Elizabeth Lopatto

When someone’s asking a question because they want to be in a position to independently produce the answer and to fully understand the principles behind it, a good Stack Overflow answer will beat what ChatGPT produces. But even though that’s the most socially-valuable service Stack Overflow offers, it’s not a good description of the typical user interaction, where the task at hand is less “I want to finally understand the Rust borrow checker” and more like “I want to fix this bug so I can finally log off.” And LLMs are a better way to access Stack Overflow’s knowledge base in order to provide that answer—it’s visible right there in the data.

One firefighter described how his truck tapped into a hydrant to try and contain a blaze that had taken root in a cluster of homes, only to find water pressure so weak that the fire promptly jumped beyond their efforts to contain it. Another firefighter who arrived on scene after the fire was already raging said he encountered a scene of chaos and soon was told that there was no water to put the fires out. Crews were forced to focus on evacuations, he said, picking up people who were stranded and pointing others toward the fastest routes to safety.