That sounds like a perfect use case for it. I’m not a tech professional or anything, so I also learned a lot of the basics by having it explain stuff to me.
AI is very useful for very specific tasks, such as searching its own vast database (or the internet) for information and then presenting it in a format relevant to your needs context. or summarizing it in a relevant way. this can be great for troubleshooting, especially for a niche problem, like installing modern linux on a 14 year-old iMac.
or so I’ve found ツ
edit: btw, if you’re wondering, bog-standard Fedora 44 Workstation runs like a dream on that iMac! (once I finally go t in running, that is)
well, the biggest motherfucker was the non-functional internal display. it burned out 8 years ago (as almost all did), but running it headless under MacOS 10.~ was never an issue. That OS always had fallbacks via Apple Remote Desktop and MacOS driver magics.
I’ll make a post later and write up the fill details (the workarounds/fixes were surprisingly simple, but very difficult to find, and I never would have found them on my own)
edit: I tried ChatGPT first, and while I got reasonably far, it just either pointed me in the right direction or handed me an answer without context, Claud actually found what I needed immediately, but also explained everything in detail and also WHY everything worked the way it did, gave me background, context, alternative options, approaches, and more.
Incredibly niche situations like that are the best tech help posts, because you could be a lifesaver to someone who finds themselves in that exact trouble again one day.
see, I’m not a tech or even a linux newbie, but I don’t often find myself in especially weird/niche situations. I also don’t like spending days/weeks trying to dig through decades of forum posts looking for the one other person ever to have a problem sort of similar to mine twelve years ago and then to try interpolating their solution from another distro to mine while being unaware of possibly hundreds of variables which might make a difference, leading me down a month-long road of trial-and-error until I come up with a maybe-solution that might work until I widdle it down to something that actually resembles what I want. I know that I don’t like this because I’ve spent decades wasting time going through this many times before. I suspect many people have.
no. I’ll ask claud to do all that process for me in 5 seconds and spit out a solution that works now, and I don’t feel bad for using Claude for that, especially if it actually teaches me all of the process while it’s at it.
the only reason it’s any good at that is some helpful human already developed great documentation of the process and put it online. search should have been sufficient
no. in that instance, search would have been sufficient.
but if that answer came in the form of tens of thousands of fragmented answers delivered over hundreds of thousands of forum posts/replies made over the course of 35+ years, then AI is able to parse all of that in seconds rather than making me do that over the course of, possibly, years (or just giving up long before then)-- and that’s a process I’ve already been through many, many times before over the decades.
no, if I can just save a bunch of time and simply ask Claude and get a reply that will not only give me the solution I need, but also explain to me exactly why the problem existed in the first place and why the solution works, then the AI is working is a positive way that’s worthwhile.
But it has. Repeatedly. And it often continues to do so. There are few things that contemporaneous AI truly excels at, but that’s definitely one of them: aggregating disparate information into condensed information summaries and drawing logical conclusions based off of that disparately assembled information. especially when that information is technical in nature.
And managing to do so all while teaching me all about the subject matter at hand better than I would’ve learned it by mucking around blind on my own? Amazing.
Did you even bother reading the previous comment that you replied to?
That sounds like a perfect use case for it. I’m not a tech professional or anything, so I also learned a lot of the basics by having it explain stuff to me.
AI is very useful for very specific tasks, such as searching its own vast database (or the internet) for information and then presenting it in a format relevant to your needs context. or summarizing it in a relevant way. this can be great for troubleshooting, especially for a niche problem, like installing modern linux on a 14 year-old iMac.
or so I’ve found ツ
edit: btw, if you’re wondering, bog-standard Fedora 44 Workstation runs like a dream on that iMac! (once I finally go t in running, that is)
That’s awesome. I’m also using hardware from that era for my media server, but not an iMac! Lol, I’m impressed that it worked.
well, the biggest motherfucker was the non-functional internal display. it burned out 8 years ago (as almost all did), but running it headless under MacOS 10.~ was never an issue. That OS always had fallbacks via Apple Remote Desktop and MacOS driver magics.
I’ll make a post later and write up the fill details (the workarounds/fixes were surprisingly simple, but very difficult to find, and I never would have found them on my own)
edit: I tried ChatGPT first, and while I got reasonably far, it just either pointed me in the right direction or handed me an answer without context, Claud actually found what I needed immediately, but also explained everything in detail and also WHY everything worked the way it did, gave me background, context, alternative options, approaches, and more.
Incredibly niche situations like that are the best tech help posts, because you could be a lifesaver to someone who finds themselves in that exact trouble again one day.
see, I’m not a tech or even a linux newbie, but I don’t often find myself in especially weird/niche situations. I also don’t like spending days/weeks trying to dig through decades of forum posts looking for the one other person ever to have a problem sort of similar to mine twelve years ago and then to try interpolating their solution from another distro to mine while being unaware of possibly hundreds of variables which might make a difference, leading me down a month-long road of trial-and-error until I come up with a maybe-solution that might work until I widdle it down to something that actually resembles what I want. I know that I don’t like this because I’ve spent decades wasting time going through this many times before. I suspect many people have.
no. I’ll ask claud to do all that process for me in 5 seconds and spit out a solution that works now, and I don’t feel bad for using Claude for that, especially if it actually teaches me all of the process while it’s at it.
That 2012 iMac (intact) will also run Mint, Zorin, ubuntu, debian, desktop editions.
More DDR3 SODIMMS help, or choose a lightweight desktop environment.
The camera is fussy to get running but crappy anyway, and start with ethernet cable to network. One of them loaded the camera okay, maybe zorin?
Also: easy to upgrade the hdd to ssd on those.
the only reason it’s any good at that is some helpful human already developed great documentation of the process and put it online. search should have been sufficient
no. in that instance, search would have been sufficient.
but if that answer came in the form of tens of thousands of fragmented answers delivered over hundreds of thousands of forum posts/replies made over the course of 35+ years, then AI is able to parse all of that in seconds rather than making me do that over the course of, possibly, years (or just giving up long before then)-- and that’s a process I’ve already been through many, many times before over the decades.
no, if I can just save a bunch of time and simply ask Claude and get a reply that will not only give me the solution I need, but also explain to me exactly why the problem existed in the first place and why the solution works, then the AI is working is a positive way that’s worthwhile.
i think that is pretty much not happening under any conceivable circumstance.
But it has. Repeatedly. And it often continues to do so. There are few things that contemporaneous AI truly excels at, but that’s definitely one of them: aggregating disparate information into condensed information summaries and drawing logical conclusions based off of that disparately assembled information. especially when that information is technical in nature.
And managing to do so all while teaching me all about the subject matter at hand better than I would’ve learned it by mucking around blind on my own? Amazing.
Did you even bother reading the previous comment that you replied to?