Reply to post: Re: The Answer

Over 50? Out of work? Watch out because IT is about to eat itself

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: The Answer

"we can sabotage it en masse from home submitting sensible questions and getting everyone to submit totally stupid answers"

Have you ever googled a moderately serious problem? Answers given are utterly hillarious. A lot of people posting replies do it for the "status/reputation/ego boost" they get answering questions and often have absolutely no frigging idea whatsoever to a degree it's hillarious.

My favourites are questions on networking. I'm not a network engineer, just one of those little SME admins who has to deal with all of these other things, but I got quite ratty with a chap on a support forum who was adament that his word was gospel, yet didn't understand networking basics like subnetting(!) let alone that there were different types of NAT to full cone. While trying to debug a network problem, naturally.

As one might imagine, the advice provided was not hugely useful.

I eventually came to the conclusion that the problem was that the program had been programmed as if full cone NAT was the only type in existance, and didn't work on restricted cone NAT. As soon as this made it's way through the support team to a programmer the program got a patch and the unfixable problem went away entirely in the next version.

The chaps response on the forum? "Your pointlessly overeducating yourself in a niche area that nobody ever needs to know".

I love customer support forums.

I look forward to seeing how well an AI deals with processing that sort of Garbage input. At some point you need a person who is actually able to sit down and diagnose problems step by step and come up with a solution. Search engines can't do that, and aren't hugely likely to endanger (many of) us that much since generally we are the people who come up with the solutions.

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