Probably people complaining about AI today were fine with Stack Overflow before and didn't have anything to complain about back then.
I also had a better experience with Stack Overflow over AI. It's been unable to tell me that I couldn't assign a new value to my std::optional in my specific case, and kept hallucinating copy constructor rules. A Stack Overflow question matching my problem cleared that up for me.
Or, like me, the kind of questions in which I’m interested are answered in a way worse rate by LLMs than StackOverflow, like ever.
I have and had problems with StackOverflow. But LLMs are nowhere near that, and unfortunately, as we can see, StackOverflow is basically dead, and that’s very problematic with kinda new things, like Android compose. There was exactly zero time when for example Opus could answer the best options for the first time, like a simple one, like I want a zero WindowInset object… it gives an answer for sure, and completely ignores the simplest one. And that happens all the time. I’m not saying that StackOverflow was good regarding this, but it was better for sure.
I don’t think I’ve ever ask a question on Stack Overflow, but I’ve consulted it several time. Even when I’ve not found my exact use case, there’s always something similar or related that gave me the right direction for research (a book or an article reference, the name of a concept to use as keyword,…)
It’s kinda the same feeling when browsing the faq of a project. It gives you a more complete sense of the domain boundaries.
I still prefer to refer to book or SO instead of asking the AI. Coherency and purposefulness matter more to me then a direct answer that may be wrong.
> A Stack Overflow question matching my problem cleared that up for me.
Perhaps if there was no question already available you'd have had a different experience. Getting clearly written and specific questions promptly closed as duplicates of related, yet distinct issues, was part of the fun.
I find that AI hallucinates in the same way that someone can be very confident and wrong at the same time, with the difference that the feedback is almost instant and there are no difficult personalities to deal with.
I've found recent claude code to be surprisingly good at dispelling false assumptions and incorrect framing. I say this as someone who experimented with it last summer and found it to be kinda stupid; since December last year it's turned the curve - it's not the sycophantic nonsense it used to be.
That's what I hear from mainstream media all the time. Do you have some information or argument that will help me see things differently?
>Of course you live in a 1st world country and it likely won't kill you, just cost you tons of money
A little presumptuous to assume my living conditions
>It's not about "take better care of the planet", whatever you think that means
Now that's just snarky and done in bad faith. If I didn't care would I have posted it, already antecipating the downvotes?
We humans got where we are much due to technology, but we have to start thinking seriously where we go from here or there won't be land or water (or air?) that isn't polluted by something the planet is not well equiped to process. Have you read on the kind of places that microplastics have been found already? In the human body?
People are gonna lose their homes and starve to death, this will create massive refugee crises. They won't care if you have micro plastics in your testicles
Yep. It's not just oil rigs in the desert. Chevron in Ecuador destroyed the Amazonian rainforest. Oil pipelines and open pit mines destroying Canadian primordial forests. Probably tons of untold stories.
I thought the same but realized you can retrospectively 'insert' the king positions into the position sequence, shifting the remaining sequence one square along for each king, so no more bits required though the data structure is unwieldy!
Ignoring the point that climate sensitivity wasn't in the parent comment, AFAIK, airplanes generate 0.16 kg/km, whereas trains are around 0.1 kg/km and container ships are at 0.016 kg/km. However, passenger ships and gas cars are at 0.25, diesel cars at 0.28 kg/km and rockets are over 1.0 kg/km, so it appears planes are in the middle, not really "one of the best ways" to worsen climate change.
Sure, through a simple analysis of CO2 kg/km, trains are better for the climate for long distance travel, but they are vastly slower (average time from LA to DC is over 80 hours), which has knock-on effects, e.g., sleeping at home averages 0.25 - 0.32 kg/night, whereas staying at a hotel averages 10-40 kg/night, eating at home averages 2.3 kg/meal vs. 3-8 kg/meal, etc.
Trains are just the most efficient way of moving people between cities. They benefit everyone, even people with cars.
You have a business trip and need to go from A to B by yourself? Take a train, it frees your brain and the highway for people traveling in groups or with lots of luggage.
Incidentally it also avoids moving 2 tonnes of material for no reason.
