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Comment by jlengrand | Hacker News Reader

" On est toujours le con de quelqu'un, et tant pis pour lui". -> "We are always someone's jerk, and so much the worse for him".

Agree with the article, I just wished it wasn't conflating "bullshit / actual harmful content" as much with "stuff that is valid, but in a given context".

200% that nothing online, (nor IRL to be fair), should be taken as universal truth. I see that same at conferences, with certain topics/fads/trends being absolutely overrepresented compared to what's actually happening on the ground.

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I interpreted "bullshit" to mean fluff. Much of the content I encounter appears to be regurgitated trivial examples from tutorials. Entire websites are dedicated to this. The goal generally appears to generate some type of influencer status or get money from ads. Few people offer helpful content that provides a deeper understanding or solves a tricky problem. Probably because they can't.

"helpful content that provides a deeper understanding or solves a tricky problem" is a lot if work to create, even if you know the solution or can solve the problem easily.

I can empathize with people who dont spend their limited free time on explaining others how to solve problems out of the goodwill of their heart and I am eternally grateful for the tiny minority that does this.

I am also grateful to the people that do actually share exceptional content. The problem is that search engines don't know the difference and the trivial seems to drown out the useful more and more over time.

You get a lot more views for a video on how to index a column in MySQL than for how to approach evaluating your needs and choose a suitable database. The latter would be outdated in a few years as new technologies emerge, while the former can be padded with enough fluff to show two adverts. So we end up with the content you know today, rather than what you'd really like to see. It's good to remember this and interact with those who do publish the latter content, plus it makes the algorithm feed you more content that's worth your time.

The latter is also hard to google, you can't exacly ask google "what database to pick with this and that constraints and capabilities"

That is the sort of thing I'd think LLMs (with suitable training data, that's not overrun with promotional material) would be good at. I've had ChatGPT recommend technologies to me before that I hadn't thought of or didn't know (much) about.

I think a more natural translation would be “You are always the idiot to someone else. And too bad for them.”

^ this. Idiot is a much better translation for con than jerk, and it also makes the saying make more sense.

Thanks!

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