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Issue 251: The LLM brain drain problem

Welcome to ISSUE #251 of The Overflow! This newsletter is by developers, for developers, written and curated by the Stack Overflow team and Cassidy Williams. This week: What launching rockets teaches you about hardware observability, why Jupiter spins so fast, and what you learn by interviewing 100 DevTools founders.

From the blog

Knowledge-as-a-service: The future of community business models

The internet is changing once again: it is becoming more fragmented as the separation between sources of knowledge and how users interact with that knowledge grows.

Brain Drain: David vs Goliath

There are worries that GenAI systems may run out of fresh data as they scale. Synthetic data is an option, but using AI-generated data to train AI can degrade the model's performance. There may be a better solution. Can data quality overcome a loss of data quantity?

What launching rockets taught this CTO about hardware observability

Austin Spiegel, CTO and co-founder of Sift, tells Ben and Ryan about his journey from studying film to working at SpaceX to founding Sift.

The team behind Unity 6 explains the new features aimed at helping developers

On today’s sponsored episode, we chat with Ryan Ellis and Martin Best about the developer-centric features built into Unity 6, the latest release of the well-known game engine. The pair explains how Unity 6 was built to help developers enhance graphics, add multiplayer, and easily port games to an audience on the mobile web.

Interesting questions

What happens when HR is the source of harassment?

“In a case like this, the only person who can fix it is the CEO.”

Why does Jupiter spin so fast but not the Sun?

Sunlight and solar wind are huge drags.

For non-native English speakers, is it ok to use ChatGPT as a translation assistant?

“Someone using a language model for a task it’s actually suited for!”

"Almost true": non-trivial claims that have exactly one counterexample

“4-dimensional space, what’s wrong with you?”

Links from around the web

HTML for people

A friendly approach to building websites for anyone who’s looking to get started.

I interviewed 100 DevTools founders and this is what I learned

There’s more to building for developers than just good code.

How hard should your employer work to retain you?

Companies should work to keep you—and you shouldn’t stay somewhere that doesn’t fulfill you.

Drag to select

Creating a "drag to select" function is harder than you might think. Here’s an interesting deep-dive into why.


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