Many years ago, my aunt bought an old, terribly specced laptop and couldn’t get Windows to run on it. I installed Ubuntu and everything was fine - she could check her email and browse toxic conspiracy theories on Facebook and all was good with the world.

Two years later when visiting I got my first support request - would I mind showing her how to print something? No problem, but would you mind showing me what you were trying? She was selecting menu items to send to a virtual printer, not the one on the network. I show her the correct printer to send to and the thing prints. Easy. Out of curiosity, I check the outbox queue for the virtual printer. Over a hundred documents, going back two years.

For two years she’d been unable to print, and every single time she’d ever attempted to print something she’d followed the exact same steps that didn’t work, and just accepted that this was the way things were.

SMH.

Well yeah because booting into Linux is so much faster

This is not a natural landscape. You don’t get fields of grass like this without human intervention. This started in the bronze age, so just because your local human-made landscape is green, make no mistakes.

Bit by-the-by, though, because obviously computers are completely awesome, but real nature is not this placid homogeneous scene

There are two difficult problems in computer science. Naming things, and pairing with Bluetooth speakers.

I think the actual problem is that they won’t know when they’ve got something that compiles but is wrong… I dunno though. I’ve never seen someone doing this and I can only speculate tbh. I only ever asked ChatGPT a couple of times, as a joke to myself when I got stuck, and it spouted completely useless nonsense both times… Although on one occasion the wrong code it produced looked like it had the pattern of a good idiom behind it and I stole that.

No arguments from me that it’s better if people are just better at their job, and I like to think I’m good at mine too, but let’s be real - a lot of people are out of their depth and I can imagine it can help there. OTOH is it worth the investment in time (from people who could themselves presumably be doing astonishing things) and carbon energy? Probably not. I appreciate that the tech exists and it needs to, but shoehorning it in everywhere is clearly bollocks. I just don’t know yet how people will find it useful and I guess not everyone gets that spending an hour learning to do something that takes 10s when you know how is often better than spending 5 mins making someone or something else do it for you… And TBF to them, they might be right if they only ever do the thing twice.

I have no idea why the engagement with this was down votes. So your friend thinks having an LLM to answer questions will help to learn Linux? I imagine he’s probably right.

Don’t knock being perpetually high. Some of my best code I wrote in my mid-20s

Yeah but the idea of AI in that kind of workflow is so that the product guy can actually do it themselves without asking you and in less than 30 mins

I feel like there are actually multiple counter-examples to this, but they’re all much better realised worlds than Harry Potter

I know you’re playing the straight man to a joke, but actually you can apply a linter, then tell GitHub to ignore the implied ownership history for the purposes of blame from that reclining pr. All such prs are massive and yet by virtue of the replayability of the linter it’s also very easy to ensure errors didn’t slip in when reviewing.

I know the original comment was about renaming all the variables, but that’s obviously deliberately absurd, so I’m using here a completely realistic example instead.

Yeah but I bet you do it sometimes on your own pull requests even after you’ve opened them don’t you?

Yes

Quite a lot happened in the Wire TBF (also I think it’s the strongest of the ones you’ve mentioned, largely for that reason…)

Then you need to diversify your comic sources

Plenty of my real friends are people I used to work with back before I was married and stopped getting as much out of this sort of culture… There doesn’t need to be some hard line here - just because you work with people doesn’t mean you can’t be friends

Hah. I’m sure once I read the rest of the responses I’ll see the observation that 1 is just a slow route to 2

Apparently I was thinking of ‘Conflicts in Civilization’, which was just a scenario set for the base Civ II game. Tbh I sucked hard at that game back then but in my defence I was too young to really get good strategy and just enjoyed building wonders

Look, Stallman may be a creep who women have to actively make excuses to avoid, but Torvalds sometimes gets sweary about subjects he’s passionate about in developer threads. Both sides are the same!

I forgot what I was saying. Anyway

Civ II expansion was peak. I never felt better than the one time I managed to win as humans in the humanity Vs aliens scenario