alt Hacker NewsI recently replaced a power supply to upgrade a GPU. I bought the power supply on Cragslist, so it had a jumble of cables and no manual. In the past I would have read an article that I would have found on one of those sites.
This time I conversed entirely with Gemini, sending pictures of the cables and of the components and the motherboard.
I'll not soon forget when I plugged in a cable incorrectly and sent an image of that cable to Gemini.
Gemini said "It is very important that you stop and unplug that cable immediately... Hopefully the power supply's safety precautions kicked in before any permanent damage occurred."
I know that Gemini was conversing with me using plagiarized information from all those sites. But, it was so much better to do this than to try to synthesize that in my brain by reading a bunch of articles.
I don't see a future for tech content because Gemini isn't paying the authors and they don't give me an option to direct payments to them either.
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If the hardware changes significantly and those sites don't exist in the future wouldn't that mean gemeni would degrade in quality because it has nothing to pull from?
That's more than a little concerning you would put full faith in AI to connect expensive hardware without verifying.
I'd at least ask for a citation to the product manual (even though half the time it cites another fucking AI generated site instead)
> I'll not soon forget when I plugged in a cable incorrectly
I'm surprised this was a problem. Back in the day, there were things like making sure your two very similar AT power connectors had the black wires next to each other, not forcing in a molex connector upside down, or the same for ribbon cables. These days? The connectors are standardized and keyed, as long as your modular PSU vendor didn't get lazy on their keying.
There is no modular PSU cable standard. Mixing cables between PSUs can destroy your hardware. Even among the same brand there is no standard.
Same experience here: someone at our company had a bricked Macbook Pro. It was previously MDM-managed with JamF, and it wouldn't boot up. Asked ChatGPT to give me steps to fix it.
The first set of steps didn't work, so we iteratively sent pictures of the screen until the steps eventually did work and the issue was fixed.
This saved us from having to call Apple support.
> But, it was so much better to do this than to try to synthesize that in my brain
For some definitions of "better", that is. :(
I have never seen a review site or tech blog go into detail about how to wire a specific power supply to a specific motherboard. I would also never go to such a site to get information I can easily get from the manufacturer through a handbook but I would also never ask a chatbot. Really odd use case tbh.
I see a future just like the seo issue of today, where the well is poisoned and llm information is garbage.
It's crazy to me that you'd trust the output of an LLM for that. It's something where if you do it wrong it could cause major damage, and LLMs are literally famous for creating plausbile-sounding but wrong output.
If you wanted to use an LLM to identify it, sure, you can validate that, and then find the manufacturer instructions and use those. Just following what it says about the cables without any validation it's correct is just wild to me. These are products with instruction manuals made for them specifically designed for this.