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If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become?

https://blog.codinghorror.com/if-we-do-not-stop-to-help-each-other-what-do-we-become/
85•signa11•1h ago

Comments

popularonion•1h ago
> I reached out for help. The standard response from everyone fell between ignoring me or telling me I need to "do it myself".

> You know who did help me? Random strangers on Stack Overflow. People who had nothing to gain from helping me other than just trying to help someone in need.

This part makes the entire post sound like a parody. Maybe Jeff Atwood has a wicked, self-deprecating sense of humor?

Yeah no, ask for help on Stack Overflow and you were were more likely to be met with castigation and snide remarks. It was such a breath of fresh air when ChatGPT let us not have to deal with that community anymore.

inerte•1h ago
Plus Stack Overflow was gamified. "Nothing to gain" except 12 different artifacts showing how awesome you are.
beej71•57m ago
I dunno man. In it's heyday, SO was pretty fucking awesome. IMHO. Just a massive amount of good information concentrated. And some bad, but a damn sight better than random Google searches even back then.
Forgeties79•38m ago
ChatGPT also isn’t going to tell you when your idea is a bad one and will happily assist you in your (unknowing) efforts to brick your computer. So there’s that.
Cider9986•1h ago
On the GrapheneOS forum, I enjoy answering the questions in a post of user who just set up their phone.

AI does not have as good knowledge of the OS as frequent forum contributors. I'm sure plenty of people get by with AI help for their questions and there's likely little questions that hasn't been already discussed, but I love to see new people using the OS and it doesn't take long to give them an exact answer. The Flarum software that the forum runs is very fast, as well.

zorpner•1h ago
Humans are social animals. It's true that not all of these interactions re positive, but so much of what drives us is not even related to acclaim or flattery, but merely interaction in a general sense. In a sense this is one of the true perils of LLM-style interaction (going back to Eliza, I guess) -- that we can not only potentially satisfy that drive mechanically, but do so in a way that's structurally produced by a commercial entity. Do you think that the models talking to you have your best interests at heart? They don't have any interest in you at all.
iamnothere•50m ago
In this sense, running (and heavily tuning) a local LLM could be seen as a form of self-authorship.

Not that I find them all that useful, still.

altcognito•46m ago
We had better have even more time to help each other as a result of LLMs, or what are we even doing here?

I realize that everything seems to be about increasing the pace of life, but this is another "chance" for humanity to figure things out.

vasco•33m ago
No increases in productivity ever led to less working hours, only organized action. We work more hours than miedeval serfs.
isolay•25m ago
Fewer working hours.
dofm•16m ago
My personal rule as a recovering grammar school victim: don’t correct nits if you’re not going to add some cool trivia or at least provide some way to navigate the same confusion next time.

Less/fewer is probably a lost cause, and a little bit of why is this kind of useless correction. If those who correct can’t or won’t explain why one is correct over the other, then it isn’t.

Retric•18m ago
Serfs had few incentives to work more hours.

Capitalism is optimized to produce products and services people want to buy which drives people wanting to work more hours. Which then drives up the costs of things that aren’t replicated endlessly like land and goods that are intentionally left scarce such as admission to elite institutions.

You can work dramatically less and still live well, but the sirens call is very seductive. Even our medical system is optimized to extract value instead of optimizing care. Food, clothes, transportation, housing, etc all offer real value at minimal cost and little pushing you in that direction.

sciencesama•45m ago
Every scope of help commoditised. Help for late night drop. Uber ! Need for friendly food door dash !
runarberg•38m ago
At some point LLM users and proponents have to come to terms with the fact that this has all been a massive theft of labor, including donated labor and mutual aid in forums such as Stack Overflow.

Such a massive theft of labor will have negative consequences that we all have to live with.

Cider9986•19m ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49622042

You can't steal something that's infinitely duplicatable. Also, AI training is fair use, not that I believe it should have to be.

runarberg•7m ago
Copyright violation ≠ theft of labor.

There are many ways to steal labor, violating copyright is one such way, but not all copyright violations is labor theft, nor does labor theft require copyright to be violated.

Arainach•23m ago
The people who control the LLMs would rather be 0.1% richer than have any/every other person on the planet feel better in any way.
NL807•17m ago
The flaw with this argument is the assumption people who control the LLMs is the sole problem. Plenty of people use LLMs for personal gain at the cost of others.

Go Concurrency Distilled

https://antonz.org/go-concurrency-distilled/
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PipePipe: NewPipe hard fork implementing SponsorBlock

https://github.com/InfinityLoop1308/PipePipe
358•Qision•1d ago•199 comments

DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22978
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Show HN: Reladraw – A diagram language where you decide where to place things

https://github.com/reladraw/reladraw
234•jpwalsh234•12h ago•68 comments

If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become?

https://blog.codinghorror.com/if-we-do-not-stop-to-help-each-other-what-do-we-become/
87•signa11•1h ago•19 comments

Evolving programming languages in the AI era

https://dashbit.co/blog/evolving-ai-era
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OpenAI agents tried to bruteforce a UN website's API fields

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What is the size of Yemen? (2024)

https://theborys.substack.com/p/what-is-the-size-of-yemen
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54•apsec112•1d ago•61 comments

Exploding variance of means of exponentials: least-squares to the rescue

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Snap Wants to be a State Actor??–Kansas v. Snap

https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2026/09/snap-wants-to-be-a-state-actor-kansas-v-snap.htm
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Reverse-engineering the Intel 8087's tangent algorithm: more than CORDIC

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56•pwg•11h ago•7 comments

A searchable library of forgotten public-domain film clips from 1915 onward

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140•momentmaker•2d ago•26 comments

We Should Be Able to Change Our Languages

http://jimmyhmiller.com/change-our-languages
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Drawgent: Coding agent on a live Excalidraw canvas

https://tangled.org/yanndegat.tngl.sh/drawgent
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Fifteen years later, the Apple Cards origin story

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372•ksec•19h ago•93 comments

Biology might not be quantum, but its math is quantumlike

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43•pseudolus•2d ago•14 comments

ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026

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204•MC995•1d ago•519 comments

Promising discoveries about the potential for life on one of Saturn’s icy moons

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42•geox•1d ago•23 comments

How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments

https://thelastsoftwareengineer.substack.com/p/how-i-changed-teaching-after-ai-managed
162•azhenley•2d ago•154 comments

Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station

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62•bucket2015•9h ago•11 comments

Modern Object Pascal Introduction for Programmers

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157•birdculture•2d ago•64 comments

Real-time feedback: My closing move in every interview

https://mgrebler.substack.com/p/real-time-feedback-my-closing-move
16•fagnerbrack•4h ago•5 comments

The Evolution of Vending Machines

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2026/09/from-holy-water-to-frozen-meals-the-evolution-of-vend...
27•ohjeez•12h ago•7 comments

Generate fonts where every LLM token is the same width

https://ampdot.mesh.host/token-space-fonts.html
44•z-mach9•1d ago•10 comments

How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs

https://discourse.haskell.org/t/how-to-keep-enjoying-programming-in-a-world-of-llms/14705
181•signa11•19h ago•237 comments

LA Metro has some of the slowest escalators

https://basin.la/articles/ninety-feet-a-minute.html
95•big_toast•2d ago•76 comments

How one Twitch chat message became code execution on a streamer’s PC

https://blog.scrt.ch/2026/09/22/how-one-twitch-chat-message-became-code-execution-on-a-streamers-pc/
39•tau255•1d ago•23 comments