Look up the Ritter Houge, or something like that. I think it's a less (maybe) expensive version of the griptilian from the same designer. I think. Could be wrong.
Houge's the brand. RSK-Mk1 is the model (Ritter Survival Knife). Sold exclusively at https://knifeworks.com/dr/
Benchmade used to make a variant of their Griptilian that he designed (the "Ritter Grip", and when they discontinued it, Hogue stepped up (proceeds go to support Ritter's https://kniferights.org/ organization)
Here's a parametric search for other knives that are made in the USA out of the same materials. They're all expensive. Fortunately, there are very good pocket knives for under a third the price from brands like Civivi, Vosteed, and CJRB if those specific points aren't critical.
> Almost everyone who comes to SO, in my experience, has a fundamentally wrong idea about how the site is intended to work.
True. I quit trying to do anything there once I realized that SO was fundamentally not useful to me. It advertised as a gamified Q&A platform, but was actually a knowledge base psudeo wiki thing structured in way that didn't lend itself to answering the questions I needed answered.
So, I think a lot of the negative reactions are deserved, because SO looks like something it isn't.
People want a place to get help. SO looks like a place to get help. But SO is a place to ask for help only if your problem fits a specific set of requirements. And since most problems will never meet said requirements, most people can never actually get help on SO.
I post this in part because I'm still saltly about how much time I wasted trying to get help only to get downvoted, but also because if SO actually wants to do what they say, they really need to restructure into something that actually looks like what they want to be.
My suggestion would be to have two sites, one that is actually a general Q&A site like what everyone is after, the other is the kind of knowledge repository that SO wants to be. Then you just promote the really good questions from the Q&A site into the other site.
I'd also recommend ending the whole "downvote" idea. I have yet to see it not result in cliques and in discriminating against viewpoints the people with downvote permissions don't like. Let a lack of upvotes cause poor content to drop to the bottom.
We would love to change how SO gets advertised. But we aren't in control of it, and the truth seems to be counterproductive to having a site that makes money from ad revenue.
I recommend looking for alternatives, because this problem can't really be fixed and the site owners seem intent on making it worse. I personally use and recommend (and am a moderator at, full disclosure) Codidact Software: https://software.codidact.com/ . But at Codidact we're still fundamentally using the same "Q&A site" (I don't think this means the same thing you appear to think it means) model . We just have proper community involvement (the site is owned by a non-profit foundation and committed to community sovereignty; see https://codidact.org/), new site software, and newly conceived site scope.
> My suggestion would be to have two sites, one that is actually a general Q&A site like what everyone is after, the other is the kind of knowledge repository that SO wants to be.
The problem is that there are already countless sites "like what everyone is after". If you try to split a Q&A site like Stack Overflow that way without changing the actual UI, the problem just repeats itself: people try to use the knowledge repository part as if it were yet another traditional forum.
And it turns out, people often think they're after that model, then get fed up with it over time.
I think an idea like yours can be done, but it would require radically different site software. (In early 2023 - I think - I kept myself busy with contemplating a design for exactly this, but I didn't really write anything down.)
Honestly, this is one of the few places where I agree with this sentiment. I have roughly the same trust in an LLM answer as in a SO answer anyway, so it's not like I'm buying any particular additional verification cost - I have to treat the response as only vaguely trustworthy in either case, and the LLM experience is certainly nicer.
I'm all over this thread explaining how Stack Overflow is supposed to work, and how almost everyone who comes to it has broad misconceptions, and about how we're very deliberately gatekeeping in a specific way for a specific purpose, and why I think that purpose is legitimate.
I've also expressed quite a bit of AI skepticism on HN before.
And I absolutely agree with you - assuming that by "use Stack Overflow" you mean "post a new question".
