I had my suspicions, but I didn't want to jump to any conclusions. So for any of you out there wondering how this journal worked out, Web 2.0 is garbage.
https://slashdot.org/journal/161630/web-20-business-networking-is-it-useful-at-all
Interestingly, I was in a lab yesterday and met a PhD student whose thesis was largely about using LLMs to fake fingerprints and retinal scans.
100% this.
This was my thought as well.
A friend of mine recently left a senior role, largely b/c of frustration with the firehose of junior AI-slop pull requests.
The majority of ads I see on YouTube these days are AI-slop deepfake celebrity endorsements, obviously-fake (and dangerous) medical scams, weight-loss salts, workout plans, etc. etc. I don't see anything in the CEO statement about that.
The "monthly question volume has collapsed [to] about 300" appears to be an artifact of the last category being the current month, January 2026, even though we're only in the 5th day as of this posting. (Specifically, 321 as of Jan-5 @ 10:30 AM EDT). I expect the number will be in the 2,000+ range by the end of the month, matching both recent trends and a simple extrapolation from the first few days. (Which would still be the worst full month on record.)
This is my take as well.
"Maybe everyone's just practicing their language skills with ChatGPT?"
Or: Maybe no one's practicing any skills whatsoever anymore, because they expect answers will always be available on-demand via ChatGPT (et. al.)
My limited sample: I have 3 long-time engineering friends currently looking for jobs, and they've all been asked to use AI tools of some sort in all of their recent interviews.
Weirdly, most of those cases have sprung the requirement on the person by surprise midway into the interview.
You sound like one of the misinformation spigots that are cheesed you can't get traction on Bluesky.
I access Bluesky on the Firefox browser on my Android-based phone.
Listen to Jeff Bezos' Washington Post and Trump's Wharton School.
If you're a right-winger, it's a terrible place to be. Don't come!
I was a senior software engineer (now a CS professor), and I never touch-typed, and it never held me back.
The work of the programmer/engineer is what, 95% mental work, 5% typing? (to be generous to the latter) That's without even getting into rapidly-changing input techniques, autocomplete in the IDE, etc.
Anecdote: When I got my first engineering job in the 90's, I vented my frustration to my father, "The guy in the next cubicle is like 100 times more productive than me" (comparing a day-1 out of college programmer to a senior codebase expert who was indeed one those x100 engineers). My father's response was, "Well, he must be a much faster typist than you are", and it was all I could do to not laugh or choke on such a ridiculous misunderstanding of the job. Consider the degree to which that's a relevant assessment.
A few weeks SO staff posted a "we're rebranding" post on the site in the Q&A format. They've been throwing out all kinds of supposed strategic expansions lately, which look scattered and less than coherent.This particular post generated comments and the CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar started responding.
Observation: The CEO (unfiltered by editors, legal, or PR) can barely write a coherent English sentence. They're not making any sense at all with their current plans, as far as I can tell. Their goose is probably cooked. Remember when Slashdot came off its peak and was sold and shuffled around a couple times by corporations grasping for some way to leverage its former popularity? Like that.
God made machine language; all the rest is the work of man.