A passenger train in the USA weighs about 1000 tons, plus another 150 or so tons of locomotive, before we add the passengers (seating 80 per car and about 11 cars for 880 passengers).
I am quite confident that the bandwidth cost is absolutely not a concern for Microsoft, and that the obvious goal is for them to capture the market.
The "C/C++" extension github repository is 4MB. Probably the download size for the extension itself is a fraction of that, but I won't bother measuring. It was downloaded 400 times over the last minute (there is a live counter on the extension page [0]).
That's a 25MB/s or 200Mb/s bandwidth, for one of the most popular extensions. Multiply by the top 10 extensions and you get the bandwidth of an average home optic fiber connection...
I am glad you have insider knowledge to be so confident. I would rather those costs go towards furthering VS Code than helping out Cursor. This comes from someone who uses Cursor and not the biggest fan of MSFT.
Pure speculation but I would see the more logical argument being Cursor is a for pay product, why should they have access to the marketplace?
Because MS didn’t write most of the extensions yet engineered things conveniently such that you have to use their service to get them. Other text editors somehow manage to not lock people into similar dilemmas. They’re not profiting from running the marketplace or providing VS Code for free, it’s about locking people into a product. Cursor should be allowed access because interoperability is a societal net-benefit.
> those costs
…are likely minescule. I run similar services at my day job, just at a much larger scale than a text editor app marketplace, and know the precise cost to run everything. I am often disturbed that people might actually think cost:revenue is tight enough that they should defend a behemoth about callously gating access to it.
> I am often disturbed that people might actually think cost:revenue is tight enough that they should defend a behemoth about callously gating access to it.
I think it's more likely that they imagine themselves in Microsoft's shoes. After all, it's a very popular editor and the mechanism of vendor lock-in is clever - give away the editor under the noble banner of open source, while jealously gate access to the plugin ecosystem that makes the editor as useful as it is.
So no, I don't think they earnestly believe that the egress costs are anything more than pocket change. But it's almost certainly what they would argue if they were in Microsoft's position.
Couldn’t it wind up being easy for Cursor and other variants of VS Code to be long run beneficial for VS Code itself? Seems like having a different third party team extending your stuff and testing it, could be hugely valuable, they take risks and move fast, the upstream project gradually learns from what works for the forks, people contribute various other new extensions.
In the age of LLMs, community is worth its weight in platinum, cutting off Cursor just incentivizes them to develop some new better thing with better technology (cough Zed, Ghostty) to compete with VS Code which won’t benefit Microsoft because it’ll be separate. What’s the use in not just open sourcing the C extension? With more people moving off C anyway, might as well get the free community contributions
MSFT want to build their own Cursor aka Copilot Agent.
They can build a better product with their resources effectively extinguishing Cursor, who will then need to find a way to differentiate.
If Cursor was smart, they would have decoupled from the beginning as they had first mover advantage. They will now have to adapt while fending off competition from MSFT and the other players.
MSFT meanwhile, have discovered that this market is too profitable to be left untouched. They have probably been building their agent for a while and have now decided to launch while simultaneously blocking direct competition. They already have an ecosystem with users who have switching inertia. It's a brilliant yet ruthless move.
Cursor is a small team, MS is a titanic enterprise. I highly doubt that Cursor could exceed MS when their entire product is built on VSCode in the first place and they can't even seem to describe their usage policies to their paying users.
Aren't you curious how 4MB of typescript can parse and understand C++ code? It doesn't. It downloads an additional 200MB binary language server that does all the work.
Disregard the obvious environmental risks of spraying silver iodide in the air, cloud seeding will artificially redirect rainfall in specific areas, which may deprive downstream regions of water, harming biodiversity. Note that cloud seeding is currently used for drought management, not global warming mitigation.
> The site's terms of service prohibited the sale of certain items. When the Silk Road marketplace first began, the creator and administrators instituted terms of service that prohibited the sale of anything whose purpose was to "harm or defraud." This included child pornography, stolen credit cards, assassinations, and weapons of any type
I also had a better experience with Stack Overflow over AI. It's been unable to tell me that I couldn't assign a new value to my std::optional in my specific case, and kept hallucinating copy constructor rules. A Stack Overflow question matching my problem cleared that up for me.
Sometimes you need someone to tell you no.