Hello Linux community.
I’d like to take a moment to explain what I hope will be a simple concept (so really it’s more of a reminder) that everyone should say least know and understand.
Not everyone (myself included) learns best by RTFM. Some of us need a guiding hand or to watch a video instead. It’s not that we’re lazy or don’t like reading, it’s just that it doesn’t work efficiently enough.
sadly dwarfed by YouTube videos that are outdated as soon as they are produced, and web guides nobody maintains. worse, AI scrapers only know this outdated information and happily hallucinate based on it it is EXHAUSTING having users cheer and celebrate the placebo of all the made up bullshit that does nothing in their config or worse breaks everything in unpredictable ways
While I have experienced this (quite a lot), it’s much easier to spend five minutes figuring this out with an AI than it is to spend an hour trying to work that out by searching forums for answers.
I have a suggestion for those that don’t have a burning hatred of all things AI or Google - try NotebookLM (https://notebooklm.google/) which is FREE for limited usage. It may take you a few tries to learn how to use it effectively *there are videos showing how) but what you can do is give it a list of URL’s on any topic. These can be man pages, wiki links, PDF documents, links to specific posts or discussion forums, YouTube videos, or almost anything that can be accessed via a link. You can include up to 50 links for free (up to 10 at a time, I think it is a bug that if you try to add more than 10 at once it just silently fails and then you have to go to a different “notebook” and come back to try again).
Then when you have added all your links, you can ask for a summary of the material, or ask specific questions based just on the links you have added (no more outdated responses). You can even do things like generate graphics or audio “podcasts” or even videos with really bad visuals (IMHO) based on your links collection if you want to. But what I find is when dealing with complex material it often makes connections that I would never have seen. And did I mention it’s free for limited usage? You just need a Google account to use it (and yes I realize that’s a non-starter for some people, and no I would never ever include anything personal in my links or requests).
I hate it when AI hallucinates an answer but I REALLY hate it when I try to ask a question and some smug know-it-all tells me I just want to be spoon fed the answers and didn’t do any research on my own. Usually if I am to the point of writing a post asking for help I have tried the usual ways of finding answers (at least the ones that work for me - man pages decidedly do not) and I’m at the point where yes, I WOULD like to be just spoon-fed the answer if you know it (or at least a relevant link), thank you very much. More than once I have got REALLY pissed off at a guy like that and then usually I’m the one that gets censored or booted out of the forum, while the know-it-all goes on to find another victim to bully. Oh, and then there are the moderators who censor “low quality” posts (except from their friends and users they like).
So when AI came along, I found it much easier to ask it and try to work through the hallucinations than to deal with that, and I suspect a whole lot of other people felt the same, and that is one reason why sites like Stack Exchange saw participation fall off a cliff. And AI keeps getting better and (so far at least) has never once criticized me for not trying hard enough to find something on my own. I get some people want challenges in their lives, but not everyone does and even those who like to be challenged now and then don’t always want it to be in the same areas of their lives. There are people who enjoy running in marathons but who would hate any friction at all when trying to use their computer.
Why not man pages though? That’s a very fast way of finding answers.
I find AI way more up to date then searching.