Gotta be fair. If I had to be an obligate wheelie and had to regularly find exotic and exquisite ways for matter, energy and the universe to kill each other and themselves, then I’d have my fun when I can and make it the universe’s problem, too.

It’s not wrong to want to reward someone for providing an above-baseline service, which is what we (usually) can at most do here. Among other things, they are literally asking for someone to hold their hand. That’s instruction-level commitment, not just “passerby internet comment”-level commitment, and I see it as fair to both request the service for a price and provide the service for a price.

I once was in the office next to Stephen Hawking.

That is, I was waiting for my dentist appointment, and Hawking and his team were on the next module of the building by the side, on the office across from mine, prepping a lecture he would present the next day at my city.

Any Mbin in the plans, or is it too similar to lemmy?

But how about the crocodile / Florida Man posts. They’d be from Florida, right?

humanist view of the world

Sure, but isn’t he the same guy writing the backend to specifically exclude or editorialize the posts by the member who does thorns?

However, even what I would consider reputable tutorials such as ones you find on HowToForge, sometimes don’t quite turn out as expected

Yes, because that’s a natural process. Most tutorial s written by users cover the experience the user had in their own use case. They don’t / can’t cover the same ground or have access to the same levels of examination that the devs can have.

So, if you’re going to say don’t trust AI, then you have to also be skeptical of all tuts. I mean, that’s where the AI scrapers got the info in the first place.

Oh please. Stop licking corporate AI boot and drinking the kool-aid. There’s at least two orders of magnitude of truthfulness and trustability between “a discrete set of tutorials written to cover described use cases” and “a random mix and blend hodgepodge coke snort prisoner soup ectoplasm of all the above, fine-tuned to invent answers that produce gratification and brand dependence”. You saying that these two things are as trustable as each other suggests you have quite a misanthropic edge to your personality and/or are going through a stage of cult-of-personality (or cult-of-brand).

I trust the humans who write the tutorials that have em-dashes. I don’t trust an AI that just slurped and pirated the work of those humans to try and snake-oil me with a bunch of grammar mistakes adorned with em-dashes.

There’s IRC, XMPP, and nu-messaging with enshittification.

The manuals are written by experts for experts and in most cases entirely useless for complete beginners who likely won’t be able to even find the right manual page (or even the right manual to begin with).

Asking for help online just gets you a “lol, RTFM, noob!”

This is a thing that honestly still makes me seethe sometimes, because as much as the manuals are there and people should be told to read the manual before anything else, there is a vast difference between a user’s manual and a technical manual. People who answer basic questions by telling the user to RTFManpage instead of leading them to the bropage or the tl;drpage or a simple use case tutorial (or even better, providing the example themselves) ironically builds bad cred for a movement for well-documented software.

The User’s Manual for a car covers, at best, how to turn the ignition on, how to drive, how to brake in difficult conditions and how to change the tires. Maybe it covers where exactly the friggin’ cupholder is. A Technical Manual for a car is for when there’s a real exceptional emergency that’s not simply covered by user service. The computer does not work and someone (not you, but the technician!) needs to know how to pin the RS232 connectors for the emergency interface of the onboard chip. The refrigeration liquid tube has broken off and you need to know what model or measurements the replacement needs to be and what heat can it withstand before it starts melting and likely obstructing the valve. You need to know if (or for how long) the car’s engine can withstand frontal semiautomatic fire and up to what reverse speed can the vehicle perform a safe J-turn maneuver in case you face an ambush.

~95% of manpages I’ve ever seen are Technical Manuals. ~70% of “help” for non-browser systems, as well.

What beginners need to be directed at before anything else is the User’s Manual.

And if that one is not available, go get writing it.

</rant>

All that said, none of that excuses turning to AI. AI is explicitly and specifically for when you don’t want things to work, or for when you are specifically looking for someone to bullshit you. They are for evading responsibility, not for finding solutions.

Are you really comparing LLM output to be on the same level of… hallucination-ness, than a Gamefaqs tutorial for a SNES game from the late 90s?

I know tiktok has deep-fried and rotten the brains of entire generations but this is just ridiculous.

This has been rethreaded so many times I feel like it deserves an entry in knowyourmeme. Opinions are like asses, everyone has one, everyone things someone else’s stink, in the end, what matters is you can support Lemmy without actually supporting the developers (eg.: support your local instance).

The blockchain is always a scam.

Heck, the way people are being nowadays, it’s “read” that’s doing the heavy lifting.

Still better investment than putting your money in, say, Felon or Trump stuff.

To support development financially, the first best way is to donate to the devs, for which people have already posted links.

The second best alternative, in particular for the people who are butthurt about the devs having their given political position yet hypocritically continue to fund or promote things like iPhone child labor, Amazon, Walmart, corporate backing of Israel military, or US taxes, would be to financially support the maintainers of the Lemmy instance(s) you are in. Most instance have their own “donate” / “support” link somewhere. Check yours.

(another advantage to supporting the instance you are in is that you would, usually, experience sooner or larger improvements in return for your investment. Better storage or network plan for your instance = better speed or uptime for posting lolcats)

Third best way, probably, is to finance public or state-level advocacy for Lemmy and/or Fediverse general. Alas I don’t know what if any organizations exist there nor how are they taking money (and report on its usage).

Nah. But if what you want is to prevent rather than palliate or delay (AIs will get throug Anubis, in fact from what I read some of them already do), then pretty much your only option is real-person authentication, so that if stuff does get leaked, you have a discrete list of people who to hold accountable.

0.- Take it out of the public.

And even if it won’t, there’s still the benefit of some variety in communities so that people can choose.

Eh, it’s not like they are going to somehow get better at it without practice…

If MySQL is more robust than SQLite of all things, something is going seriously wrong.

Then again, it’s 2025. I no longer bet on what to expect from reality. Next someone points me to a mail indicating linux kernel will move its bookkeeping to MongoDB.