AI models don’t really 'get' the BSDs.

[jackemled@furry.engineer]

@glent @david @stefano It's all marketing. A guy you've never met but who has some charisma opens up his trench coat, shows you this thing he says will make doing things easier, & says the first hit is free. Documentation doesn't promise that, it just tells you how to do the thing the correct way. People don't want the right way, they want the easy way. They don't want to learn, they just want it over with.

They trust the charismatic guy in the trench coat because he tells them myths about the work almost doing itself if they would just try the thing he's offering to them. After the first hit, it's all over. The victim is locked in because "This is the easy way, isn't it? All that stuff sounds so complicated, I'm afraid to even try it without using this. It feels so fast & easy to do it this way even though it makes me feel bad too.", then they get used to it, their standards have been lowered, & they try it with other things, then it's too late.

[lispi314@udongein.xyz]

@stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe The funny thing is a lot of the BSDs have fairly comprehensive manuals available from the official site.

[ianthetechie@fosstodon.org]

@peteorrall @stefano same. It’s improved a lot and will continue to do so. I remember getting total rubbish from ChatGPT 4. But these days major models do a pretty good job.

My main use is also gap filling for more esoteric stuff. The great thing is you can verify stuff ;) just like everything you read on the internet.

Of course people will believe whatever Claude says. Just like they believe whatever they see on TV. Or some shady website that has great SEO.

[ianthetechie@fosstodon.org]

@peteorrall @stefano it important though that we acknowledge it and help others to see it too. That said I do find it to be a very useful tool.

[tusharhero@mathstodon.xyz]

@stefano this also happens with GNU Guix, if you ask it about guix, it keeps trying to run nix commands.

#guix

[zstg@fedia.social]

@stefano oh my 😞. Could you share some examples?

[stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@zstg in general, linuxisms everywhere. But this is slowly changing.

[jperkin@federate.me.uk]

@peteorrall @stefano As you tagged #illumos: in my experience Claude does a fantastic job of fixing hard problems using native illumos tooling. It knows how to talk DTrace, mdb, ptools, etc. I can give it a /goal and it will generally go away and do it with little prompting. Usually the main area I have to help it along with is analyzing flamegraphs.

That said it is disheartening to see them drop illumos/*BSD/etc support, so hopefully others will step up here so we can continue agentic probes.

[speaktrap@mastodon.com.pl]

@nk @stefano Have you ever used a BSD?

[stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@nk outdated fragmented and complex? BSD documentation? Quite the opposite.