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Comment by gertlex | Hacker News Reader

> This looks like one of those home server infrastructure setup rabbit holes I would've bailed out of within the first 10 minutes of Googling to research the problem.

Absolutely have felt the same often, in the past. Good news! There's ChatGPT now!

It's so much quicker than google for figuring out approaches; it's great for explaining concepts and "how to do x with tech". And it's great at writing the scripts for you too. I set up a prometheus/grafana dashboard with scripts for various temperatures from various APIs with its help.

Not trying to shill, but just sharing that this type of project is something that's a lot more feasible to implement in limited timeframes than it used to be. (and get the satisfaction of bringing the idea to fruition)

But I reckon I'll always want content like this that covers the journey of uncovering various edge-cases, too...

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This seems like an example of the worst setup for ChatGPT.

There isn't much info on the internet about it. Of the info that exists most is inconsistent, outdated, and/or wrong. The specific instructions need to depend on what's supported by the exact model number of your network card. You're dealing with hardware, so there's a chance of breaking things permanently. Close has zero value, the solution needs to be exactly right. Close but incorrect solutions are hard to debug.

I didn't in-depth read the main article here. But skimmed most of it.

Not sure any of it is going to brick hardware, but I haven't played with setting flags with ethtool. I've messed with Wake-on-Lan stuff in the past, as well as "prevent device from randomly waking from sleep" issues, too (on Windows, though).

I do have the advantage of a lot of past experience with Atmegas then RPis, so know a lot of the common sense hardware considerations... and a lot of troubleshooting. For me getting 90% correct with ChatGPT, and building up incrementally, has been an improvement on doing it all myself with google.

I might take an attempt at asking chatGPT how to do what the author did. Could be informative, even if just introspective realizations like, "oh, this is a question I asked in a good way due to my existing knowledge."

So far my experience has been the opposite with ChapGPT FWIW. Overall it has cost me more time sending me down rabbit holes that it totally made up, but said with absolute confidence.

This is interesting to hear!

A key caveat in much of what I'm doing, is I'm implementing things I previously did for other projects in the past 15 years... so I'm using old technology, know the terminology, and can troubleshoot 90% correct stuff that chatGPT gives me.

I haven't done as much "I have no idea where to start" stuff.

I have, and while it’s not perfect I’ve found that it makes a great tutor. I’ve asked it a lot of programming questions where my starting point was 0, and my biggest takeaway is it will give you exactly what you ask for and nothing else.

This can be a bit of a problem since you can’t ask for what you don’t know, so starting broad by having it explain the general concepts to you, and then slowly getting more specific with direct pointed questions had the best outcomes.

I came at it too from a 'I've done this for more than a decade' perspective as well. I simply found that it's advice was already something I knew, or outright wrong, or wrong but very convincing that it could work.

ChatGPT can't even do sensible NGINX configs, despite feeding it documentation. Gets URL rewrites wrong et al, hallucinates things that aren't even there. Troubleshooting its output is more labour-intensive than just doing it right in the first place, but most folks' Dunning-Kruger complex prevents them from knowing when the output is wrong in the first place.

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