Most questions are fundamentally simple, even if they're tedious. If you're implementing something "complex", usually it really just involves following a straightforward series of steps, and it just takes a little bit of experience to see what the steps are. That breakdown is probably not useful to anyone else, and is hard to turn into a searchable artifact for others. If you're tearing out your hair troubleshooting something, most of the time one of the "standard" fixes really will work, and you just need to be talked through them.
If you like reading professional/academic sounding prose extensively trained to be inoffensive (even if it isn't always to the point), you have much better odds now with an LLM than with a random person who happens to be an expert on whatever it is you're trying to do.
If you're trying to figure out a thorny problem and it would benefit you to have a back-and-forth communication - or ask multiple questions on a theme and get all the responses from the same place - Stack Overflow can't do that for you. In fact, traditional forums can't, either, except accidentally (because they're too small to expose you to more voices). But the Stack Exchange Q&A model is explicitly about preventing back-and-forth communication, because it degrades the experience for third parties.
If you take downvotes personally (they aren't meant personally) or expect that your questions should be answered simply because you ask them, then of course you should prefer a system that doesn't rate what you say (unless you explicitly ask) and is directly tasked with responding (even if you prompt with complete nonsense).
And if you want a system that tries to adapt code to your personal circumstances and minimize the editing you need to do, then you obviously shouldn't use one that specifically tries to show demonstration code relevant to everyone with the same problem.
----
But the LLM is trained in part on Stack Overflow content. And if everyone using Stack Overflow used it as intended (and as took years to properly figure out, and is taking much longer to communicate), the LLM would be trained on much better Stack Overflow content. And would also not need the LLM a lot of the time, because a traditional search engine would find you high-quality Stack Overflow content directly.
(Actually, despite everything that's gone wrong, traditional search engines still do a reasonable job a lot of the time. Granted, it's extremely frustrating when they fail. I know because I've experienced this failure when trying to find a good target to close an obvious duplicate.)
And sometimes the LLM will be wrong; and it will be absolutely abysmal at introspecting whether it's wrong.
Gentoo was the first distro I got working with internet access because it supported the little phone line based network my family had, so I could share dial-up via the parents windows computer. And, yes, I also printed off the install guide.
Makes me wonder what it would take for governments to actually hit Microsoft hard enough for it to hurt. I remember when they were hit with anti-trust fines here in the USA due to how they were bundling Internet Explorer as the default browser. I mean, did they ever stop? I can't recall ever turning on a new Windows install in the past couple decades and not having IE or Edge as the default.
It also makes me wonder what it would take for IT people to finally stop gritting their teeth about having to use, or having to let others use, Windows and start just dealing with the learning curve of switching to some Linux distro. I mean, Windows Recall is spyware. If it didn't come from Microsoft, Windows Defender would be sure to mark it as malicious... What's the name for a screenshot based keylogger I wonder...
I used to just figure that Windows was just all some people could use. And if that was the best tool for them, then ok. But now? I can't say that anymore. It's out and out malware at this point.
In all seriousness, if you are sticking with Windows at this point, why? Is it just the fact your other software doesn't work on another OS? Or is there something good about Windows that you like?
Things seem more complicated due to Visual Studio Code being cross-platform, and the fact that there's some extremely rudimentary support for consoles in Jetbrains tools, but there's no debugging support at all.
> In all seriousness, if you are sticking with Windows at this point, why? Is it just the fact your other software doesn't work on another OS?
That’s not really a minor point. It’s a big deal for people who do things other than use a browser, text editor, and terminal.
Even for certain CAD software I use that has Mac and Windows versions, the Windows version feels so much more performant and responsive. I’ll switch to Windows for anything serious.
Also, YMMV, but in the past 5 or so years my Windows workstation has felt less buggy and more stable than my Macs. I’ve dealt with a lot of annoying quirks on the Mac over the years where the only solution is to wait for the next update and hope it’s fixed. Even today, accessing network file shares is incredibly buggy on Mac in certain cases.
I daily drive Linux for everything except games, and gaming on Linux has come far enough that I'll be switching over soon. My 60+ father also uses Linux for most of what he does.
