• rtxn@lemmy.worldM
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    4 months ago

    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.

    • Boomer Humor Doomergod@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

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

      • Pika@sh.itjust.works
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        11 hours ago

        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

      • salacious_coaster@infosec.pub
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        4 months ago

        More than once I had trouble calls about an “error message” that basically said “everything is fine, click ok to proceed”

    • A_norny_mousse@feddit.org
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      4 months ago

      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.

    • SolSerkonos@piefed.social
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      2 months ago

      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.