• hardcoreufo@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I find AI very frustrating. I had a script I wanted to turn into a systemd service which I’ve never done. I searched the web, didn’t find quite what I wanted so I asked AI. It gave a great answer to exactly my question and explained what every field was doing. It got me there faster than searching and browsing forums would have.

    So great, I also wanted to set up a watchdog on the pi to reboot. It tells me to get watchdog package from apt then edit a systemd conf file. An hour later with nothing working right gave up and found a tutorial in about 30 seconds of web browsing that made it clear AI was mixing up instructions from 2 different methods.

    So it saved me 5 minutes on one thing, cost me an hour on another. I feel like the internet and search engines of 10 years ago were much better than what we have now.

    • wulrus@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      That is my exact experience. I was basically just incoherently whining about an issue I had that involved accessing the DB for old legacy windows photo albums and preserving them, and it spit out a fully working program that did all that.

      Then again, it often latches onto a way to do something that messes things up and leads nowhere, and I have to be the one to say: “STOP. The goal is to install a scanner on a very common OS, one that is praised for being particularly compatible to this. Now you want me to add 50 lines of custom configuration to a background service and switch it to an unsupported version. We are clearly on the wrong path here.”

      Hence I do experiment with it at home to see its limits, but my customers get 100 % human generated solutions.

    • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      here’s how I do it :

      Word it as best as I can. If the AI gives a specific and likely answer, doublecheck the documentation or stack overflow, or its listed sources.

      It sucks a lot of the stuff I’m searching comes from the same three fucking AI generated things from 2024 onwards