And, yes, software working on your OS is not a minor point. That's the whole reason I used to go with the "best tool for the job" approach. Windows Recall is what changed that for me. I can't see using an OS with spyware built in as a "feature".
In my opinion, Apple is no more trustworthy than Microsoft, so...
> It’s a big deal for people who do things other than use a browser, text editor, and terminal.
So, the number of video editing, photo editing, CAD, gaming, and so on tools that work on Linux has grown a LOT. It's not just for basic stuff. You can do almost anything you need to on Desktop Linux. Yes, a lot of things are rough around the edges, but they're that way because people haven't invested in them, not because they're bad tools.
So, I feel like "Docs-as-Code" has some context I'm missing, so I'm going to comment on docs in general.
I think there multiple kinds of docs for software.
* Comments explaining a specific section of code.
* API docs describing functions/classes/etc.
* Docs on how to use a library/class/etc. Usually including simple, isolated, examples.
* Tutorials on how to create simplified applications using the developed tools.
* Docs on how to deploy, configure, and maintain an application.
* Docs on how to use an application.
* Docs on how to troubleshoot an application.
* Docs on how to integrate applications.
* And likely others I'm missing.
Personally, I've been seriously frustrated by how bad most of the open source (haven't done much with proprietary code) documentation is. Case in point is Drupal and Symfony. Trying to use api.drupal.org is not fun, and Symfony's docs always cover the basics, and then there's nothing on pulling everything together into something complicated. So you try to dig into the actual code, and end up finding multiple layers of uncommented abstractions. Yes, I can eventually figure out what is going on if I put the effort in, but that's a lot of time that could be save by a few lines of comments.
I usually end up asking JetBrains AI about what I need, then use what it says after I fix the errors it makes... It's also very good at summarizing everything I'd find if I used a normal search. But that all only works if others have already asked and answered my questions.
Some things I've been trying to do to improve my own code's documentation:
* Unless the line is super obvious, even if I think it is obvious, I try to leave a comment. Yes, it seems pointless, but I have gone back to old code I remember being obvious without said comment enough times that I think it is worth it.
* Avoiding "elegance" in favor of "explicitness". For example, I use full `if` statements instead of ternary operators even when ternary operators would look better. For whatever reason the syntax of ternary operators has never sunk in for me, and the explicitness of `if` is much easier to parse. I also use very descriptive function and variable names. Basically, if I have to think about what something means, I try to change it so I don't have to.
* Split out functions into smaller functions as much as I can't. This means I can use descriptive function names. And I'm pretty sure it's just good practice.
I also have been trying to figure out ways to keep higher level docs closer to my code. I have some ideas, but haven't tried them yet. Has anyone ever written something that detects changes to a method/function, and then when you save your file it pops up asking if related docs need updating? Maybe add comments to the method pointing to where related docs live, and then your IDE/tool uses that to know what docs need updating?
"Has anyone ever written something that detects changes to a method/function, and then when you save your file it pops up asking if related docs need updating?"
I've got a partial solution to that: I have automated tests that introspect my code for things that need documentation and then fail if those items aren't at least mentioned in the docs. Works really well.
That's a good way to do it. I was actually thinking of a Git hook or something in the ci pipeline as a place to start. So reading about how you implemented it was helpful. Thanks for sharing!
Drupal still has a very high learning curve. I'll use Drupal over WP any day, but I can acknowledge it has some rather rough edges.
I haven't dug into it yet, but I think that "starshot" initiative that's been Drupal.org's front page since the last DrupalCon might be aimed at giving people an option without the rough edges.
Personally, if Wordpress handled security alerts with plugins the way Drupal does, and if they did a better job of keeping bad code out of plugins (why can a theme implement a form?? At least that was the case years ago. Has it changed?) I'd give WP a serious look again.
That said, someday I need to give NixOS a try.