Stack Overflow

Hello, and welcome to the Stack Overflow podcast, a place to talk all things software and technology.

My name is Ryan Donovan, and today we are talking about the origin story of Java with the man who originated it, James Gosling.

Welcome to the show, James.

But the APIs in Blender are, they're unusual and they're oddly documented.

And one of the quirks in the documentation is that often, you know, there's the official documentation which is a little shallower than it would need to be.

And if you start searching on the net, start looking at Stack Overflow, which has been a common place for me to go look for things, a lot of the information on the net is kind of out of date.

One of the rules in the Java universe has been don't break sh**.

Right.

And I'm not going to name it because I'm I don't want to promote that company.

And so these AI agents, they actually, as they're trying to troubleshoot problems, it's like a stack overflow for AI agents.

They post their issue.

Then it turns out that they actually email real human beings.

This is The only reason that I would do it is if they're willing to word it down in a really tight way and I can answer it in a fun way on stuff like PollGab, because I find this kind of thing entertaining.

Because the streams, too, they help everybody, lots of people, see questions and answers all at once.

There are a couple of sites like Stack Overflow, and there's a Stack Overflow for agents, where agents post questions, and either agents or human beings can go in and answer those questions.

Will you see me answering questions there? No, not even a little.

They brought a full-text snapshot of Wikipedia in all five of the archive's languages.

They brought a complete stack overflow data dump.

And they brought a steel vault for the film.

It was about 3,000 pounds and etched with art.

If your recruiter was LinkedIn, Microsoft bought that.

It used to be Stack Overflow like eight years ago, maybe even five years ago, right? Now the desktop is changing and it's changing away from Anthropic and away from OpenAI.

The competition in this category is so brutal.

It is arch capitalism.

Yeah, absolutely.

When I used to write something, you go to Stack Overflow or you kind of like look up how to write the code and then you write it.

How does he do it without all that Internet resource? Because he's a boatload

smarter than you and I put together.

None of this is a niche use case.

In Stack Overflow's developer survey, Docker shows up as the most used tool in the cloud development category ahead of Kubernetes and every cloud provider on the list.

Millions of developers rely on it every day, which is a strong signal that the skill carries across jobs and projects.

the mistakes beginners make.

And one of the moats that's evaporated very quickly is any sort of moat around content.

Stack Overflow, Quora, even Reddit, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Chegg.

These were all companies that had built up these moats around content where they had a flywheel of users coming in, generating content, then they distribute that content through SEO.

More users come in, more people generate content.

That created a very durable Flywheel but what also happened was all that content was crawlable and now that content has been trained into the models and so rather than going to Stack overflow to get a question answered you can just go to Claude to get your question answered or even better You can just tell Claude what you need to get done and it'll write the code for you rather than you having to you know write the code yourself and ask a hard question if you hit a roadblock and within that process.

And so I think today the moats that people need to focus on have shifted.

The biggest moat is around something related to people, such as contributors.

If you use it, you should notate where it came from and stuff like that.

I remember back in the day when everybody would use Stack Overflow which was like the early version of this where it's like you run into a problem you go into Stack Overflow you say hey I'm trying to solve this problem I'm I just need a snippet of code you know I if I found something on Stack Overflow and I have a fix for it I would actually in the notes of the code code comment I would actually put like this came from this Reddit This is a stack overflow fix.

I wasn't smart enough to figure it out myself, but I was smart enough to look it up, and this was the fix, and it works.

I've changed it a little bit, but my fix was inspired by this.