[keysersoze33]

I've contributed 32 edits (1 new page) in the past 10 years, so despite being stable, there are still many things to add and fix!

Sadly, the edit volume will likely drop as LLMs are now the preferred source for technical Linux info/everything...

[resonious]

At the same time, I suspect resources like the Arch Wiki are largely responsible for how good AI is at fixing this kind of stuff. So I'm hoping that somehow people realize this and can continue contributing good human-written content (in general).

[overfeed]

> So I'm hoping that somehow people realize this and can continue contributing good human-written content (in general).

AI walled-gardens break the feedback loop: authors seeing view-counts and seeing "[Solved] thank you!" messages helps morale.

[mdnahas]

I just installed Arch (EndeavourOS) and LLM did not help. The problems were new and the LLM’s answers were out-of-date. I wasted about 5 hours. Arch’s wiki and EndeavourOS’s forums were much better. YMMV

[bdavbdav]

They may be preferred, but in a lot of cases they’re pretty terrible.

I had a bit of a heated debate with ChatGPT about the best way to restore a broken strange mdadm setup. It was very confidently wrong, and battled its point until I posted terminal output.

Sometimes I feel it’s learnt from the more belligerent side of OSS maintenance!

[VorpalWay]

Why would you bother arguing with an LLM? If you know the answer, just walk away and have a better day. It is not like it will learn from your interaction.

[DevDesmond]

Arguing with an LLM is silly because you’re dealing with two adversarial effects at once:

- As the context window grows the LLM will become less intelligent [1] - Once your conversation takes a bad turn, you have effectively “poisoned” the context window, and are asking an algorithm to predict the likely continuation of text that is itself incorrect [2]. (It emulating the “belligerent side of OSS maintenance” is probably quite true!)

If you detect or suspect misunderstanding from an LLM, it is almost always best to remove the inaccuracies and try again. (You could, for example, ask your question again in a new chat, but include your terminal output + clarifications to get ahead of the misunderstanding, similar to how you might ask a fresh Stack Overflow question).

(It’s also a lot less fun to argue with an LLM, because there’s no audience like there is in the comments section with which to validate your rhetorical superiority!)

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44564248 2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43991256

[michaelt]

> It was very confidently wrong, and battled its point

The "good" news is a lot of newer LLMs are grovelling, obsequious yes-men.

[vladvasiliu]

I think it all comes down to curiosity, and I dare think that that's one of the main reasons why someone will be using Arch instead of the plethora of other distros.

Now, granted, I don't usually ask an LLM for help whenever I have an issue, so I may be missing something, but to me, the workflow is "I have an issue. What do I do?", and you get an answer: "do this". Maybe if you just want stuff to work well enough out of the box while minimizing time doing research, you'll just pick something other than Arch in the first place and be on your merry way.

For me, typically, I just want to fix an annoyance rather than a showstopping problem. And, for that, the Arch Wiki has a tremendous value. I'll look up the subject, and then go read the related pages. This will more often than not open my eyes to different possibilities I hadn't thought about, sometimes even for unrelated things.

As an example, I was looking something up about my mouse the other day and ended up reading about thermal management on my new-to-me ThinkPad (never had one before).

[fragmede]

Depends on how AI-pilled you are. I set Claude loose on my terminal and just have it fix shit for me. My python versions got all tuckered and it did it instead of me having to fuck around with that noise.

[xhcuvuvyc]

I'm not there yet. Not on my work system anyway.

Seen too many batshit answers from chatgpt when I know the answer but don't remember the exact command.