On this home team episode: Discussions on Stack Overflow is a new feature that allows users to engage in open-ended conversations outside the site’s primary Q&A structure. The team explores deep-cut Stack Exchange questions about the nature of consciousness and the availability of corrective lenses for medieval knights. Plus: The psychology of downvoting and a recent FCC ruling on AI-generated robocalls.
Discussions are now taking place across all tags on Stack Overflow. Check out this one about why people keep proclaiming the death of PHP or this one on whether Jenkins is still the dominant player in the CI/CD space.
What would happen if you suddenly lost consciousness? The Philosophy Stack Exchange has thoughts.
Did knights wear glasses? Historical records don’t really answer this question, but the History Stack Exchange does.
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has deemed AI-generated robocalls illegal.
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Ben Popper Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Stack Overflow Podcast: Seat of Our Pants Edition. Nobody dropped any links in the doc today, but that's all right because we've got a brand new feature rolling out on Stack Overflow. You can find it in the left hand rail if you're looking at a question. Is there a blog post up about it, Ryan, that talks us through this?
Ryan Donovan There is. We had a blog post go up this morning.
BP Great. So the feature is called Discussions. I joined Stack Overflow five years ago this April, and I always said, “Wouldn't it be fun if there was a place you could go on Stack Overflow and you didn't have to ask a strict question, you could just chit-chat?” And Stack Overflow turned 15 this year, and for the first time ever, we are allowing a new kind of discourse on the platform. We did add articles in certain collectives, so I guess you could have written an article on some of the collectives that we've built, but those also were sort of confined to a narrow range. This is very much like, “Hey, you like PHP? Come on over here and let's chew the fat about PHP.” So it's pretty fun. It's pretty interesting given all the years where it was like, “Oh, this is a duplicate question. This is a closed question now.” So I looked it up and there's 151 discussions as of today, and some of the ones with the highest scores are: “Why do people keep shouting PHP is dead always?” Ryan, you've actually asked this question on a podcast before, right?
RD Sure. I think my question was why does PHP keep surviving, keep living, but it keeps growing, keeps changing. WordPress is a big PHP source and it's going strong.
BP So here, the top voted answer– “It's been around for a while so there's less hype about it. It makes it seem like it's not that interesting even though it powers most of the web. Second, let's face it. It used to kind of suck, but over time it has matured into a fully object-oriented language that supports strongly typed quality code.” The memories of those old days, though, still live on for people who haven't been bothered to look at the modern PHP.
RD I think I used a little bit of PHP a while back and it's server side rendering in that it figures out what to put in based on server side stuff. So you can do really easy changes to a basic HTML page. Now, with all the framework stuff going on now, all the server side rendering, all the shadow DOMs and whatever, that's a lot more prevalent, but it does seem like a very simple way. You don't need all that overengineering sometimes. Sometimes you just need to pull a simple variable.
BP So another one here, and I’ve got to say that I myself am guilty of this. When I need a little dopamine hit and I don't want to go doom scrolling through certain social media platforms, I go to the subreddit for jujitsu and I post some discussion bait. I don't want to call it clickbait, but you ask a question.
RD You poke the bears.
BP You poke the bears, exactly, and you get the engagement and the dopamine flows. So another big popular question here– Is Jenkins still the winner of the CI/CD space? And so Betteridge's law, if the headline ends with a question mark, the answer is usually no or it depends.
RD I think we get called out on that every time we have a question in our headline. But I think Jenkins is the first CI/CD thing I was exposed to, and it's open source. It says it's an automation server, very extensible so it has a lot of things that developers love– it's customizable. It also has a lot of things that developers hate, which is that it has to be customized.
BP Apparently you have to type at least 30 characters for your answer. The top answer is, “No, I have to type at least 27 more characters, but really the answer is no, but since I need more characters, Jenkins is an aging nightmare of myriad plugins, which are themselves open source projects that have not been maintained.” Ouch.
RD Got to love somebody fighting to hit the word count. Eira, I know you've worked at other software companies. Have you ever seen CI/CD pipelines in action or known that people were using them?
Eira May I've known that people are using them. I've heard it talked about around me, but it's not something that I've really seen up close and personal just because I've always been kind of more on the marketing side.
RD The basics of it is, once you commit and approve code, you run all these sort of actions on it, and I think as an automation platform it does that really good. You can hook in your testing library, you can hook in your cloud stuff, but I think there's also simpler stuff that's out there now.
