| ▲ | khalic 5 hours ago |
| Seing a bell curve and singling out a factor that appears only for the 15% of the total time demonstrates some pretty extreme tunnel vision Edit: https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb |
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| ▲ | embedding-shape 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Yeah, I don't understand the HN title. The "downfall" seems to have began in 2018-2020 sometime, what AI was launched and popularized at that point that would have killed SO? LLMs were basically useless until GPT3 which appeared in middle-2020 sometime, after the downfall seemingly already had begun. |
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| ▲ | j_maffe 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'd call it significant that the number of questions halved within one year following the release of ChatGPT, the biggest relative or absolute rate of decrease in the timeseries. | | |
| ▲ | ipaddr 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Right around the time Google rolled out new search results removed many information based sites. | |
| ▲ | khalic 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | "How AI precipitated SO's downfall" would be a correct title then |
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| ▲ | pydry 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Add it to the list: - the downfall of junior devs - bad hiring market - layoffs in practically every sector theres a ton of things where AI took credit for a trend that had already started before it started being even halfway capable. | | |
| ▲ | gwerbin 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think if you won't even admit that AI greatly accelerated these trends, you're in some kind of denial. There's no reason to believe that we would see a rapid coordinated decline in all of these things at the same time without AI, and strong reason to believe that we would see it with AI. So we have a model that makes testable predictions, and data strongly consistent with those testable predictions, in the form of an acceleration of existing downward trends. What more do you want? | | |
| ▲ | pydry 39 minutes ago | parent [-] | | >I think if you won't even admit that AI greatly accelerated these trends, you're in some kind of denial I think if you actually look at the data for these trends rather than asking AI what it thinks you might experience some cognitive dissonance. >There's no reason to believe that we would see a rapid coordinated decline in all of these things at the same time without AI It's called hiked interest rates. The economy is not doing so great for several reasons but the main one is wars. |
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| ▲ | khalic 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | People love simplistic narratives, i usually don't mind but this is just ridiculous. AI hate is gently overtaking AI hype as the most stupid thing around | | |
| ▲ | pydry 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | AI hype is still a million miles ahead and a million times dumber, especially thanks to online astroturfing. | | |
| ▲ | khalic 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | By volume sure, a part of the anti AI crowd is pretty extreme though, death threads, bomb threads, etc. |
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| ▲ | fluoridation 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's not really a bell curve. There was obviously a downwards trend from 2016 onwards, but 2023 definitely precipitated the fall to zero. Without AI they might have lasted at least a couple more years, or the activity might have stabilized to a new floor greater than zero. |
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| ▲ | yorwba 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You mean the fall to a thousand questions per month. Now that the volume is low enough someone has a chance of looking at every single one of them, maybe the StackOverflow community can finally collaborate in peace, safe from the onslaught of questions that could be answered by reading the documentation. | |
| ▲ | khalic 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb Goodness of Fit 0.911, Kurtosis -0.849, Skewness: 0.073 It's very much a bell curve | | |
| ▲ | fluoridation 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Just because it's approximated by a bell curve doesn't make it a bell curve. There are quite obvious separate phenomena shaping the curve at different times. | | |
| ▲ | khalic 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > just because it's approximated by a bell curve doesn't make it a bell curve I'm going to assume this is bait... | | |
| ▲ | jdlshore 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Bell curves are probability distributions. This is a time series, so it can’t be a bell curve. It just has the same shape. | | |
| ▲ | khalic 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Are you discarding the utility of Gaussian functions in analysis simply because the independent variable is time? A Gaussian curve can be used as a descriptive model without claiming that the observations themselves are a probability distribution The fit does not prove causation, but it does show that the decline was already well described by a trend that began years before generative AI. If the claim is that 2023 created a separate structural break, it's different claim then the title describes |
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| ▲ | strken 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Do you mean "just because it's a bell curve, doesn't make it a normal distribution"? | |
| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | 3uruiueijjj 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Those graphs look nothing alike, except for "going up and then vaguely going down." | | |
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| ▲ | shevy-java 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I am not sure. I think SO died way before AI and that graph seems incorrect too. > Without AI they might have lasted at least a couple more years Nah, their decline was already readily apparent before AI. You only
need to go through old discussions and other people noticing it.
AI may have accelerated the decay, but the decline happened already
largely prior to AI. |
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| ▲ | mmwako 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| this. Thanks for pointing it out, I fell for "oh it was just AI" at first. |
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| ▲ | airstrike 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This isn't really a bell curve. |
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| ▲ | khalic 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | check my other response, it's very much a bell curve, statistically speaking https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb | | |
| ▲ | j_maffe 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > statistically speaking That's a very big word you're using there for what is basically making shapes out of clouds. A bell-curve is the amortised function of a random variable with a mean and standar deviation. What does that have to do with a timeseries dataset? | | |
| ▲ | khalic 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | A bell curve is not an "amortised function." Amortization applies to accounting and algorithmic time complexity, not probability distributions. You're likely thinking of a Probability Density Function (PDF). If you are going to police terminology, it helps to use the correct words. Second, fitting a curve with an R^2 of 0.911 is the exact opposite of "making shapes out of clouds. | |
| ▲ | antonvs 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > A bell-curve is the amortised function of a random variable with a mean and standard deviation. The general notion of a bell-shaped curve is broader than that. Wikipedia has a reasonable overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell-shaped_function > “typically continuous or smooth, asymptotically approach zero for large negative/positive x, and have a single, unimodal maximum at small x.” |
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| ▲ | j_maffe 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| You don't just fit a Gaussian distribution to a timeseries dataset. That's not what a Gaussian curve is designed for at all.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1725:_Linear_Regr... |
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| ▲ | khalic 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | You are confusing a Probability Density Function (PDF) with a phenomenological curve fit. No one is claiming that time is a random variable drawn from a normal distribution. | | |
| ▲ | j_maffe 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > No one is claiming that time is a random variable drawn from a normal distribution. You are doing that implicitly by fitting a Gaussian curve. | | |
| ▲ | khalic 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Fitting a mathematical function to a dataset does not implicitly adopt the ontological baggage of probability theory. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of applied mathematics |
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