Comment on ChatGPT fried my drive!?
lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 9 hours agoThe manuals are written by experts for experts and in most cases entirely useless for complete beginners who likely won’t be able to even find the right manual page (or even the right manual to begin with).
Asking for help online just gets you a “lol, RTFM, noob!”
This is a thing that honestly still makes me seethe sometimes, because as much as the manuals are there and people should be told to read the manual before anything else, there is a vast difference between a user’s manual and a technical manual. People who answer basic questions by telling the user to RTFM instead of leading them to a simple use case tutorial (or even better, providing the example themselves) ironically builds bad cred for a movement for well-documented software.
The User’s Manual for a car covers, at best, how to turn the ignition on, how to drive, how to brake in difficult conditions and how to change the tires. Maybe it covers where exactly the friggin’ cupholder is. A Technical Manual for a car is for when there’s a real exceptional emergency that’s not simply covered by user service. The computer does not work and someone (not you, but the technician!) needs to know how to pin the RS232 connectors for the emergency interface of the onboard chip. The refrigeration liquid tube has broken off and you need to know what model or measurements the replacement needs to be and what heat can it withstand before it starts melting and likely obstructing the valve. You need to know if (or for how long) the car’s engine can withstand frontal semiautomatic fire and up to what reverse speed can the vehicle perform a safe J-turn maneuver in case you face an ambush.
~95% of manpages I’ve ever seen are Technical Manuals. ~70% of “help” for non-browser systems, as well.
What beginners need to be directed at before anything else is the User’s Manual.
And if that one is not available, go get writing it.
</rant>
All that said, none of that excuses turning to AI. AI is explicitly and specifically for when you don’t want things to work, or for when you are specifically looking for someone to bullshit you. They are for evading responsibility, not for finding solutions.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
I totally agree with the rant, and a big issue is that the Linux community specifically consists to a large part of technicians and not users who then go full *surprised pikachu face* when they see a user who is not a technician.
But seriosly, how would a (to quote OP) “total beginner” know that AI is not a good place to look for help?
And, tbh, it sometimes does actually help. AI lies more often than it doesn’t, but it at least tries to help, which is more than I can say of most members of the Linux community.
I had an issue on Fedora 42 where the performance of my games would randomly be abysmal. One day I can play current AAA titles without issue on my Nvidia 4070, the next day I have to measure performance in “Seconds per Frame” even on 15yo indie titles. This issue only affects game started from Heroic, all other things I try including all debugging stuff works fine.
I’m not a new Linux user. I’m a developer and I’ve been using Linux for about 20 years. So I get to debugging, googling, reading bug reports, all that, and can’t find anything. I ask on StackExchange, Lemmy, even Reddit, no result. Most people are like “Works on my machine, noob”, and a handful people are like "I have the same issue and no solution.
So after a year or so I swallow my pride and ask ChatGPT. The first answer is correct: Heroic (and thus all proton/wine games it spawns) runs in Flatpak. Flatpak has its own version of the Nvidia drivers, and if that version doesn’t exactly match the OS driver version it falls back to software rendering. So if I do
dnf updateand it updates the Nvidia drivers this breaks my performance until I doflatpak update. I often ranflatpak updatebeforednf updateand thus my performance sucked.Yes, the majority of the answers I get from AI are lies. But without AI I would still not be able to game on my system.