BP One thing that I know is fun for us is going through the hot network questions every week, and I think this is going to make it a lot more fun and I also think we have some plans to try to bring some of the best discussion here to the blog. So if you're listening, one of the objectives always was how do we highlight some of the great activity from the community on the blog or the podcast or the newsletter. It wasn't always that easy. Questions, maybe they don't lend themselves to the discussion or maybe they're very technical within a certain space, so I think this is a great opportunity for us to sort of bring to the fore more of what's going on. And I've been clicking around just trying to figure out are these new people, old people, and a lot of the people on here, five years on Stack Overflow, seven years on Stack Overflow, so it's cool to see them getting involved with the site in a new way.
RD I love that there's an official place for this. The sort of back and forth discussion that happens in the comments or multiple answers in a lot of questions is some of my favorite stuff. In so many things, it depends. It depends on what the right answer is, and we've talked about this. Podcast co-host Cassidy Williams had a great little video on it where it's like, “Well, everything sort of depends on something else,” so there's no way to give a straight answer. And getting that full context, that full multiple perspectives of actual humans is a lovely way to learn and get the full picture.
EM It strikes me too that the most interesting part of the discussion sometimes is not just in the question and the top voted answer, but in the back and forth underneath and people sort of refining the question to make it better and a back and forth process of coming to a better answer sort of collaboratively. I do like that there's more ways that people can touch the platform as opposed to through the structured question and answer. I think that's a great way for us to structure our knowledge base in a lot of ways, but it also makes it easier this way for folks to be part of the conversation and ask questions without maybe being a little intimidated by the prospect of asking a question and having it shot down as a duplicate.
RD I think it's a great community building content forum, too. Stack Overflow for so long, as old Jeff Atwood blog posts said, optimized for pearls, not sand. We want you to be able to find answers to your questions, but not necessarily have your question answered. So that's rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, so now this is people getting to participate. Nobody's going to be like, “Oh, duplicate opinion.”
BP I do see some of these getting voted down, which I don't really understand. I feel like it should just be zero. If you're not interested, don't vote it up.
EM The instinct to downvote something that's not actively offensive is sort of foreign to me. Isn’t a neutral reaction just not reacting, like you said?
BP Exactly. No, they must understand that someone on the internet is wrong!
EM They must be put in their place, I think.
RD Listen, I absolutely understand the desire to downvote to be like, “No.”
EM You just can't sleep at night if someone on the internet is wrong.
RD Absolutely. Why would you put that there? I think there's other ones. There's one here on working with very large data sets. Somebody voted down something that was just a block of code, and maybe just this isn't enough context, maybe you're like, “Hey, this isn't really helpful. Not a workflow.”
EM There's no real context captured in the downvote. Is this wrong? Is it not what I was looking for? Should it be in a different channel? There's no way to really interpret that except, “Oh, somebody messed up.”
RD So if you want context-aware downvotes, you also have to comment.
BP I wanted to bring up another side discussion to this, which is that we try to include questions from a bunch of different Stack Overflow Stack Exchanges in the newsletter, and those have always had a little bit more of the freewheeling nature of debate. So I'll give you an example– we have one for philosophy.
RD Oh, I love the philosophies.
BP What would happen if I suddenly lost consciousness? And then people go on underneath forever and the answers are so good. “Well, you would be a zombie or what we call a philosophical zombie, a P-zombie for short.” And then they tell this story about this guy who had no short term memory. Have you already read this one?
RD No, I haven't seen that one.
EM I bookmarked it for my future reading pleasure, but I haven't.
BP He spent every minute of every day writing in his journal. I am now fully awake. I am now fully awake. Wow, the things you learn.
RD I love those sort of deep cut answers. There was one in history that was like, “Could somebody be a knight if they had to wear glasses?” And somebody was like, “Yep, here's a history of glasses that would have occurred across knights and here's why they can wear glasses– because knights’ weapons are sort of big, clumsy hammers that you don't have to be super accurate about.”
BP But does it fit over or under your armor?
RD I think it goes under the armor.
EM Under your visor.
RD Honestly, I think it's mostly that you don't wear the glasses. You just go out there and clobber things.
EM You just don't need to see that well. Nobody else had glasses either so maybe it was a more level playing field.
BP Yeah, I agree with that.
RD But with Discussions, I think another great reason for it is that in this era of AI, AI is not going to give you the context of a whole discussion. It's going to give you an answer, and sometimes you don't just want an answer.
BP I do find that a lot of the LLMs that I'm using these days like to prevaricate– is that the word? They like to be like, “Well, I've heard blah, blah, blah, and many people say it, but on the other hand, you should be aware that some other people…”
EM “A lot of people are saying…”
RD Yeah, “some people say.” Got to love the weasel words.
