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

Bonding time is important but it’s also important to get into the habit of looking after the children as a father. Otherwise odds on you won’t manage to bond very well with either your child or the mother 😅

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

Third degree embarrassment right here

Preach

I have actually said that exact phrase out loud on occasion. I used to be really quite introvert but then I found my group and I’m pretty extrovert with them! Sometimes so much so that I realise I’ve been ‘holding forth’ and should probably shut up and let everyone else have a go.

Han you actually give yourself an aneurysm by just being really angry? Or is anger just an early-warning sign?

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

Can’t put the genie back in the bottle. It was inevitable. Whatever happens next is far from it.

I bought and read the first comic, watched the first series, and called it good.

If you grew up hearing the crackle, then to have it removed is pretty jarring. Some stuff feels to me like it benefits from it because it’s kinda old-timey stuff anyway, and it sets the mood better - like the Beatles or Frank Sinatra. But it’s not an audiophile thing in that case, just vibes.

My man has got no money, he’s got his trombelese.

Let me know how the film was, I haven’t seen that one!