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[–] 180 points 1 year ago (14 children)

Most people were conditioned by more "user-friendly" systems to ignore the content of error messages because only an expert can make sense of "Error: 0x8000000F Unknown Error". So they don't even try, and that's how they put themselves in a Yes, do as I say! situation.

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  • [–] 94 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    It’s not even obscure, context dependent errors. I’ve had many professional system administrators not understand what “connection was closed by peer” meant.

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  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago* (3 children)

    In the admins defense. "Closed by peer" can indicate everything from a safe closure to an unsafe closure to a server connection terminating which causes the peer to terminate.

    Like that's a fair point of confusion.

    What bugs me is when the error says something stupid specific and obvious such as JavaScript heap out of memory or dd: error writing *pathname*: No space left on device

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah, but they literally couldn’t tell me if it’s a problem with the network or something else. It’s like it’s in a totally different language

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    But most error messages are in plain English first (plus some numbers and codes).
    No, they see white (gray actually) blocky text on a black background, they think the machine is broken and go into panic mode. Instead of reading.
    Which is kinda what you said.

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  • [–] 8 points 6 months ago*

    But most error messages are in plain English first

    Nah. Most error messages today are: System unavailable. Try again later. or Something went wrong. :( [Contact Support]

    (And 'contact support' just takes you to their main support website homepage where you can maybe search something up on their janky search engine from the 10,000 useless 'articles' on their support site. Or you can talk to an AI chatbot that hallucinates a solution for you that sounds correct, but actually doesn't work.)

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (1 child)

    I don't need to make sense of error messages. Which is good because I usually can't.

    I just need them copy/pasteable cuz that shit is going in Google and I'd rather not manually type it.

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