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, doas I say! situation.
It’s not even obscure, context dependent errors. I’ve had many professional system administrators not understand what “connection was closed by peer” meant.
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
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.
But most error messages are in plain English first
Nah. Most error messages today are: System unavailable. Try again later. or Something went wrong. :( [Contact Support]
(And ‘contact support’ just takes you to their main support website homepage where you can maybe search something up on their janky search engine from the 10,000 useless ‘articles’ on their support site. Or you can talk to an AI chatbot that hallucinates a solution for you that sounds correct, but actually doesn’t work.)
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.It’s not even obscure, context dependent errors. I’ve had many professional system administrators not understand what “connection was closed by peer” meant.
Well, to be fair, I’m also not very well versed in the intricacies of connecting with British nobility.
Have you tried turning the rape island off and on again?
One day I’ll catch that jerk Peer! So rude, always closing my connections!
It’s very much on brand for Peer, at least in the beginning of the play https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_Gynt
More than once I had trouble calls about an “error message” that basically said “everything is fine, click ok to proceed”
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 memoryordd: error writing *pathname*: No space left on deviceYeah, but they literally couldn’t tell me if it’s a problem with the network or something else. It’s like it’s in a totally different language
yea thats fully understandable. also no idea why this post just showed in my feed, didn’t mean to revive a 4 month old comment 😅
That’s the beauty of the fediverse :)
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.
Nah. Most error messages today are:
System unavailable. Try again later.orSomething went wrong. :( [Contact Support](And ‘contact support’ just takes you to their main support website homepage where you can maybe search something up on their janky search engine from the 10,000 useless ‘articles’ on their support site. Or you can talk to an AI chatbot that hallucinates a solution for you that sounds correct, but actually doesn’t work.)
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.