CrankySec

Pour one out for community

By now, it should be clear to everyone that the whole "Tragedy of the commons" concept was not intended to be an argument in favor of preserving the commons. It was, instead, a racist line of thought that can be condensed to something like "You barbarians cannot control yourselves. Whereas, I, Garrett Hardin, a person belonging to the most refined and enlightened class, believe that only the most refined and enlightened should be in charge of said commons." In other words, the tragedy of the commons is not about preserving the commons: it's about getting rid of them, and handing them over to powerful people who would be better stewards of it. Which, of course, it's S-Tier bullshit.

This argument is a projection. Hardin probably thought "I know I would exploit this common resource to the ground, but I am refined and enlightened, so I know how to suppress these troglodyte impulses. You ruffians are not refined and enlightened, so let your betters handle things please and thank you.", which obviously ignores the very well-known feature of human nature that is the ability to collaborate.

When you come from an environment of cutthroat competition, of constant backstabbing, of extreme individualism where you have got to get yours, fuck everyone else, collaboration seems like a completely absurd idea. What's in it for me? It should also be clear by now that the whole "tech" scene these days is exactly like this. Get your VC money, sell out, fuck everybody else. If the game is not a zero-sum one, it's not worth playing: it's not sufficient for me to win. You need to lose.

"But what does that have to do with anything?", I hear you say. Well, reader, this had to do with this article titled "Stack Overflow Is Almost Dead". It's worth a read, because it is utter shit news.

You can make the (correct) argument that Stack Overflow is not really the "commons" in the sense that it's not a public resource. However, it is very close to that: I have a question, I ask this question, people read my question, and some people may answer it. Tomorrow, someone else has the same question, they look it up, and there's the answer. No need to repeat the whole process. This particular question was already answered, and we've added it to the collective body of knowledge that is out there for anyone with an internet connection and a browser to reference.

Community-driven resources are messy. They are chaotic by nature, and by design. Some answers to your question might be wrong. Some participants might be unreliable. Some participants might be malicious. But that's just how communities at large work. Healthy communities can self-correct, adjust, and deal with behavior that's not acceptable. It's not perfect, but the alternative isn't either.

The theory behind the article is that people are turning to LLMs for those answers, and, to a certain level, being able to get an answer immediately from ChatGPT or Claude is "better" for the person asking those questions. No need to wait for someone to reply to you on Stack Overflow. Shit, no need to even look it up first to see if someone else's asked the same question. EZ. GG.

The consequence is that the notion that you just need a browser and an internet connection to access and query this body of knowledge is now gone. You need access to LLMs, too. And, depending on your particular circumstances, that might not be possible. The idea that "this question has been answered" morphs into "we, the lucky ones with reliable access to these tools, can ask these questions over and over and over again. It doesn't matter if it's been answered already."

So, instead of having a place where a lot of questions have been collectively answered satisfactorily, indexed, archived, and catalogued, we are choosing the method of individually asking the same questions over and over again. If I have the exact same question as you do, I need to ask the LLM again. All the tokens, and energy, and GPUs, and training data, and models, are doing the same work twice. Or thrice. Or a billion times. Instead of a thousand people finding one answer that's one search away, we are asking the same question a thousand times. Instead of a thousand people typing "How do I reference a specific list item in Python" on the search box and getting answers, we're asking LLMs to compute and generate the same answer a thousand times. And that's only possible for those who even have access to these tools.

And that's the ultimate trick: convincing people that they don't need other people. Making people believe that other people want what you have, and that these others will stop at nothing until they grab it from you. Conditioning people to believe that one's gain is necessarily someone else's loss. It's not. The technology we were promised would bring everyone together is being used to drive us apart instead, and you know what happens when collective action, the only power regular people have, is undermined.

A thousand years from now, if we're lucky, historians will probably write their post-grad theses that will read something like "For a brief period during the 21st century, industrialized societies just stopped documenting their knowledge, and started relying on what was then called LLMs for simple queries that would have to be recomputed instead of simply looking it up. It was a very wasteful and stupid era, and we are lucky we stopped doing that."

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