This is one of the comments 💀

To be fair, bad advice from random internet people was already a thing long before big babble machines.

time better spent rtfm and thinking

a GParted backup file was corrupted

I don't know much about Linux, but is a single backup that important? Like it feels like you could just delete that backup and make another one

Y'all - This post is actually a full level more sinister and all about shareholder value than it seems.

There is a huge difference between the paid versions of LLMs and the unpaid/free tier. I've heard some estimations of about a year lag time.

Why is this about shareholder value? Because these companies only tell you about the pie in the sky good stuff that the corporate level paid versions are doing.

Case in point, I've had 2 really excellent times troubleshooting issues with Claude, just like @paranoia@feddit.dk which only worked because it was the paid version. One was trying to re-format and re-use an external SSD in container to use as a bootable Win 11 drive. The paid version managed to troubleshoot the issue, which was an MBR label for the boot sector. Didn't even take long, maybe 20 minutes on a side quest. Similarly, paid Claude helped me get a home network up and running in minutes.

I've tried unpaid Claude for even rudimentary troubleshooting, and it throws boilerplate "have you tried turning off and then on again?" level troubleshooting that might only help grandmas and dipshits. Useless. Which is the point. "Oh, hey, you want the thing that isn't soft in the head? Pay us $20.

Can we all agree that giving a bunch of shit advice followed by: welp, that's all i got, good luck. Is kinda funny

I was told the same thing about resetting the CMOS battery when I was new to Linux and an update broke my graphic shell (yes, it was an arch-based distro).

I was asking Lumo and Mistral for help recovering it because I didn't even know enough to know how to try the solutions mentioned in the forums. That was the first thing I asked them, and once I tried it it didn't work anyway so then I started troubleshooting with the chatbots.

Some of the stuff they told me sounded crazy, like taking the laptop apart and resetting the CMOS battery, but fortunately I knew they weren't infallible so I decided to go ahead and not do that. Also I was too lazy to try, and wouldn't trust myself to anyway. But mainly I thought that seemed more likely to break things even worse, so I didn't.

I kept asking questions, narrowing things down, adding detail about precisely what was happening and what the problem was. Eventually it told me (I forget which one) how to check my Plasma version and roll it back to the previous one, as well as backing up my config dotfiles, resetting them, and selectively restoring them one at a time. Between those solutions, it worked, and I got my graphic shell back.

This was after fixing something else that I had broken myself when I tried solving it without a chatbot, when I misunderstood the instructions on the forum and went to the UEFI menu instead of the GRUB terminal or TTY, and accidentally changed my boot disk to my unallocated spare drive.

I learned a lot about Linux systems that day. Prior to that I always considered myself a non-techie. I thought I hated computers, but it turns out I just hated Windows (and Apple, which I had tried too).

It was my trial by fire, and I honestly wouldn't have gotten through it without Mistral. That being said, I also would have probably broken my system beyond repair if I had blindly trusted everything Mistral said.

It's helped me with some other things too. Encrypting an external hard drive; using rsync and Borg; learning GParted, Ventoy, and BalenaEtcher, as well as clamAv, maldet, rkhunter, and aide; setting up anacron scripts; recovering a waterfox profile after an update seemed to reset everything.

None of which I would have been able to do on my own. Even following the forums, the instructions assumed a certain baseline level of knowledge that I didn't have yet. Chatbots can be helpful, even free ones. It just takes some critical thinking, a healthy dose of skepticism, and a little bit of interrogation, clarification, and troubleshooting.

One of my next projects will be to self-host a smaller model to minimize environmental impact and be more self-reliant and offline/resilient

"Three hours of following Goggles suggestions"

Say no more

At Google, AI does Reinforcement learning on You!

This is what I call a “wild goose chase”. LLMs like to do that sort of thing, and it’s your job to notice that and pull the plug as soon as possible. If you’re not qualified to evaluate output, the risk of an aimless never ending chase increases dramatically. The good thing is, that you’ll learn to be more careful next time. Take those half hallucinated answers with a spoon of salt.

Haha yeahh, AI helps, but everything needs to be verified with experience

I've tried to use it before for troubleshooting but even with as much detail as I can manage, it almost always gives me irrelevant boilerplate advice. I get it, it's a predictive model and the most common answer to the question. The problem is, tech issues are specific and general advice isn't going to solve it (plus man, of course I rebooted, duh).

I found that instead of AI, it's always an obscure forum post that saves me. Like, cold boot after a 30 second power off saved me so much trouble after going Windows to Linux, and AI didn't even have that in the 60 bullets of advice it was giving. Ugh.

They want us to use it but don't want any responsibility for when using it harms us. We are being experimented on by corporations to test the technology they will use eliminate our jobs and impoverish us all.

Backup file corrupts, program still loads and operates normally Oh shit Better destroy my laptop

Yeah, I once had ChatGPT lead me down a rabbit hole chasing a windows network share issue that I had absolutely no business troubleshooting. At least I knew enough to test one change at a time and verify functionality with the concerned parties before moving to the next change, so nothing broke catastrophically like this, but looking back on the experience scared the shit outta me. Never fixed the issue, but the slop machine had me believing I was just on the cusp of fixing everything the whole time.

I know for a fact that there are people way dumber than me, way more powerful than me, and way more willing to eat up this garbage psuedo-technical sycophancy all at the same time, and that sends a cold shiver down my spine.

This shit needs to die. The sooner the better.

Goddamn clankers

Ha, fuckin slopper

Best I can do is buy it off of them for $20

I've had pretty good success with Claude doing this even two years ago.

I have an extremely dodgy home server where I needed to move the OS from the eMMC to an SSD connected to the WiFi card port. Obviously had a lot of problems with partitions and cloning but it got there in the end.