ChatGPT business model: rephrasing stackoverflow answers to make the asker feel like a valuable human being.
this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2025
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You’re on to something there! Shut up and take my money!
It’s true. And neither of them back it up with reasons.
Nor care to have those reasons in the first place.
And if you press them, you get complete bullshit reasons. But SO will also ban you, while ChatGPT only cares about you paying.
The good thing about stack overflow, (when your question isn't marked as a duplicate of something completely unrelated), is that you accidentally learn random other things while browsing answers.
Stack overflow is great for learning from posts that are marked as duplicate! I’ve learned the most from those lol
The one very important thing I learnt on stack overflow was the XY problem. Most of my first questions were about how to make my idiotic solution work, instead of how to properly solve the problem.
I asked ChatGPT if it would ever maliciously give me a wrong answer and it said no, so I believe it.
"There is no need to be malicious when incompetence will provide the same result" - ChatGPT
It's because it wouldn't be a miracle.
It's wrong like all the time.
I think you misread a word there
No. Yes.
One of the guys I worked with said be prefers the chatbot because stack overflow always made him feel stupid when he'd ask for help. The emotional dimension is big for some people.
I never understood that... I've found thousands of answers on SO, asked 3 questions I didn't find an answer to, and answered maybe 50 questions myself.
Most of the time people are just too lazy to search for themselves, or unable to abstract a problem.
Stack Overflow was the antithesis of "Just say something wrong on the internet so that someone will correct you with the real answer" because none of the negative threads actually answered the question lol.
ChatGPT: "I'm absolutely wrong"
Ahh...I see the problem.
If you guessed this sound (rubber duck squeak) is not like the others then you're absolutely right!
Source: Sesame Street record from when I was a kid.
Sometimes I rubber duck with ChatGPT.
Honestly I've learned more in a few months of fixing its mistakes than I had in years of being on the job.
Never understood why people on SO are such dicks all the time
It’s how some technical people are generally. It always kept me from spending time in tech spaces even though I was always interested. It’s no excuse to be autistic because plenty of autistic people don’t rip your head off for not understanding concepts.
I think technical people should have to socialize supervised until they pass some sort of decency exam.
Lmao I can’t disagree!
That's a fun thought but StackOverflow are early adopters for AI so they're probably not much different at all.
The new model 5.2 seems to have toned down a little in term of constantly glazing you up.
Hey there Sam. Maybe we should believe you this time?
The people with the money believe him, that's what matters.
Honey, we all know they're hitting the ceiling they predicted in their OpenAI paper on AI Scaling Laws in 2020 and corrected by Deepmind's 2022 followup paper. It's trash now and it will always be trash, attempting to give it that infinite power and compute time to reach 94% is just an exercise in futility.
"You're doing something very right here."
glm-4.7: I fixed it
Ime Google AI is much worse about making up wrong answers to sound right.
If I'd ask ChatGPT and Google AI to help me craft a set of Ansible tasks to do something rather simple but also something I don't do very often, like converting PEM certs + key to PKCS12....they'd both write a playbook that's close, but ChatGPT would be much closer.
But they both say crazy shit sometimes. The other day ChatGPT told me Fedora 40 is the latest release and 43 is still in testing.
Chatgpt just cribs from stack overflow, which in turn just cribs their answers from documentation. Once you figure that out, they both become surprisingly useless.
I kinda miss stackoverflow
While SO is toxic, it's mostly about the failure of the supplicant to do the fucking research (RTFM or equivalent these days goddammit, and is usually backed by ppl with actual knowledge, Chat GPT / LLMs., not so much.