Hi all,
I've 'lurked' on this because I have some, but not enough, of this setup
... Postfix and DKIM on a public-facing Raspberry Pi, and an internal
Postfix Dovecot 2.3 on kubuntu; no MariaDB. It seems I was probably
right to hold back.
I'm also glad to hear you got it sorted.
On 10/05/2026 22:12, Nick Chalk via Hampshire wrote:
> Interesting. I have been reading similar positive
> feedback recently. It seems the LLMs have reached
> a point of being generally useful on technical
> subjects.
I've found similar, but the hard an fast rule is always to check/test
what AI tells us.
Some is helpful/useful, some is complete nonsense!
> I read an article a few weeks ago, written by a
> proponent of using LLMs in development, who stated
> that they amplify a Software Engineer's deviation
> from the mean.
>
> If you are an average programmer, the LLMs will
> not help much. If you are a bad programmer, they
> will feed you bug-ridden code and you will not
> notice. However, if you are a good programmer then
> they will take away the drudgery, leaving you more
> time to concentrate on the heart of the problem.
It seems AI is generally designed to 'flatter' the questioner a bit. It
will agree with what one says, whether or not it's correct, which helps
to help someone who knows the subject well, but can easily misguide
someone who doesn't. I wonder about the weighting of answers that are
fed back into the LLM.
> I haven't touched them myself. I am concerned that
> the copyright problem has not been resolved, so
> I'm wary about shipping code that I'm not fully
> responsible for.
I also like to fully understand what the code actually does, in
preference to what AI tells me it does. I think one can't say AI lies,
but it certainly makes things up if it doesn't actually find a proper
answer.
>
> I have come to the conclusion that the worst
> people to document a piece of software are its
> developers. One holds far too many unconscious
> assumptions to be able to explain its use to
> others.
>
> I highly respect the Technical Authors who can
> take the obscure descriptions I throw at them, and
> turn it into instructions that a complete novice
> can follow.
Agree entirely ... developers are usually too close and the know (or
should!) how the software works, what it should do and tend not tho
consider the "dumb" questions that non-programmers quite reasonably have.
My one frustration about so many technical writers, though, is that I'll
usually give them a techy-draft so that they can get started, only to
find that they're lifted bits and rewritten them a poor grammar. One of
the arguments for a tech author should be the old saw of "engineers
don't really do English", so how come I so often have to ask ...
politely and diplomatically ... to make the grammar sensible?
Ho Hum.
Gordon.
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