The saga on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, and how tech always serves the ruling class.

Right now, on Stack Overflow, Luigi Magione’s account has been renamed. Despite having fruitfully contributed to the network he is stripped of his name and his account is now known as “user4616250”.

This appears to violate the creative commons license under which Stack Overflow content is posted.

When the author asked about this:

As of yet, Stack Exchange has not replied to the above post, but they did promptly and within hours gave me a year-long ban for merely raising the question. Of course, they did draft a letter which credited the action to other events that occurred weeks before where I merely upvoted contributions from Luigi and bountied a few of his questions.

  • FaceDeer
    -5•1 day ago

    Yeah, AI has become good enough at this point that you can provide it with a large blob of context material - such as API documentation, source code, etc. - and then have it come up with its own questions and answers about it to create a corpus of “synthetic data” to train on. And you can fine-tune the synthetic data to fit the format and style that you want, such as telling it not to be snarky or passive-aggressive or whatever.

      • @naught101English
        6•1 day ago

        That’s not really true though… They come up with brand new sentences all the time.

      • FaceDeer
        -7•1 day ago

        And yet the synthetic training data works, and models trained on it continue scoring higher on the benchmarks than ones trained on raw Internet data. Claim what you want about it, the results speak louder.

        • @JcbAzPxEnglish
          1•19 hours ago

          This is the peak, though. They require new data to get better but most of the available new data is adulterated with AI slop. Once they start eating themselves it’s over.

          • FaceDeer
            1•18 hours ago

            You are speaking of “model collapse”, I take it? That doesn’t happen in the real world with properly generated and curated synthetic data. Model collapse has only been demonstrated in highly artificial circumstances where many generations of model were “bred” exclusively on the outputs of previous generations, without the sort of curation and blend of additional new data that real-world models are trained with.

            There is no sign that we are at “the peak” of AI development yet.

            • @JcbAzPxEnglish
              1•17 hours ago

              We’re already seeing signs of incestuous data input causing damage. The more that AI takes over, the less capable it will be.

              • FaceDeer
                1•17 hours ago

                Are we, though? Newer models almost universally perform better than older ones, adjusted for scale. What signs are you seeing?

        • knightly the SneptaurEnglish
          1•22 hours ago

          The results aren’t worth the expense. So-called “AI” is the biggest bubble since the great recession.

          • @LedivinEnglish
            1•21 hours ago

            Nah, I’m still giving that one to the blockchain. LLMs are going to be useful for a while, but Ethereum still hasn’t figured out a real use, and they’re the only ones that haven’t given up and moved fully into coin gambling.