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Comment by gavinray | Hacker News Reader

  >  I run into problems, figure out solutions that don't seem to be documented anywhere else, and then I don't post about them.

I don't understand this. Presumably you've only been able to build software your entire career because, when you hit a wall, usually someone online had too and shared the solution.

This feels like throwing a sandwich in the trash rather than let a hungry person eat it.

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I've been trying on and off over a few months to drop in at her site to see what's new - the site never loads and occasionally I run into wrong protocol ... maybe I don't have the right referer, wrong IP range, but I've tried a bunch of different browsers and it's unreachable for myself - the guess is the very heavy LLM bot traffic that's swamped the site. I could be wrong (however archive.is also circles endlessly failing to load) - the only thing I haven't done is tested to see if a smart phone browser is acceptable ... which I won't be doing.

The thing of it is, if one writes and it's primarily feeding bots which have the time to try and try again and the minority who are holding their tongue the right way who do get access - one is not really writing for the whole net any more.

There was a time before the Internet existed, and people were able to write programs. They reviewed the documentation, digested and understood the system as a whole, then worked on problems using that knowledge. That’s still possible today. When you hit a wall, you read through some more, try some things, and sleep on it. Often you wake up with the answer.

Not everyone is only copy/pasting from SO/Google/AI to know how to build stuff.

People are usually not specialists in every bit of software and hardware they use. The field also includes novices and budding enthusiasts trying or adopting, which when rarer snafu instances pop up are not going to spend weeks getting to the level of expertise to solve it themselves. Though many people do like a challenge to solve problems themselves, more often it's easy to see that maybe they do require some help, pre internet it was asking other people in the field, then with the web over the years it's been a pathway that's evolved from being predominantly on usenet asking, IRC, to forums until one didn't have to join a forum to ask, search results got to a point where the right keywords would find that information within the great number of help based areas. Of course quality data within forums and blogs are /were for good search engines. It's been a pity that some search engines and now LLMs have abused bandwidth forcing some forums and the like to tighten permissions / require password access.

> Not everyone is only copy/pasting from SO/Google/AI to know how to build stuff.

It's not just that. Back in the day, StackOverflow was also the place where besides some copy-paste-ready lines of code you would also get some detailed explanation.

Sure, you had to deal with SO's awful moderation policies...

> This feels like throwing a sandwich in the trash rather than let a hungry person eat it.

More like: giving up on making artisanal sandwiches to leave on a counter for free, after realizing the surge in people grabbing them aren't hungry, they're running off to resell them in sandwich shops.

Some people just want the information out there so it might help anyone. They see information sharing as a pure philanthropic path.

In this case being swallowed by LLM is fine.

Some people, however, chase the raise in status and credits. So they'd feel really pissed at giving it away.

If you believe that tech actually does more harm than good, then you don't need the motive of personal credits. The author actually mentions helping bad people in her article.

https://xkcd.com/979/

It’s more like not tipping a billionaire.

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