Hello, this is Archer72 for Hacker Public Radio.

In episode, it seems that AI is a trap. This over-arching generalization is my opinion and may not reflect the opinions of HPR.

So the back story to this is that I was listening to the 26 hour Hacker Public Radio New Year’s show, and the discussion came up in the Tech and Coffee Telegram Channel My Resolution was to stop using ChatGPT for an AI chat bot, with the implication being to not using AI at all, but instead, to use Duckduckgo and Brave Search

Probably less than a week or two later, I was trying to figure out something, and figured that I’d use the easy way and use Claude.ai , which is actually pretty good if you have short and concise questions. I’ve found that if you have a long drawn-out question, it is better to do a Google or Duck search and document your results.
I document in Vim, but you can use whatever is best.

This way you can clearly show what works and doesn’t work and refer to what you find later, instead of relying on an online service. And sometimes, depending on the AI bot you use, exporting is not very straightforward. With the exception of Duck.ai , that has a button for a quick share of a text file. Then you share it to your self somewhere else like in Proton mail

Well… Over the past weekend, I was just making a quick upload button to my own server. The previous weekend, I got HTTPS working. This was just from following the guide on the Let’s Encrypt - Documentation and EFF Certbot instruction - Apache2 websites. At least that time, instead of using the AI bot, I just followed clear documentation.

See, the thing about going right to the Debian Wiki or the Arch Wiki is that users and developer have already documented plenty. I figured out that part of the hacker method is not to take the ‘easy’ way, but to document out what you are trying to learn.

So this past weekend, I was trying to learn something about that upload form, and I probably took longer going back and forth with the AI bot than If I had taken the time to search the documentation. And even if it did take longer with the documentation, I would have learned something else and created a Markdown document of my own. There is a tool I use once in a while, which is part of the Duckduckgo search, called Search Assist

This can be good, because a have a horrible memory. If there is something small that I can’t remember how to do, I let Duck.ai take care of it. But recently, I have turned off the option where it says to sometimes show Search Assist , but instead only when it is on demand. That way I won’t be tempted to go down a rabbit hole in order to find what I am looking for. Instead base what I am looking for on standard tools.

So Yes, AI is a trap, but is also useful for certain things. But if you are careful how you use it, it’s not always a bad thing.

This has been Archer72 for Hacker Public Radio.

Feel free to comment on this or any other show. Ken says it is the Mana by which we pay our hosts. Also, feel free to record a response show to this or other shows.