Right now, on Stack Overflow, Luigi Magione’s account has been renamed. Despite having fruitfully contributed to the network he is stripped of his name and his account is now known as “user4616250”.
This appears to violate the creative commons license under which Stack Overflow content is posted.
When the author asked about this:
As of yet, Stack Exchange has not replied to the above post, but they did promptly and within hours gave me a year-long ban for merely raising the question. Of course, they did draft a letter which credited the action to other events that occurred weeks before where I merely upvoted contributions from Luigi and bountied a few of his questions.
user4616250 will now be a famous meme. “How do we fix healthcare? We call user4616250.”
Do not forget me user4616250
Look down, look down You’ll always be a slave Look down, look down You’re standing in your grave
A musician needs to write a catchy tune to put the name to so people will remember the numbers.
Headquarters seems to be:
70 White Lion Street, London, England, N1 9PP
To send all your angry letters too.
Stack Overflow has been toxic for a long time already. It’s one of the things that a lot of people seem pleased to see AI devour.
I’ve read it is still well valued because people will keep asking questions there when LLM can’t answer, so they remain a precious source of post LLM curated Q&A.
…for now.
Yeah, AI has become good enough at this point that you can provide it with a large blob of context material - such as API documentation, source code, etc. - and then have it come up with its own questions and answers about it to create a corpus of “synthetic data” to train on. And you can fine-tune the synthetic data to fit the format and style that you want, such as telling it not to be snarky or passive-aggressive or whatever.
It can reproduce an api. Can’t solve actual problems. LLMs are completely incapable of innovation.
I cross posted this to Hacker News (which is very pro-CEO and big corpo) and it’s now rank 1 on the front page, lmao. People really support this guy
(And it’s funny because in the comments, people are seething “Nooooo he’s not popular, look at these polls that show he has 13% approval!!”)
(Not sharing link to avoid brigade)
The submission has been clearly penalized by hn moderators: Posted 3h ago, upvoted >600 times with almost 500 comments, ranking 23rd on the front page. Ranking first currently is a submission with 80 upvotes, posted 1h ago.
Wait, seriously? WTF is it named hacker news? Hackers are the least corporate people out there…
Because those are the equivalent of Hippies that turned Yuppies.
What kind of world have we come into where Hacker News is a pro corporation website?
Hackers used to be the antithesis of big corporations and capitalist overreach.
What can Stack Overflow’s motivation possibly be to strip Luigi’s account? Are their private equity owners in cahoots with health insurance executives?
A connection I may be inventing comes to mind: all the CEOs making million dollar donations to the new administration in the US.
Basically, show you’re on the side of “law and order” and hope you’re not caught up in any purges.
Preemptive compliance.
It’s pretty standard when a highly-publicized murder suspect’s online profiles are discovered. Platform admins will typically disable/hide their accounts from the public while investigations/trials are ongoing. This is hardly unique to Luigi.
Do you have other examples? Because the article gave an example of a similar account that was not anonynized like this. Sure, accounts are often taken down, but the content isn’t left up.
By this logic, everyone charged (not convicted, just charged) should have their accounts and submissions changed in the same manner as Luigi’s.
Didn’t he confess though? That’s quite a bit different than a pending trial.
The presumption or admission of guilt does not and should not justify violating the Creative Commons License, nor perpetrating any illegal behavior agains any individual(s).
If JK Rowling went out and robbed a bank, or murdered an ex-Husband, in no world or timeline would that give a member of her publishing company the right to scratch out her name from any of her books and replace it with their own or someone else’s.
should not justify violating the Creative Commons License
Absolutely. Even a guilty verdict shouldn’t justify violating the Creative Commons License. It should either be completely taken down/hidden, or left in-tact.
That’s not at all what I’m saying though though, I’m saying that it’s reasonable for the site to take action to hide the account. He’s a public figure with an apparent confession, which is going to attract a lot of attention to that account that otherwise wouldn’t be there. They shouldn’t have done it this way since it violates the Creative Commons License, but I am saying that action to hide/disable the account is warranted.
That’s fucking bullshit.
Censorship needs to die.
They’re scared of Luigi still, got it
Reducing someone to a number has never backfired in a revolutionary way. Just ask prisoner 24601
Apropos of nothing, this was an article about substance from a year ago:
Substack faces user revolt over anti-censorship stance on neo-Nazis
Fuck substack.
Shit, this article is about stack overflow, not substack. Too early, but still fuck substack.
“Censorship forced me to flee a pro-nazi site to another pro-nazi site,” is a contradiction worth noting. It highlights the general pro-nazi vibe going around big tech.
On Stack Exchange, all of the contributions on the site are contributed under a license maintained by a third party called Creative Commons […] the work remains properly attributed.
This is the main issue IMO
Yeah, I edited the post to call that out specifically