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Comment by Tempest1981 | Hacker News Reader

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Tempest1981

> It's really not that hard,

I've learned not to say this. Different things are easy/hard for each of us.

Reminds me of a discussion where someone argued, "why don't all the poor/homeless people just go get good jobs?"

Edit: I know your comment was meant to inspire/motivate us to try harder. Maybe it's easier than it appears.

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Empathy is really not that hard.

It is that hard for some. Empathy requires actually going out and talking to people. And then listening to them describe their experiences, without editorialising or interrupting.

I've met plenty of engineers who would rather spend 2 weeks programming than spend 5 minutes talking to their users. I used to struggle a lot with this myself when I was younger. Social anxiety isn't easy to overcome.

With so many people lacking emotional intelligence, I would strongly disagree with you.

I would agree with this statement before LLMs. Reading manuals can take time, be messy, and are sometimes hard to understand.

Now, I can simply ask any LLM to write the command, and understand any following issues or questions.

For example, my OS records videos as WEBM. Using the default settings for transforming to MP4 usually fails from a resolution ratio issue. I would be deadlocked using this library.

It really isn't that hard anymore.

Except what if you don’t really grok those ffmpeg flags and the LLM tells you something wrong - how will you know? Or more common, send you down a re-encode rabbit hole when you just needed a simple clipping off the end?

I sometimes use LLMs to generate commands, and it generally works. But a common issue is that it throws in extra options because they are very commonly used - even if they're not necessary or relevant to my actual situation. So if you don't go through and check them all, you get this kind of unchecked cruft in your scripts that may later cause a problem.

ChatGPT is pretty good at generative commands

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