

The difference of a private chat with an Ai to a public question on Stack Overflow (or any forum for that matter) is, that on Stack Overflow multiple persons can read and comment. Answers often iterate and fact check if someone hallucinates, because so many eyes sees it. If the answers are helpful is something everyone has to decide themselves, but the principle of an open platform being very useful is undeniable.
Compare this to your private Ai chatbot. Only one person sees the answer and if something hallucinated is in there or the quality of the answer is not good, then you might not know. And those Ai bots are controlled by the few big corporations, maybe a little less if you use a custom offline bot, but they are probably not as good as the big models. That’s why this is a bad trend. I think the open and user controlled Stack Overflow was a better approach, by principle.








Edit: Summary: Rant about RetroAchievements being online only.
I love the idea of RetroAchievements and I used it in the past. But I do not like that the games basically becomes online only titles, if I want keep playing with achievements. Even more so on a handheld, but I also used it on a desktop PC. The moment you lose internet, no achievements can be unlocked. I had those moments (even for longer period of time like days) and I didn’t want continue playing the roleplaying game, because I could miss the achievement. Then I looked what games I could play and decided to play a system where achievements aren’t supported. That was the moment when it hit me. From that day I stopped using it and now I can play whatever I want, whenever I want.
They have their reasons why they don’t want to have offline functionality. But I wish one could setup an offline account that will not interfere with their leaderboards, because they don’t want you to cheat. Yes, that’s the reason… And in fact, if you cheat, you get banned from leaderboards and can still earn achievements; you just can’t participate in the leaderboards. So I do not understand why this cannot be build as a legitimate normal functionality, if they can track it!