9mo ago

Hate it when that happens

110 comments

I have this exact problem.
Edit: nvm, found the solution
- You're just the worst, you know that?
  
  Found the answer to this here

Hate it when I search an issue and the only other person with the same problem is me 5 years ago and I didn’t figure it out then either.
- I think it's worse when they say they found a solution and include a link which is now dead.
  With Google dropping its archive I feel like dead links are going to be more and more common.
  
  I hate the ones that are just "open a case" and then they close the thread without saying what the fix ended up being, looking at you Veeam forums.
  
  The worst is when they say they've found a solution, without adding any information or elaborating further. Makes me want to flip my desk.
  
  Even worse in my opinion is when you find someone who had the same problem as you and the only person who replies says "use google." It's like that's how I got to this page!
- Relevant XKCD
  
  Is it the denvercoder one?
  checks
  That's it.
  
  aww you beat me to it.
- This issue has been closed as off topic
  
  Closed as a duplicate of another issue.
  The other issue was closed as off topic.
- "I'll upload a patch later this week" 12 years ago
- The answer was to disable FreeSync. FreeSync was causing the stuttering with SAM turned on.

You are not the only one, trust me. Google just went to shit in the last years, so it's harder to find what you are looking for.
- I’m currently trying out the first 300 free searches with Kagi. It’s only been a day but it’s already looking like I’m going to subscribe.
  Remember when you got good at Google and you started to notice that you could find what you needed better than most other people? It’s a bit like that and it’s refreshing.
  
  How does it compare to other meta search engines that are free?
- Kagi is a payed search engine service that has worked well for me so far
- Yes that is what I thought too. Google is still good for looking up movies and games and such, but for tech stuff and shopping it has noticably declined.

Kinda relevant XKCD

https://xkcd.com/979
- thought about it, too!
  (and... not sure if it's Jerboa, but the image appears emoji-sized to me. a bite-sized comic, hehe)

True story. I was looking for an answer to an obscure problem and found it in a 10-year-old stackoverflow post. Then I looked more closely at the author…
Hey! Me from 10 years ago, stop being such a smart ass! It's obnoxious.
- This happens to me more than I care to admit. I told a coworker about a Gitlab CI issue that I’d seen a few years back and hadn’t had any action. I looked up the link to share it. Me; I opened it. Brain failing me, I had forgotten it was my issue.

I play the numbers.... When this happens to me I assume I'm asking the wrong question
- Sometimes asking the right question is the hard part
- That's actually good advice

I find if I'm the only one on the internet having a problem unless it's a very specific niche application I'm probably doing something fundamentally wrong in my approach and should try figure out how other people normally do it
- Neiche application like old industrial equipment. Sure 90% of it is well documented and properly sourced. Still there's always that one piece of equipment purchasing got because it was cheap with no documentation and just a safety placard from the 90s. Regardless it needs to be integrated and you bet your ass no one has ever searched that. Then you're back to basics, sometimes even BASIC.
- It is usually this for me as well. I'm misunderstanding something or I completely looked over a basic thing.

Don't worry, this just means your job is safe from being replaced by AI. No search results means no training data.

What if the answer is there but google refused to include it in your search results until you saw enough ads?
- Stfu! Don't give them ideas!
  
  Someone patent this so we can sue anyone who tries this shit
  
  I have a strong suspicion that’s already happening.

Remember kids: If you find a solution to a problem nobody on Google (or your search engine of choice) seems to has, put it as a blog post on your site!
- Or you can ask on SO. Then close it with "nvm, fixed".
  
  Or you can explain it to a SO until you realise what's wrong yourself
  A pet or rubber duck will do if you don't have a SO handy
  
  This is the way

My favorite is when you Google a problem and many, many people have the same problem but the company has never provided a solution.

It's surprising how useful ChatGpt is in these situations. Honestly, it's a great general purpose search engine.
- If your work is bleeding edge enough, even ChatGPT won't be of help since it's not in their training dataset.
  
  Yeah and it won’t tell you that it hasn’t seen this pattern before. It will just make things up out of the blue which seem like they might be correct.
  Stay away from ChatGPT for bleeding edge things.
- It is nice to generate generalizable code examples, to give me clues how stuff works. I find that my work (marine biogeochemistry) is obscure enough that there's a certain level where I am still on my own. Which is a good sign for my future employability!
- This is why Satya Nadella said he could make Google dance.

Or the only person who phrases your issue this way) so many times I’ve found out that I just state my problem in an unusual way
- That's one area where LLMs can come in handy. If you describe something, they can usually come out with what you were thinking about in another, maybe more correct way, then you search what they gave you

You just need to spend a few hours trying weirder and unique ways to frame the issue and you might find the answer.

