As someone who resists agents, I agree with all of this 100%, especially that it's not said enough, because this is exactly what I've railed against most of my career. There is a HUGE "LOL all code sucks" sentiment across the majority of our industry and I friggin' hate it.

Definitely good stuff on YouTube, but I do miss the curation and, as was talked about here recently I believe, shared experiences that brought. I'm also crazy addicted to YouTube in a way that I wasn't to TV, but that's another issue.

...from answers that were publicly shared without license. It's not the same thing, even though every LOVES to make this argument.

Also: Over the past 20 years, I could count the number of times on one hand that I was been able to get away with out-right copy/paste from SO.

Stackoverflow code has a license (not per post, but a blanket one depending on which year - https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing it's mostly CC BY-SA.) I've written corporate policies that emphasize that you can learn from SO answers, but (as you point out) they basically never fit exactly - and you should include a link to the original so when the next Ubuntu LTS breaks your clever hack, we can see if someone has already posted a fix :-)

In a prior job, I had to scan a 2M+ line codebase for software license violations to support the sale of a unit to another corporation. One class of violation was using SO snippets, because they are licensed under CC and not compatible with the distribution model the new company was planning. Many weeks of work to track them all down.

> I will need to keep my address alive and forwarding to my new address at least for a few years. So no privacy gains there either.

Ya, there's no way of not letting google know what your new address is, but you're going to be emailing a lot of gmail addresses anyway so there's no way around that, really. But with the forwarding they only know incoming mail.

I switched off gmail 3.5 years ago and all I can say is that it wasn't anywhere near as scary as I thought it would be. I setup an auto-responder that would hound people to update their contacts for me and slowly switched over services I cared about (and closed others!) An important point, though, is that I don't really care about old emails. I do still have access to my gmail account, of course, but I have yet to go back. Surely there is a way to export everything and import it into something searchable, though?

It's inline with what I perceive as the more informal tone of the sqlite documentation in general. It's slightly wordier but fun to read, and feels like the people who wrote it had a good time doing so.

You hit on something key here: the vast majority of the pro-articles are talking in the context of code vomit or content vomit or other types of vomit. As you say, it is beyond tiring, so we respond. I'm still waiting for that cancer cure!

> it's only been that person limiting it's own growth and productivity.

Maybe limiting raw productivity, but I sure don't buy that it limits growth. Maybe if all you ever did was copy and paste off of SO, but taking the time to study and deeply understand something is going to be much better for your overall growth. Also collaborating with humans instead of robots is always nice.

You can study better and more effectively with more tools at your disposal ;)

I've never learned and collaborated as much as in the last years.

It's all situational, I guess. For example I never learned or collaborated more (or had more fun at work) than when I worked at an XP shop, pairing every single day. I feel the majority of people are just going to have coworkers who have fully stopped asking asking questions. But you aren't wrong. I use AI a bit as a search engine.

You can still do XP, can't you!

I do agree that real people sharing is absolutely crucial, and that AI may have a negative effect it it becomes the main and only way of (non) sharing.

I could if there were a wealth of companies that offered it ;) Not only that, if there was a wealth of people who wanted to do it. It's unsurprising that most people are more willing to collaborate with a machine than a human (if they are even willing at all), but there's obviously nothing I can do about that.

> I do agree that real people sharing is absolutely crucial, and that AI may have a negative effect it it becomes the main and only way of (non) sharing.

Yes, exactly. Most of the pro-AI articles that show up here are about generative AI which is what the vast majority of people are raging against. This particular nuance is often left out. Although the TFA's About page explicitly states that when they use "AI" they mean "Generative AI." Obviously pretty much all of us having been using "AI" in some form or another for the past 20... 30+ years?

But then there are a whole host of other reasons I don't like "AI" that are a little out of scope of this rant.

I'm not, I'm tired of hearing about it. If someone is forcing you to read these articles then that sounds like you are in a really shitty situation. Blink twice if you need help.

Whoa, was unaware of this! Thanks!