Tim Loughrist

Tag: technology

Knowledge Sharing in the Age of AI

July 15th, 2026

During the Enlightenment, ideas spread at the speed of a letter. The scholars of Europe formed a complex web of correspondence, sharing thoughts, criticism, books. Crucially, they did not just consume the ideas of others and use them for their own private projects. The intellectual environment was vital and productive because it encouraged reciprocity.

Until recently, we saw something similar in the epistemic environment of tech: software developers voraciously consumed knowledge, yes, but they also shared knowledge. Take, for example, the use of Stack Overflow. Here we have a central locations where questions can be asked, answers suggested, criticized, hopefully accepted, and later found by those facing the same problems. For the generation of software developers before the arrival of LLMs, Stack Overflow was an intellectual commons.

But the rise of coding with the aid of LLMs has demolished the commons. The answers to previous questions are still there and they are heavily mined by LLM agents looking to solve problems. But new questions are kept private, and if answers are found, they, too, stay private. Consider, the decline in Stack Overflow contributions over the last several years:

Source: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/437921/how-does-the-continued-decline-in-posts-since-may-25-influence-our-interpretati

And just in 2025:

Source: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/437921/how-does-the-continued-decline-in-posts-since-may-25-influence-our-interpretati

Assuming that this is emblematic of a broader imbalance between knowledge consumption and knowledge sharing, it raises a significant practical concern: LLM reliability will decline as the public knowledge base from which they draw grows stale.

I have some initial thoughts on how to combat this. First, AI companies could view knowledge sharing as an essential investment in the future of their products and create harnesses where-by (non-proprietary) questions are posted to fora like Stack Overflow and the solutions that work are posted as well. Second, knowledge sharing could be monetized such that a pay-walled forum could be created where contributors are payed out for every time their question is viewed or their solution is adopted. Third, knowledge sharing could be viewed as a professional responsibility for those in the tech sector, as it is for those in academia.

All three of these suggestions face significant problems, but they all seem to me to be worth further investigation.
Stopping a click event without breaking your turbostream

September 10th, 2024
In a Rails application I have a link that has various elements within it. Some of those elements are actionable on their own while others are such that I want them to open the parent link when clicked. The elements that are actionable should not open the parent link when clicked. The link, among other things, renders a turbostream.
<%= link_to edit_task_path(task.id), data: {action: "cli ck->drawer#showDrawer", "turbo-stream": true}) do %> <div> <%= render ButtonComponent.new(data: {"action": "cli ck->selectable-table#select"}) do %> <% render IconComponent.new(name: "check_box") %> <% end %> </div> <div> <span><%= task.title %></span> </div> <% end %>
As this code currently stands, clicking on the task title will open the link to the edit task path. Good. Clicking on the check box will fire the select method from the selectable-table stimulus controller. Also good.

But clicking on the check box will also open the link to the edit task path. Bad. This happens because a click event bubbles or propagates up to the parents of the element on which the click occurs. So, we need to stop that propagation.

Helpfully, stimulus provides an option that can be appended to actions that will prevent those actions from propagating: the :stop option (for .stopPropagation()).
<%= render ButtonComponent.new(data: {"action": "click-> selectable-table#select:stop"}) do %>
We click on our check box and…the link is still opened but now the turbostream that the link was supposed to render is broken. Something in the way that turbostream works involves an event that needs to propagate to work. That in and of itself shouldn’t be an issue since we only care about what turbostream is doing if the link is opened and the link shouldn’t be opening. Why is the link opening?

Because there are actually two different events firing when I click the check box: a click event and a link click event. The important thing to know about these events is that the click event, but not the link click event, doesn’t bubble up if the :stop option is appended to the stimulus action. To stop the link click event, you also need to append the :prevent (for .preventDefault()) to the action.
<%= render ButtonComponent.new(data: {"action": "click-> selectable-table#select:stop:prevent"}) do %>
Now when I click on the check box, the select method from the selectable-table stimulus controller fires but the link does not open. Success!

You can read more about the difference between .stopPropagation() and .preventDefault() here.

Tag: technology

Knowledge Sharing in the Age of AI

Stopping a click event without breaking your turbostream