I have different technical questions I want to ask. I went to Stack Overflow and they blocked registration with a VPN. It’s really fucking annoying. I can buy a residential IP to bypass this, but I’d rather just not use these enshitified platforms that are so hostile to VPNs.
Is there any decent alternative to Stack Overflow? I have tried getting AI answers to the technical question but they are not good.
And no, I can’t just create a github ID using VPN to login, they block github logins based on IP also.
There soon will be. They are still trying to scrub all of the helpful information out there and, once done, all you need is an AI subscription to get you moving again. /s
Piefed iirc has question answer support like Stackoverflow. Where you can choose an accepted answer. So you could replicate stackoverflow with a piefed community, and something like that might already exist. I’m not aware of it if it does though.
Man, I need to get to switching to Piefed soon, it seems nice. Any cons vs Lemmy?
Why not turn off the VPN to make the account then use the VPN like normal afterwards?
You could try codidact. I’m not sure what kind of gatekeeping they have around account creation, but the project basically started up with “Stackoverflow sucks now, let’s make our own!”
Wow, I had never heard of that before and thought it was a typo.
https://codidact.com/ also links to https://topanswers.xyz/ to check for communities they might not have.
Hard to tell how active they are but interesting to check out for sure.
Depending on your question, maybe you have a lemmy group (sublemmy?) for the tech you are working with.
Or you can try ask here.
Myself and others can try and help you.
Generally people just call them communities here
I would love a strong moderated community of people to answer technical questions.
Like a “no stupid questions” style of community with the opposite of StackOverflow’s style of communication.
SO has a pretty great standard for communication. I known it can be frustrating if you don’t know the rules at first, but if one asks a clear question, states what they have attempted, and provides a minimal reproducible example, with code as text not an image, the support is pretty damned good.
The vpn block is probably trying to diminish what they can of bot scraping, to salvage what’s left of their husk of relevance.
Could I have a more detailed view of what that would look like? When I want to explore a problem for the layman I go to Wikipedia first and later onto SO if I still can’t find the answer in relevant literature. Making my question precise is often enough for me to accept an answer.
I don’t have an answer for you I’m sorry.
I think I asked a question on S/O once, like 10 years ago, and I got the usual “this question has been asked before” bullshit so I just never tried again.
These days I mostly just search for technical answers, yes often the answers are on S/O but often they’re elsewhere.
I also use a self hosted instance of openwebui to chat with LLMs hosted by huggingface. You’re correct that often technical answers are insufficient, but often it’s helpful. For example today I was trying to measure contrast between 2 colors. The chat bot gave me theory, explanation, and a working spreadsheet formula in a few seconds. It didn’t complain about how I’d formatted my question or that someone else may have asked the same question.
Are these questions that an LLM can’t answer? For better or for worse, SO has basically died because LLMs can answer a great majority of SO-type questions. So I guess my question to you is: what are the nature of your queries? Something some bullshit LLM can’t answer? Well by golly, then let’s see if we can’t answer them here!
No, sorry. Never. I believe in mind training and development, human discussions, attribution, contribution, and discoveries for human work, imagination, achievements, and scientific miracles.
You? You do you with your LLM.
