Oh my this place is back finally

I wanted to ask something a while back in early June, but

why is this SE so... inactive?

At least during that period I was seeing around one or two questions a week

Is it because we've somehow asked everything under the sun?

@TheCommander lots of people left over old drama and recovery takes time if ever

It's always been here 😁

Was it SE's sacking of the one mod...? I forgot their name

Monica

Yup

People are still upset about that.

Do we have consensus on Should we ban posts using ChatGPT or similar software?

@VLAZ I think the current network wide rules would be in place?

We have a network-wide policy?

I was under the impression it's still per-site decision whether AI generated content is acceptable.

@VLAZ post strike - I'd say the strike negotiation results are the rules

I just wanted to say "hi" and "how are you all doing", I've been starting to contribute to the main site over the past few weeks and am really enjoying the community, especially the aspect of recognizing people when I've seen 2-3 of their other answers. Looking forward to becoming one of those recognizable people myself! :)

lo

\o

@VLAZ The network-wide rules mean that we can now enforce the ban on AI-generated posts; they were always prohibited (IIRC), it was just that mods could only actually take action against posts/users in a very, very narrow range of circumstances.

(And the WB mod team has been taking action against generative AI posts, given the strong site consensus against them. There are more than we'd like, unsurprisingly. . .)

@TheCommander I'll be simultaneously disappointed and proud in Worldbuilding if we ever manage that.

I just had to delete a whole bunch of AI answers.

@HDE226868 The number most of us like, regardless of site is ... very close to zero :D

@JourneymanGeek I try not to be greedy.

I think we're still at 0 on HSM, which is easier to monitor given the low answer rate. Astronomy falls prey from time and time, and Worldbuilding . . . blerg.

Meta gets them sometimes

Which confuses me

@MontyWild Yeah, most likely I know who the user was. I was wondering whether I should flag them. But they were handled before I did.

@HDE226868 "they were always prohibited (IIRC)" not network-wide. That was a per-site discussion and decision. Well, until SE mandated a new criteria for if an AI generated content was to be removed. I've seen some mods claim that ChatGPT was not relevant as reproducing its content would still fail due attribution requirement. Others drew the line at ChatGPT.

Also: "With due consideration, we've decided no network-wide, general policy regarding banning ChatGPT, or other AI generated content, is necessary or helpful at this time."

@VLAZ well then they decided on the flawed policy for everyone

@VLAZ Ope, misremembered -- I was thinking that the discussions this spring that banned it network-wide happened earlier than they did.

@VLAZ It's dealt with, and there's no need for anyone to name names.

@MontyWild oh hi! it's been very interesting reading your Pandemonium series of questions, thank you for sharing them!

@MediocreFantasy I'm just starting work on the story, getting some ideas on how I'm going to get people from each side to the other side. I'm creating a constructed language for the Pandemonium side too, which is something I haven't done before.

It's going to be interesting thinking about how two different nations are going to operate with wormholes connecting them to the other.

@MontyWild oh, best of luck with the conlanging! I started one for my Carven but didn't follow through on it since it couldn't have been a spoken language (they're deaf/mute as a species)

I think that I have the basic grammar functional - it's OSV polysynthetic - I mostly have to invent the necessary vocabulary now.

Dang it, people visited and I missed it

@AndyD273 Have you tried not having anything to do outside of chat?

@VLAZ I have tried that, but people keep whining until I do the stuff they could probably do themselves...

bug "Real life demands too much attention"

bug "Gotta work to eat"

Darn, did that wrong

Oh, figured it out

Just FYI, there is [tag:foo] and [meta-tag:foo]

Hmm, interesting... I guess I can see why that'd be interesting

So I do a search for a work programming project I want to work on to make an REST API in PHP, but I want to understand the basics so I can build it from the ground up. So I do a search for that, and the top result starts off promising "Here is how to build an API in PHP from scratch". First step "Import this third party library"... Apparently there is some confusion about what the phrase "from scratch" means.

It's like wanting to make cookies from scratch, and the first step is to buy a tube of cookie dough from the store.

The more popular and "low entry" the language, the more the tutorials are "to do X, first install <package that does X>"

I'm not sure about low entry... I think I've run into that phenomenon in just about every language I've tried. I think it's just a consequence of people being lazy.

Though honestly, this is probably my own way of being lazy. I kind of have my own home built framework that I've put together over the years, and me wanting to learn how it should work and make my own is sort of a way to avoid having to learn someone elses framework.