Don't be surprised when you learn their so-called "chess bots" are actually people, lying hidden below the floor of the passenger cabin, moving pieces with the help of levers and magnets.
Your problem is that you have only one comment's worth of context and can't be bothered to read up the thread. The comment was "Don't be surprised when you learn their so-called "chess bots" are actually people, lying hidden below the floor of the passenger cabin, moving pieces with the help of levers and magnets."
That was a joke about the Mechanical Turk (as a response to "I used to fly a lot of Turkish, and their one's laughably bad. If anyone here works for Turkish Airlines, get yourself a better Chess bot"), which is why I said that's what it sounds like and provided the link. "Amazon Mechanical Turk" does not involve hidden people moving the pieces with the help of levers and magnets and has nothing to do with chess bots on Turkish airlines. I posted the link because most people aren't familiar with the Mechanical Turk and would not know what @tomjakubowski's joke referred to.
I'm sorry if you still can't follow, but your failure to comprehend isn't my fault and I'd rather not be insulted for simply posting an informative link because of someone else's misunderstanding so I'm not going to comment further.
You are making unwarranted assumptions here. I read the comments in order.
tomjakubowski joked about the mechanical turk. anematode recognized the reference, you recognized the reference, and I recognized the reference.
But you didn't reply to tomjakubowski as a general explainer to the audience. You replied to anematode. You replied to anematode in a way that suggested they needed the joke explained, even though they not only understood it, they expanded on it.
That's what I didn't comprehend. Why did you reply there and phrase it like that. And you still haven't explained.
Your claim that [["Amazon Mechanical Turk" does not involve hidden people moving the pieces with the help of levers and magnets and has nothing to do with chess bots on Turkish airlines.]] makes it sound like you still don't understand anematode's joke. Amazon's mechanical turk is named after the original mechanical turk. It has very much to do with turkish chess bots.
I know you responded to "sounds like", I'm asking why.
When they said "sounds like", they were acknowledging the mechanical turk joke, and extending it. Your response looks like you're calling them wrong, like why are they talking about amazon, it's actually about mechanical turk! Which would be a deep misunderstanding of their comment.
Could you just say yes or no: When you first replied, did you realize they understood the mechanical turk joke?
Interesting. I've gotten really good mileage with Georgian and ChatGPT, which I'm aware is apples and oranges.
There should be a larger Armenian corpus out there. Do any other languages cause this issue? Translation is a real killer app for LLMs, surprised to see this problem in 2026.
I've been walking seriously for about a decade now. I've got a dog, so it's mandatory, and my last two locations have been hilly so I'd say I'm doing "good" walks.
I feel great for it, and I'm definitely way healthier than I was when I was younger.
That said, I've found walking hasn't been enough to keep me in shape alone.
It does little to nothing for my flexibility, and whilst it's great for my legs (and possibly core) it does little for strength elsewhere. I also struggle if I need to really get my heart rate up.
Not at all. We, as European governments, block pirate sites and Russia Today. We should similarly ban the social media of what is clearly a hostile foreign power.
To expand my metaphor, you can force an addict to go cold turkey, but it’s not the best method. Concentrate on people around you. Been happily social network free for 2 years now, have convinced 2-3 people, given my small friends circle, it’s already a miracle.
But at some point, blocking is the answer. I tend to agree we’re already there
Back in the late noughties, my Dad had a NAS. I had a pretty chaotic life at the time and a big stash of old pics on a hard drive I knew could die at any point.
Dad offers to keep them for me. He's a sensible, stable chap. "Sure I say", and do a full backup of my old pictures and crap to his NAS.
Five years later, the HD is long dead, I'm more together and putting together a fresh setup. I recall the backup and figure I'll merge it with my current files.
He has no memory of the backup, nor ability to find it.
What I always appreciate about SO is the dialogue between commenters. LLMs give one answer, or bullet points around a theme, or just dump a load of code in your IDE. SO gives a debate, in which the finer points of an issue are thrashed out, with the best answers (by and large) floating to the top.
SO, at its best, is numerous highly-experienced and intelligent humans trying to demonstrate how clever they are. A bit like HN, you learn from watching the back and forth. I don't think this is something that LLMs can ever replicate. They don't have the egos and they certainly don't have the experience.
Whatever people's gripes about the site, I learned a hell of a lot from it. I still find solutions there, and think a world without it would be worse.
