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Hello, this is Archer72 for Hacker Public Radio.
In episode, it seems that AI is a trap. This over-arching
generalization is my opinion and may not reflect the opinions of
HPR.
So the back story to this is that I was listening to the 26 hour
Hacker Public Radio New Year’s show, and the discussion came up in the
Tech and Coffee Telegram
Channel
My Resolution was to stop using ChatGPT for an AI chat bot,
with the implication being to not using AI at all, but instead, to use
Duckduckgo
and
Brave
Search
Probably less than a week or two later, I was trying to figure out
something, and figured that I’d use the easy way and use
Claude.ai
, which is
actually pretty good if you have short and concise questions. I’ve found
that if you have a long drawn-out question, it is better to do a Google
or
Duck search
and document your results.
I document in Vim, but you can use whatever is best.
This way you can clearly show what works and doesn’t work and refer
to what you find later, instead of relying on an online service. And
sometimes, depending on the AI bot you use, exporting is not very
straightforward. With the exception of
Duck.ai
, that has a button for a quick share of a
text file. Then you share it to your self somewhere else like in
Proton
mail
Well… Over the past weekend, I was just making a quick upload button
to my own server. The previous weekend, I got HTTPS working. This was
just from following the guide on the
Let’s Encrypt -
Documentation
and
EFF Certbot instruction -
Apache2
websites. At least that time, instead of using the AI bot, I
just followed clear documentation.
See, the thing about going right to the
Debian Wiki
or
the
Arch Wiki
is that users and developer have already documented plenty. I figured
out that part of the hacker method is not to take the ‘easy’ way, but to
document out what you are trying to learn.
So this past weekend, I was trying to learn something about that
upload form, and I probably took longer going back and forth with the AI
bot than If I had taken the time to search the documentation. And even
if it did take longer with the documentation, I would have learned
something else and created a Markdown document of my own. There is a
tool I use once in a while, which is part of the
Duckduckgo
search,
called
Search Assist
This can be good, because a have a horrible memory. If there is
something small that I can’t remember how to do, I let
Duck.ai
take care of it. But recently, I have turned
off the option where it says to sometimes show
Search Assist
, but instead only when it is on
demand. That way I won’t be tempted to go down a rabbit hole in order to
find what I am looking for. Instead base what I am looking for on
standard tools.
So Yes, AI is a trap, but is also useful for certain things. But if
you are careful how you use it, it’s not always a bad thing.
This has been Archer72 for Hacker Public Radio.
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