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Comment by pfych | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I fix something or struggle with an issue I ALWAYS write myself a blog post and make sure to cram in the exact errors/SEO Keywords I searched for while trying to glue together a solution.

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Two days ago, I was looking on how to get Gamescope working with a new computer on NixOS. I searched around, and found a Reddit post about it [1], found that they had a Github Gist attached to it, and then realized that I was the guy who posted it. I had completely forgot that I had done this work already.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1dahr3g/steamos_base...

That and finding the answer on StackOverflow that you wrote

That's incredible, I don't know how I would react. It's like finding a time-capsule that you forgot about.

My most useful stack overflow answer is one where I barely knew what I was doing (something back in MVC.net) and while I managed to fix the problem, which was the same as the one asked about, I didn’t understand any of the marked “best answers” or how they were relevant, so i wrote out how I’d fixed it in “I clicked here and typed this to match that” terms. Much later I knew enough to realize that of course my answer was exactly what those other answers were saying to do, but mine still got buckets of votes from all the other poor folk googling without having yet understood the bindings and views and magic connections between pieces that Visual Studio was making.

That's what I do too. The last post I did was trying to figure out how to replace the battery in my baby monitor.

https://www.michael1e.com/how-to-replace-the-eufy-spaceview-...

Our Eufy SpaceView camera just arrived yesterday, I hope web search/AI will point me to this answer in a few years when I need to replace the battery!

I also do this.

Still don’t know how to respond when i get fucked by LLM authoritarians (Grok, ChatGPT, etc.).

They don’t give the traffic back / incentives or even cite us as the source. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I use a robots.txt[^1] to try to prevent them from calling my site. But they're probably doing it regardless ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Don't want to completely kill my site from indexing, but if I did I'd 100% set up a tarpit.

[^1]: https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt

Same with posting questions - try to include all the things you searched for, so when it gets answered, the next person can find it.

Something I wish I had done more. You think you don't need to make a note because it's fresh in your head at the time, but years later, even the context is gone. Expecting to remember arcane solutions to things you do rarely is unrealistic. I've gotten better but still have a ways to go. One thing that removes the barrier is to just have common log to put everything, perhaps with some tags, so you can quickly open it and type your thoughts when they're fresh, without having to worry about packaging it just right.

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