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Comment by jrflowers | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the example!

While I would definitely, definitely think critically before running a command from the internet, I can see how that use case makes sense for ChatGPT if you’re willing to roll that way.

>…take a few minutes to skim through and look for the relevant options (which is what I wanted to avoid by Googling…

Ah, I see! We are using the phrase “googling” differently here. I explicitly mean googling as a verb that involves reading and parsing information, not the act of avoiding reading or parsing information.

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> Ah, I see! We are using the phrase “googling” differently here. I explicitly mean googling as a verb that involves reading and parsing information, not the act of avoiding reading or parsing information.

In order to make things friendlier towards search, nigh any answer you find will be drowned in a sea of junk. Eg, Googling sends me to: https://phoenixnap.com/kb/how-to-zip-a-file-in-linux

It does have an answer, around the middle of the page.

https://i.imgur.com/jVEyCZe.png (useful answer on the bottom)

Here's what I actually want:

https://i.imgur.com/tXOEIIX.png

What I actually want most of the time is the closest equivalent to "Hey Bob, what's the command to zip up a folder on Linux?"

This is my use for ChatGPT around 90% of the time. The other 10% is trying to get it do something more complicated, getting frustrated and giving up.

I get the correct command in the highlighted search result at the top, and in the first result: https://i.imgur.com/FdDAz64.png

Of course I only use relevant keywords in my search. Adding extra words like "how to" will add results containing those words, which tends to mean more SEO spam.

Once I saw the command, I knew that it made sense and it was the right one, because it's something I had in the back of my head, I just couldn't summon the specific syntax.

I wouldn't count that as critical thinking, although I guess it depends on how you define the term.

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