Worse. "Hey I have your problem ... ... nevermind I figured it out"
True story. x3
- The most cathartic moment of my entire life was when I encountered that exact thing in a thread from over a decade ago expecting that to be it and lost all hope, only to find somebody replied calling them out and telling them to share their solution or future googlers were gonna be very upset. They posted their solution and it did, indeed, work.
  Don't even remember what the issue was, but the wave of relief was amazing enough that I still remember the feeling to this day.

What's worse is googling a specific thing and having the results be just chock full of generic copy pasted thing with similar name

You describe your problem in the forum.
Moderator: "use Google, there is an answer to your question"
Google only gives you a link to your own thread in the forum.

Any one else getting this crash? Edit: Don't worry guys I fixed it
- I've had that happen to me in a couple of pretty obscure cases, fuck it's irritating. "WHAT SECRET KNOWLEDGE DO YOU HOLD, YOU FUCK‽ TELL US"

Hah.. I used to search up an issue and see my own unanswered question on reddit as the first result. ಠ_ಠ

This is currently happening to me and I hate it.
Something between linux kernel 6.2 (working) and 6.7 (broken) and all I have at best is a generic warning message that yields just a few results and all are unrelated.
- Same, started having issue with a docking station on my laptop with 6.7. It's so niche to my configuration that finding an answer has proven impossible. Now I need to reboot every time I plug in my dock or else I have no external monitors.
  
  THAT is very shitty. My problem is that after using it for a bit apps start freezing for a split second all the time. Most notable is firefox. The frequency and duration of them increase steadily. Then opening a new program might freeze the system fully (or wait minutes/hours until it unfreezes). It has something to do with memory allocation "according to" dmesg.
- Git bisect?

I love it when the reason I'm the only one with the problem is that I didn't notice something extremely obvious that solves that problem. I'm an idiot and shouldn't be trusted with anything ever.
- Someone has to bite the bullet and ask the obvious questions. Everybody starts somewhere and learns at their own pace, so there's probably dozens more with the same problem but too afraid to ask.

for me when that happens, it usually turns out to be a simple but stupid mistake on my end

Or: Plenty of people have the problem, but nobody has figured it out.
And: Stack Overflow agrees that this is a dumb thing to want to do, anyway.
- Or it's a bug that was reported 5 years ago with 165 votes and somehow still not fixed
  
  time to learn assembly cracks knuckles

So so so much worse when the comment is deleted and OP replies "thanks!"
- OP: "Nevermind, I figured it out on my own. Thanks anyway." and doesn't share what they did drives me up the wall.

I find it more frustrating when someone has already had the issue and received an answer, but unfortunately the solution is a link to a Microsoft forum that no longer exists.

I never noticed the body pillow in the corner.
- Common misconception, you actually did.

They had the answer on Yahoo! Answers. 😢

But have you tried askjeeves?

Anime source?
Edit: nvm, found it.
Actual edit: Apparently I'm slow with the joke. K-On! Manga about high school music club.
- https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/anime-girl-punching-wall
  
  Thank you.

When you search*

The worst is windows always giving "unknown error" with a code, and when you google the code you try stuff for like an hour just for every website you check to be useless, and at the end you just needed to put a password on the other computers file share, but why would it tell you that?

Im finding this more prevalent now as ai can answer a lot of the questions hence other people are getting solutions without the need to ask. Then my ai has problems cos it googles the answer and has to make shit up and idk if its hallucinating or not.

I have more than once found a post my exact problem with an exact solution and sources, only to go back and realize it was my own post from n years back

Or when you're having a problem with a piece of accounting software that nobody has ever had, so you call in for phone support, and they've never had it, but they can reproduce it on their side, find a solution, and thank you very much for letting them know.
- Ohh I had a similar experience with a quite big open source project (~10k stars on GitHub). Posted an issue, it's obscure enough even the lead maintainer comes in to help and still got stuck unable to fix the issue.

More like when you Google and half the solutions you find contradict themselves, with some of the responses to the solutions discussing the dangers.

Just post that the answer is simple:
can (root; split) for - 1 =sam if (all "null") then (n = n+1)
Watch the rage answers roll in.

Somebody has to be the first one.

Usually that's about when I strace the process before running it through gdb...

Me when I was trying to figure out what the outputs in the Javascripts RSA key generation crypto api curruspond to so I can link it to a rust api to prevent Man in the middle attacks occurring on https traffic with false certificates installed (I figured out eventually)

Or all the documentation/answers conflict with each other so now you have to play Russian Roulette with your project/system. Yes I am still salty about the hyprland nvidia page that kept me up between 2-6am EDT and confused for 13hrs. I trust the Arch and EndeavourOS wikis more for general OS stuff now tbh. For programming I like the specific documentation by the devs of their respective programming languages. If I need help: Google, Discord, Reddit, Forums or StackOverflow
For context go read: https://wiki.hyprland.org/Nvidia/

Usually it means you're doing something terribly wrong.

User error

110 comments