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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I do not agree with @FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today’s take. LLMs as these are used today, at the very least, reduces the number of steps required to consume any previously documented information. So these are solving at least one problem, especially with today’s Internet where one has to navigate a cruft of irrelevant paragraphs and annoying pop ups to reach the actual nugget of information.

    Having said that, since you have shared an anecdote, I would like to share a counter(?) anecdote.

    Ever since our workplace allowed the use of LLM-based chatbots, I have never seen those actually help debug any undocumented error or non-traditional environments/configurations. It has always hallucinated incorrectly while I used it to debug such errors.

    In fact, I am now so sceptical about the responses, that I just avoid these chatbots entirely, and debug errors using the “old school” way involving traditional search engines.

    Similarly, while using it to learn new programming languages or technologies, I always got incorrect responses to indirect questions. I learn that it has incorrectly hallucinated only after verifying the response through implementation. This makes the entire purpose futile.

    I do try out the latest launches and improvements as I know the responses will eventually become better. Most recently, I tried out GPT-4o when it got announced. But I still don’t find them useful for the mentioned purposes.



















  • Ubuntu 10.04.

    A walk down memory lane

    I received a free CD of 10.04 with a computer magazine that I purchased every time I travelled.

    The CD was neglected for the better part of that year, until I tried it out of curiosity. I remember setting up a dual boot configuration around two weeks in. I removed Windows around eve of 2011 and never looked back.

    Since then I distro hopped every six months but kept coming back to Linux Mint as it nailed the balance between stability and UX, especially for the home machine that would be used by people from diverse age groups.

    In those years, GNOME’s UX regressed so terribly with its 3.0 release, that Canonical’s Unity and Mint’s Cinnamon & MATE popped up as a response. One of those didn’t make it by the end of that decade. In those same years, Canonical started alienating its users with questionable decisions. Fedora and Manjaro became stable enough to be recommended for actual daily use. The 2010s was a wild ride.

    Though by the start of 2020s, I entered Apple’s walled gardens as I no longer had time to troubleshoot my devices and tools, and expected those to work reliably.

    I still use Linux on the home machine as well as the homelab. But I patiently wait for the day Linux is stable for daily use on phones. :-)