Generative AI has been praised as some kind of magic bullet to revolutionize creative and coding tasks, making both more efficient and obsoleting experts, or at least, their junior assistants. That's true to some extent: AI-assisted code completion and virtual assistants like JetbrainsAI or Github Copilot can generate context-based suggestions using function names and coding style of a current project.
Unfortunately, AI is also getting misused in situations where it is absolutely unnecessary, just because it's there. Google search results often add AI-generated answers on top of the web results, making it absurd to say that an AI request costs much more energy than a Google search for the same question. Developers use Google and StackOverflow less than before (TODO: add factual source), as we don't need to leave our IDE to ask just anything, even when we know we could flip our journal back a few pages to find the answer that we wrote down a week ago, without using any electric energy or computation.
Here are some notes and code snippets that I shouldn't even have to ask AI or Google again, but which don't seem common or frequent enough to stick in my mind.
TODO: add the actual answers
- How can I prevent the default Xfce window manager behavior in Linux Mint that make windows snap to screen edges and resize when their border approaches the edge of the desktop?
- How can I make my Tuxedo touchpad work in Linux Mint, including full support for pseudo-right click by touching it with two fingers at the same time?
- How to temorarily enable full debug output on screen in a local WordPress instance?
- How to count the number of array items in PHP?
- etc.
TODO: add more of those questions
As you can see, this is a work in progress, and I'm not sure if it is even worth finishing?
Should I ask my AI assistant? What do you think?
