there's way way way too much critical software development information that basically only exists on stackoverflow threads
@aoife the one saving grace is that you can just download a copy of stack overflow
but also, that's that's 133gb of information that would really be better if it were sprinkled across the original documentation for the topics it was about
@aoife oh, absolutely agreed! (that's why i mentioned that last part~)
also, the difference for me is knowing at least the entirety of that vital knowledge isn't going to go up in a puff of "lol data preservation" if stack exchange ceases to exist
it's a good place for people to ask things that documentation is unclear about (or nonexistent), but as a result, that means its preservation is paramount because of just how seldomly that information finds its way back into the places it belongs
@thingywott what difference does it make whether it's an online or an offline archive? the problem is that the information should be in real documentation rather having to sift through a dozen cases like mine and figure out the common denominator
or better yet, things should just leverage the basic understanding of computers we all get in middle school so that i don't need to look at super-specific documentation to write a hello world program or push something to a github repo lol