• 19 Posts
  • 103 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: October 5th, 2025

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  • I’ve done some research after posting the OP, by which I mean watching a few YT videos of people who have looked into the matter. It seems the founder was insistent that the site not become another Yahoo answers, so the process of asking a question was made to be high friction in order to improve the signal to noise ratio for people looking up answers later, such as with google.

    While they succeeded in not becoming another Yahoo Answers, they’ve instead become so impenetrable as to be useless. It got to the point I’d avoid clicking on SO when it came up in search results because I figured the question wouldn’t be answered anyway, so they ended up not making the experience better for future googlers after all.


  • Yes. I tell people that IT isn’t about knowing the answer right away, it’s about knowing which questions to ask, where to ask those questions, and how to interpret the results. These skills are in no way obvious if you aren’t familiar with the system you’re working with.

    Problem is that more experienced folks forget that they were noobs once, too, and there was a time they didn’t know what ARP was, let alone that not sending ARP response packets could cause a device to stop communicating.







  • When I was little I had my parents read to me from the Mario 3 instruction manual before going to bed.

    Manuals were necessary because the games back then couldn’t fit a tutorial and, especially in the Atari days, the art didn’t always get across what was going on.

    I too had my nose in the manual on the ride home. My parents had a rule that we couldn’t bring portable game systems (Game Gear in my case) on “short” car rides, so I’d sometimes bring a manual to look at.

    I recommend Tunic if you’re nostalgic for game manuals

    Regarding the text of the OP, that sense of discovery is gone now. The internet has ruined it. All the secrets get posted online within the first week, and there’s a wiki up in short order spoiling it for future players.