Thanks, I was not aware of the label, “The XY Problem” but I am very familiar with the situation.
For example:
and
I have other examples, I’m just not aware of them yet.
As for people admitting they don’t know but wanting spoon feed the answers…
LOL this person wasn’t wanting to be spoonfed the answer… THEY THOUGHT THEY KNEW THE ANSWER even though they admitted they had no knowledge or experence:
“I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing”
“I asked ChatGPT to write me a macro”
“The macro didn’t work”
“Therefore it is HIGHLY LIKELY that the API is broken!”
Reminds me of users telling me specifically to add something to PDM or Windchill to do a certain thing. Like "I need an attribute called “x” with a droplist of “y” values. Then I ask “what is the problem you’re trying to solve?”. Typically, what they asked for doesn’t solve their problem, or there is a much better way that in no way resembles their request.
Start every request with a problem statement.
[quote=“bnemec, post:180, topic:1617, full:true”]
I’ve mentioned this before, but I am often baffled by how many times someone will answer a question on a forum that I don’t know the answer to, but am able to answer it after five minutes or less of experimentation.
I don’t understand why so many people just want to be handed the answer instead of trying to figure it out for themself.
Just wait until we have an entire generation whose knowledge is “ask Chat GPT.”
this brings me back to the guy that would ask everyone a question on how to do something and 4 or 5 people would tell him the right way to do it. He would keep asking till he got an answer that he was looking for, or till he just accepted the first answer and did what he should have done to begin with. I was happy when that project started winding down and we started letting people go.
Yeah there’s been quite a few times that I’ve pasted the subject line of a forum post into Google, and the answer to the question is not only contained in the top result, but it’s even shown in the little bit of preview text below the link…
I misread the post, I thought that “Root Cause Analysis” was from the AI. I have been curious about AI code writing and give it a try some times. After feeding the exception or compiler errors that it’s code generates it defaults to “There’s a bug in the SW API.” So I just assumed the user copy pasted that AI response as well; likely the human doesn’t generate much original content.
Considering the LLM, it really makes sense that Chat GPT and the like would say that the API is incomplete or buggy. It’s trained on what people have typed on the internet. There’s a lot of text about API documentation being incomplete and lots of talk about bugs around 3D CAD systems.
It was a super long post… I just grabbed a couple of snippets. I guess it’s certainly possible that the OP was just parroting what the AI “thought” the problem was rather than coming to that conclusion on his own.
Just wait until we have an entire generation whose knowledge is “ask Chat GPT.”
Then we end up like that Star Trek Next Generation episode where this really advance race that can cloak their entire planet, has no idea how their “custodian” works. They just ask for answers and it takes care of them, until they become infertile because of their planatary cloak technology and have no idea or understanding.
Season 1 episode 17, “When The Bough Breaks”"
For years now I’ve been using this nice simple app for my garage door openers. It showed you the doors status, and allowed you to open/close the door from your phone.
The app still does that, but now it is way more focused on selling me stuff rather than allowing me to control my garage door. I have to close an ad just to see both doors displayed at the same time.
We won’t even talk about all of the notifications and alerts it wants to send me. Fortunately most of that can be disabled.
Using same thing, didn’t notice the ads yet.
It help with: “Did I close the garage door?
Wait till they decided to charge you $29.95 a month to be able to use all the features and still get all the adds.
Sounds familiar…
And now the whole book about it is out 
Cory Doctorow is awesome, highly recommend his stuff.
$30 for a shitty book? No subscription?
Our business is the first driveway into a business park located right next to the interstate. We get all sorts of interesting traffic over the weekend. This isn’t the first driver to hit the peninsula, but it is the first to fully commit and drive right over it.