The fundamental difference between asking on SO and asking an LLM is that SO is a public forum, and an LLM will be communicated with in private. This has a lot of implications, most of which surround the ability for people to review and correct bad information.
The other major benefit of SO being a public forum is that once a question was wrestled with and eventually answered, other engineers could stumble upon and benefit from it. With SO being replaced by LLMs, engineers are asking LLMs the same questions over and over, likely getting a wide range of different answers (some correct and others not) while also being an incredible waste of resources.
Providing context to ask a Stack Overflow question was time-consuming.
In the time it takes to properly format and ask a question on Stack Overflow, an engineer can iterate through multiple bad LLM responses and eventually get to the right one.
The stats tell the uncomfortable truth. LLMs are a better overall experience than Stack Overflow, even after accounting for inaccurate answers from the LLM.
Don't forget, human answers on Stack Overflow were also often wrong or delayed by hours or days.
I think we're romanticizing the quality of the average human response on Stack Overflow.
The purpose of StackOverflow was never to get askers quick answers to their specific questions. Its purpose is to create a living knowledge repository of problems and solutions which future folk may benefit from. Asking a question on StackOverflow is more like adding an article to Wikipedia than pinging a colleague for help.
If someone doesn't care about contributing to such a repository then they should ask their question elsewhere (this was true even before the rise of LLMs).
StackOverflow itself attempts to explain this in various ways, but obviously not sufficiently as this is an incredibly common misconception.
What I'm appreciating here is the quality of the _best_ human responses on SO.
There are always a number of ways to solve a problem. A good SO response gives both a path forward, and an explanation why, in the context of other possible options, this is the way to do things.
LLMs do not automatically think of performance, maintainability, edge cases etc when providing a response, in no small part because they do not think.
An LLM will write you a regex HTML parser.[0]
The stats look bleak for SO. Perhaps there's a better "experience" with LLMs, but my point is that this is to our detriment as a community.
Humans do not know what’s right. What’s worse is the phenomenon of people who don’t actually know but want to seem like they know so they ask the person with the question for follow up information that is meaningless and irrelevant to the question.
Hey, can you show me the log files?
Sure here you go. Please help!
Hmm, I don’t really know what I’m looking for in these. Good luck!
> What I always appreciate about SO is the dialogue between commenters.
Stack Overflow is explicitly not for "dialogue", recent experiments (which are generally not well received by the regulars on the meta site) notwithstanding. The purpose of the comments on questions is to help refine the question and ensure it meets standards, and in some cases serve other meta purposes like pointing at different-but-related questions to help future readers find what they're looking for. Comments are generally subject to deletion at any time and were originally designed to be visually minimal. They are not part of the core experience.
Of course, the new ownership is undoing all of that, because of engagement metrics and such.
SO was somewhere people put their hard won experience into words, that an LLM could train on.
That won't be happening anymore, neither on SO or elsewhere. So all this hard won experience, from actually doing real work, will be inaccessible to the LLMs. For modern technologies and problems I suspect it will be a notably worse experience when using an LLM than working with older technologies.
It's already true for example, when using the Godot game engine instead of Unity. LLMs constantly confuse what you're trying to do with Unity problems, offer Unity based code solutions etc.
> Isn’t back and forth exactly what the new MoE thinking models attempt to simulate?
I think the name "Mixture of Experts" might be one of the most misleading labels in our industry. No, that is not at all what MoE models do.
Think of it rather like, instead of having one giant black box, we now have multiple smaller opaque boxes of various colors, and somehow (we don't really know how) we're able to tell if your question is "yellow" or "purple" and send that to the purple opaque box to get an answer.
The result is that we're able to use less resources to solve any given question (by activating smaller boxes instead of the original huge one). The problem is we don't know in advance which questions are of which color: it's not like one "expert" knows CSS and the other knows car engines.
It's just more floating point black magic, so "How do I center a div" and "what's the difference between a V6 and V12" are both "yellow" questions sent to the same box/expert, while "How do I vertically center a div" is a red question, and "what's the most powerful between a V6 and V12" is a green question which activates a completely different set of weights.
I don't know if this is still the case but back in the day people would often redirect comments to some stackoverflow chat feature, the links to which would always return 404 not found errors.
You can ask an LLM to provide multiple approaches to solutions and explore the pros and cons of each, then you can drill down and elaborate on particular ones. It works very well.
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