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!
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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
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)