I learned so much over the years abusing Cunningham’s.
Could have a presentation for the C-suite for a major company, post some tenuous claim related to what I intended to present on, and have people with PhDs in the subject citing papers correcting me with nuances that would make it into the final presentation.
It’s one of the key things I miss about Reddit. The scale of Lemmy just doesn’t have the same rate and quality of expertise jumping in to correct random things as a site with 100x the users.
The major problem with reddit is that you could never really trust the credentials of the person you were talking to. They might have been PhDs or they might have been 13 year olds who just learned to Google. It amazes me how many times I saw a highly upvoted comment posted about a subject that I knew a lot about, but was just so blatantly wrong.
Yeah voting on content has nothing to do with quality and everything to do with feelings.
People just vote for their side of any discussion, regardless of validity.
Only if it’s something controversial. If it’s something technical with no political affiliation, people vote for answers that sound right. Thankfully Cunningham’s usually comes to the rescue on time.
To be fair this is not a Reddit thing and it can be found in the fediverse too. I can remember some of such situations where a person just posted wrong stuff but in a very confident way. I was able to prove him wrong later but nobody cared anymore.
cunningham’s law is intended to be used recursively
I know what you’re trying to do, but that is not the case /hj
As long as they provide appropriate sources then it doesn’t really matter who they are
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Especially if you move 0.1% away from that PhD’s particular specialty.
I mean, unironically exactly why people think LLMs are smart.
Unless the thing falls under non-commercial electronics or computing. The community on here is skewed towards that for obvious reasons.
I always kind of felt like those voices began to be drowned out the more and more popular reddit became. You’re correct about Lemmy’s scale, but there is certainly a sweet spot. I’m happy knowing Lemmy hasn’t yet reached its own, and reddit’s is long gone. I’m happier here and it’s likely only going to get better.
Errmmmmh achstually…, lol
i do the same thing. its called Murphy’s law :D
I know what you’re doing but I can’t help myself. It’s Cunningham’s law.
tbh, I prefer Cole’s Law
Cole’s Law: if there’s a salad, I want that one.
Brannigan’s Love is like Brannigan’s cole slaw, wet and chunky.
The spirit is willing but the flesh is spongy and bruised.
Took me a minute to realize this was a pun… shame on me.
Cole’s law is best with a burger.
I’ll be honest you almost for me
Ahem, it’s called Poe’s law
Are you /srs or /j?
They’re Super Cereal
Is this Betteridge’s Law?
No.
Nah thats called laws of thermodynamics! And they were made up by Elvis together with is homy Obama (the guy without last name) who were known for their contributions to biology
Are you talking about uncle Obama, well known for his banana?
imo it’s not that correcting feels better than helping but rather it’s easier to correct someone than draft an answer of your own.
Sometimes that’s part of the issue (or the whole deal), but sometimes it’s not even that.
Sometimes it’s that someone asked something difficult and elaborate to answer, which has been answered a ton of times, and it’s tedious to answer again and again. But if someone answers with misinformation or even straight FUD, then one needs to feel the urge to correct that to prevent misinformation.
I suffered that with questions in r/QtFramework. Tons of licensing questions, repeated over and over, from people who have not bothered to read a bit about such a well known and popular license as LGPL. Then someone who cares little for the nuance answers something heavy handed, and paints a wrong picture. Then I can’t let the question pass. I need to correct the shitty answer. :-(
I would say that if someone asks a difficult question it’s often difficult because it’s very general, so you don’t have any specific point to answer that you know will satisfy the person asking.
On the other hand, if someone is writing misinformation then they provide specific statements which still may be difficult to correct but you have those anchor points you can refer to.
So I guess the thing here is that if someone, after asking a question, writes a BS answer they actually refine their question and narrow its scope, thus making it easier to answer.
I usually see broad questions about rather simple things unanswered, but very specific yet difficult questions answered
ACTually, they’re still helping you, so it would be better to say correcting = helping.
Sincerely,
Definitely not Gollum’s alt.
Smeagol is that you?
Don’t asks us, precious.
Nicely corrected, thanks.
My coworkers had a hard time picking resturaunts, so I started recommending McDonald’s for work parties, and then everyone else started chiming in with actually good ideas.
This is like putting a $10 price tag on a free sidewalk item so someone will steal it.
It’s an older meme, sir, but it checks out. I was just about to upvote it.
Who post programming questions on Reddit? Are you looking for answers in meme format?
reddit was/is much more than a meme site
Honestly, meme communities’ comments could have some of the best in-depth discussions. Memes tend to provide a great launching point for discussions. A sort of prompt that everyone can coalesce around to talk in a serious manner about the subject.
/r/dndmemes and /r/programmerhumor were two great examples.
And they’re still pretty good on Lemmy!
Omg I didn’t even realise which community I was in as I made that comment!
But yeah, this one and !rpgmemes@ttrpg.network are both great.
Where would you post them?
stack overflow
DUPLICATED, CLOSED, etc.
Joke aside, for an open question I’d prefer posting on Reddit/Lemmy/forums to have an open answer.
SO is too strict on its policy.
for an open question
That’s clearly not the type of “programming question” mentioned in OP tho
Oh god
There there. I’m not quite god himself yet although I have over 1000 points on stack overflow.
The validation system is extremely off-putting. I have been working on some specialized tools for years so I could have answered some very precise questions with good confidence. However, the system was always there to detrust me and I was not going to spend hours to go through their hoops for an answer that takes me 10 min to redact. So instead I’ll post it on Reddit or a gist hopping people will be able to discover it.
Off-putting it is. Still an important tool for finding actual answers I need for my work.
Useful for me too. But I wish it was more opened for people who would just want to answer a couple of times a year, community can sort it out.
for C and Python: libera.chat
There are serious programming subs. However, I find that those tend to debate/discuss solutions/approaches moreso than the actual code itself, although that’s not unheard of either. For actual coding questions, I want to say there’s a “learn programming” sub that has those, but they’re pretty strict about just doing people’s homework for them (those posts tend to be pretty obvious).
Niche professional subs under 100k members can be very good quality. That’s the only thing that is hard for me to find a replacement for.
Almost like that xkcd joke…
I was trying to remember where I read this originally. Thank you.