BP It's hard to know what plagiarism is in this day and age, and I guess always. For my son in fourth grade, it's a book report and it's like, “Get blah, blah, blah about a bobcat.” And where should he just look that up and how much is he really going to change about what he's reading? It's like, “What does a Bobcat do to avoid being seen?” Well, it's got camouflage. He doesn't really have much to add to that at this age.
RD Right. Little Billy, you didn't do any field research on Bobcats.
BP Yeah, exactly. I'm failing to see the original insight contribution to the field here, PhD thesis denied.
EM Yeah, you need to engage with the criticism that came before you a little more meaningfully next time, Billy.
BP Exactly. So I'm struggling with it because I'm trying to help him and I sort of just want to be like, “Go get me the best answer you can find and then copy it down because maybe you'll remember it and then you've learned something.”
RD That is interesting. For a lot of schooling, your reports are essentially all plagiarism because they have to be.
BP Exactly. What can you bring to the table? Ryan, there was a regulatory ruling here in the United States that you wanted to mention before we sign off. Tell me what this is about.
RD So the FCC recently ruled that AI-generated voices in robocalls are illegal. They adopted it unanimously and that they count as artificial under the Telephone Protection Act. So all those robocalls have to use recorded voices, I guess.
BP Interesting. So they have to use recorded voices of real people but it doesn't have to be a live person on the line.
EM But it has to have at one point been a live person on the line, is that right? It has to have touched the lips of a real human and not an AI-generated voice.
BP What a Black Mirror episode we live in.
RD I mean, it's still a robocall.
EM Oh, for sure.
BP All right. Well, if you are more of a cynical type, if you enjoy a Black Mirror episode here or there, I recommend you go look up a hearing. I forget who it was in front of– Senate/Congress. It was a hearing in the United States in front of some governmental body, and an older gentleman was describing a harrowing incident in which he received a call from his son who said he'd been in a car accident. The woman he hit was pregnant. She may have been hurt and they took him to jail and he was very worried. He didn't think it was really his fault, but he's now in jail, could he please be bailed out? And so the guy freaked out, this dad, and tried to proceed to figure out how to send bail money, and the son's voice was just an AI clone. I don't know how they got his voice, but in that moment of urgency, and I guess the kid said he'd been in a car accident maybe and his nose was broken or something. I forget. They had some subtleties to it to try to make it so if his voice sounded a little off. But his dad bought it hook, line, and sinker, so that was a scary one.
RD Well, I feel like those are scam calls, so those are hopefully illegal anyway.
BP Yes. This is more just a warning about how good these AI voice clones can be.
EM So the next time you get a call from your spouse saying they've been in a horrible accident, make sure you say, “Well, okay, what's our family password first, and can you respond to these prompts I’m going to give you?”
RD Everybody needs a password.
BP Boy, oh boy. You do.
RD When I was a kid I had a passcode for adults.
EM Exactly. If someone had to pick you up from school who wasn't your mom or dad, they would have the secret passphrase.
BP So now that passphrase, you just need that in all of life unless you're IRL. It's either that or get your iris scanned by that weird company that will guarantee you're not AI.
EM I think it does the opposite of that, but that's just my feeling.
RD Do you think it clones your irises and machine learns what real eyes are about?
BP Then it lets the robot open your phone or whatever.
EM Right, that's what I'm saying. Facial recognition.
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BP All right, everybody. We want to thank you so much for listening. We appreciate it. If you've been a Stack Overflow user for a long time, definitely go check out Discussions. There's a couple of cool collectives. If you use AWS, if you use R language, if you use PHP. There's people in there who are chit-chatting about this kind of stuff. All right, a Famous Question Badge, awarded to Leo Messi 10 minutes ago. Leo Messi's won enough tournaments, also the icon is Lionel. “Change a state value in React testing library.” If you want to know how, Leo has the answer for you and helped over 2,000 people and earned himself a badge.
RD Nice.
BP A famous question is one with 10,000 views and this badge can be awarded multiple times. I didn't know that. All right, everybody. As always, I'm Ben Popper. Thanks for listening. Find me on X @BenPopper. Hit us up with questions or suggestions, podcast@stackoverflow.com. We've been bringing people on the show who email us there. so this is your chance. And if you enjoy the show, leave us a rating and a review, or do us a favor and just hop on and try Discussions.
RD My name is Ryan Donovan. I edit the blog here at Stack Overflow. You can find it at stackoverflow.blog. And if you want to hit me up on X, my handle is @RThorDonovan.
EM And my name is Eira May. I'm also a writer at Stack Overflow. You can find my stuff on the blog with Ryan’s stuff, or you can find me mostly inactive on Twitter @EiraMaybe.
BP Thanks for listening, and we will talk to you soon.
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