geteilt von: https://sopuli.xyz/post/26841469
Meme transcription:
An obviously exhausted Spongebob is raising his arms in a rejoicing gesture. His face shows great tiredness, but also happiness.
Title: Finally finding your stupidity after hours of debugging.
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On Friday I spent over an hour trying to fix my Firefox tabs - I could no longer drag them to reorder or to a new window, and ctrl-shift-T didn’t restore tabs, but I could still do it via menus. I thought it might be something to do with the new tab-island stuff and tried FF safe mode, restarting computer, confirming about:config options, etc.
Turns out my headphones were resting on my Esc key.
Had this happen too in other tasks/apps, a plate resting on ctrl key
I feel always 80% more stupid when i find my mistake. Shouldn’t it be different?
Light debugging I actually use an LLM for. Yes, I know, I know. But when you know it’s a syntax issue or something simple, but a quick skim through produces no results; AI be like, “Used a single quote instead of double quote on line 154, so it’s indirectly using a string instead of calling a value. Also, there’s a typo in the source name on line 93 because you spelled it like this everywhere else.”
By design, LLMs do be good for syntax, whether a natural language or a digital one.
Nothing worse than going through line by line, only to catch the obvious mistake on the third “Am I losing my sanity?!” run through.
For that purpose, I use a language with a decent compiler, but I know not everyone is as lucky…
Fine, but I hope you’re taking a few seconds to understand why the error message you received came from the the syntactic mistake you fixed.
A single Vs double quote mistake should be 5 seconds from error message to fix, with a thought process like:
- “Unable” is illegal key-word on line 163
- Go to line 163 - “Unable” is the first word of a string…oh the previous string must not be closed correctly.
- Find previous string on line 154. There it is - the wrong quote mark.
If you don’t learn what the error message is telling you, you will be forever doomed take time to cut’n’paste code into an LLM. It might save you time today because that thought process takes you 2 mins not 5 seconds, but that’s not the level you want to stay at.
If you’re stupid, look into Static analysis for additional warnings that let you know when you’re fucking up as you code, instead of at runtime.
EDit : It’s also good if you’re not stupid, but you know, you’re probably already using it.
…and it’s almost always something entirely simple.
In FreeCAD, spent 5m trying everything to figure out why a part wouldn’t adjust. Had transform dialog open. Still let’s you click everything, items just don’t work.
Right after that, went to work on the new NAS. Kept rebooting during install. PSU is a nice 850w, can’t be that. Swapped out for proven RAM, no luck. Can’t be the PSU. Swapped out the… Everything. No luck. Can’t be the PSU. Sigh…
I was once about to file a bug report for the library, when I found out my stupidity.
