What stupidly easy tech solution do people gloss over all of the time?
What stupidly easy tech solution do people gloss over all of the time?
For me it's the paranoia surrounding webcams. People outright refuse to own one and I understand, until they go on and on about how they're being spied. Here's the secret - unplug the damn thing when you think you won't use it or haven't used it in a while.
They, whoever it is, can't really spy on you on something that's already off and unplugged!
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Honestly, just Googling (or DuckDuckGo-ing) things. I tend to be the "tech person" that people ask about their computer problems quite often, and 9/10 times I just copy-paste the error code into the search bar and it tells me what to do. I'm not secret about it either, I'm like you can literally just Google it and it'll usually work. But people still seem to think it's magic lol.
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There's a hidden skill in there that allows you to filter out the bullshit/scam/unhelpful solutions and zero in on the helpful, legitimate stuff.
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You also need crazy fast reflexes for all the popups.
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Ah yes, "two idiots one keyboard".
There's a rumour that it was part of a bet about which producer could make the dumbest hacking scene.
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My colleague (we work in web dev) will literally sit there staring at an error message but apparently not reading it, and then he'll open ChatGPT and start asking it what to do. The fucker never even Googles error messages, it's an absolute nightmare.
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ChatGPT can be super useful, but I'm kind of worried about people learning to use it exclusively.
I tried helping a PhD student assemble a set up for measuring transistors. He used ChatGPT to do all the code for the software control (python), which is fine, even if he relied on it to fix every single part of his code when a quick trip to the reference manuals of the equipments would solve the problem instantly.
At a certain point I realized I maybe had misunderstood his set up design and asked him "wait, which device do you want to connect to your gate? Which terminal even is the gate?"
And I kid you not, the dude asked ChatGPT which terminal in his device was the gate
(he also reeked of weed so there's that)
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I had a chat with someone that is a Senior Staff Engineer at a huge company a while ago, on what I'd say is a pretty big service that millions use.
They don't write much code any more, but they debug a lot of issues. The way they described the workflow to mastery is:
- If you know nothing, ask someone that knows something
- If you know something, Google, and there will be answer from an expert
- If you're an expert and Google doesn't work, read the docs and specs from the masters
- If you're a master, start writing the specs, and offer addendums for when the spec needs to change.
IMO, Googling gets you 99% of the way there in many situations, but if you know nothing the answer might be in front of you and you wouldn't know it.
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Unless it's Windows giving you some long hexadecimal number. Those never return any results.
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And the solutions to Windows problems are almost always ludicrously esoteric and stupid anyway lol. It always turns out to be something like "the CPU usage went up because the clock in the taskbar on this specific version of Windows syncs to a different server that closed down so it tries to ping it 400 times a second for some unknown reason and that's why you get a 78-character hexadecimal error code and all your USB devices disconnect whenever you render a video."
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Overheats when you hold down the space bar.
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Don't change that! I need that feature for my workflow
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If it's not a crash it's probably an ntstatus and if it shows during a bsod then it's a bughcheck code. That said the most common ntstatus I see is the very unhelpful 0xC0000001 - status unsuccessful.
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The one I came across had something to do with...you remember Intel Optane? How there was a brief window there where they'd sell you a PC with a spinning rust hard disk and like a 16GB special NVMe drive that acted as a kind of cache for the hard disk? I was replacing that with just a normal NVMe drive, and there's some settings in the BIOS you have to tinker with. And BIOS settings are bullshit. TMP. XMPP. FLP. TLQ. DKR or LXD. Which combination of these settings means "no more optane, just normal bulk storage on the NVMe socket?" There's nothing that says anything like that.
I apparently didn't get this quite right and Windows would get a ways through the install process before failing with an 0x2ac4d7f9f2 code or something. Windows' installer doesn't give you a functioning desktop, it's in its own useless environment, so you have to manually type this into your phone to look it up, which returns no results. Like it doesn't link to a page on Microsoft's website because of course it doesn't.
I then tried to install Linux Mint. Boots to the live environment, I get a full desktop. I run the installer, which fails partway through. The error message spells out the issue in plain English, contains a clickable hyperlink to a relevant wiki page which launches in Firefox because we're in a live environment, and it has a QR code you can scan with your phone to go to the same page on a smart phone. Armed with this knowledge I got the setting right in the BIOS and successfully installed Linux.
But Windows is just so much more user friendly you guys.
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It's not a question of googling, it's about recognising bullshit answers and skipping them
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Nah. People are using you and too lazy to care. They pretend it’s magic cause it’ll get you to continue being their gateway to laziness.
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I think you're underestimating peoples' ability to filter out the massive amount of garbage results/astroturfed reviews/posts/websites out there.
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As a similar “tech person,” me googling tech problems is exactly as lazy as the person asking me.
Their solution is “ask someone” and our solution is also “ask someone.”
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