process, it is hard and very few people live that.

Which process, though? Every human alive easily went from millions of cells to billions of cells to trillions of cells.

Yes, recent. Oh dear indeed, it's gotten worse than it ever was before.

I have no problem with vibe coded software.

You need to catchup with the last 15 years then. It's not new at all. But I agree it is getting worse, but it is getting worse every year for a while.

Being generous in my assumptions, you may have missed that my intent by "recent sprawl" indicates, "things are getting worse, at a rapid rate". At no point did I mean malware didn't exist 15 years ago.

It is getting worse, faster. That's objectively true.

Yeah software quality has been declining for years at this point.

YES YES YES YES

That's perfect

wrong link...

this guy gets it

So if they paid for pre-training they would not be able to open their weights?

Not if they want to recoup their investment.

We were this close to glory... This close!

But we got a generic 3D doll instead of forum-like signatures.

Just imagine something like this: https://i1168.photobucket.com/albums/r488/Vayne-D3/HybridSig...

Already 10x cooler, or maybe a long strip of startups / project you've done https://www.carlos-menezes.com/img/before-the-bio/smaller.pn...

damn that's pretty cool actually

Nice! The showcase of companies is really nice

For those who don't know what the Monica affair was: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/393046/who-or-what-...

I don't have the time to, but I'm surprised there aren't a lot of comments on the decline before chatGPT was released, but after SO was sold to Prosus [1][2]

Even the curious growth spike in activity happened just before the acquisition. I wish I had time to do this analysis a bit deeper, but you can look for SO activity up until when chatGPT was released, it is really noticeable.

---

[1] Stack Overflow acquired by Prosus for $1.8 billion: https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/02/stack-overflow-acquired-by...

[2] Prosus to acquire Stack Overflow for US$1.8 billion https://www.prosus.com/news-insights/2021/prosus-to-acquire-...

I don’t think we need to blame that sale. The same steady decline had been going since 2016. Itms clearly there in the graph, but everyone trumpeting the ChatGPT angle conveniently ignores the preceding 5+ years of continual decline.

The sale is relevant. The spike in activity right before the sale already shows the management hand and how they actively ran the org to optimize for this sale. The rebound right after is hard, and it was (right) before chatgpt

They accelerated the downfall with this and then chatgpt came over

Are we talking about the large Covid spike in early 2020? I don’t think that has anything to do with the sale.

So you think its mostly just coincidence that 4 years after AI is introduced stack overflow is dead?

No, of course not coincidence. It's just that people didn't have an alternative until 2021-ish. Users hated SO for many years prior, but had nowhere to go other than small niche communities. When LLMs came into play, it was just the obvious choice.

In an alternate universe, where LLMs didn't exist, I bet you SO would be equally dead by this decade. Someone better, with healthier values and a more welcoming community, would come up and steal their lunch.

If stack overflow was universally loved, AI would still kill it.

People here seem to be so emotionally invested in hating stack overflow that they seem to think AI was like ~10% of the reason it died, when it was 95%.

Both things can be true. SO was universally hated because they let (or actively incentivized) bullying run rampant and destroy the culture.

And yes, it's possible AI would have killed it anyway, despite its best efforts. But in this version of parallel universes, AI was only a catalyst. Its fate was sealed well before 2020.

Everyone trumpeting the "bad SO moderation" angle is delusional. Stack Overflow was far better than conventional forums. Without LLMs, SO would have stayed popular, there is no doubt about it. The massive decline was clearly and obviously caused mainly by LLMs.

This is the more valuable take. AI simply accelerated an existing condition.

Do you mean that curious growth spike in mid 2020? If so, can you think of anything else significant that happened in mid 2020...?

Scrolled looking for this comment the decline appears to be way earlier than LLM agents becoming popular.

But where did all the users go is something that would be interesting

Mostly: Discord, Github issues (as forum), X (twitter at the time), and Discourse! Discourse was growing steadily, even startups like OpenAI and neobanks like nubank (Brazil) had forums for their users because keeping your community active and close was something considered valuable (devrel since then has experienced a rapidly decline).

I didn't know that. Good to see they cashed out in time.