https://mastodon.online/@billyjoebowers/114634755259809058
@Uilebheist Also, I LOVE cheap Chinese electronics where the manual is a 10cm by 10cm booklet printed in light grey 6pt type on white paper (bonus points for lemon yellow on white!), which turns out to be machine-translated from Chinese and simply tells you how to charge the device for the first time (using an unfamiliar foreign charger that didn't come with the device).
Then tells you to go to the manufacturer's TikTok account and follow them.
@cstross I once bought a flame thrower¹ and the instructions explained in excruciating details how to:
1. unpack the thing
2. fit a gas cylinder (amazingly, a standard fitting which anybody who has seen one can guess).
3. follow them on twitter and become their friends on facebook,
4. err, that's it. There wasn't space in the booklet for minor things like how to use it safely.
They could have omitted 1, 2 & 3 to make space for safety instructions, but of course not.
@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @cstross@wandering.shop It's really not the type one can attack a crowd with. I think, I never tried. It's sold as a gardening tool to very precisely burn plants one doesn't want while not touching nearby plants one does want. It produces a very small flame (although bigger than a lighter). It's more dangerous against the person who uses it (if used wrongly) than against a crowd. [Somebody who follows me here has seen me using it to light a BBQ a few years ago; that's how dangerous it is]
@Uilebheist @cstross
> ¹ no, not telling why
Ordinarily I would understand that and not comment, but since a flamethrower was in the news in a really horrific way just a few days ago, you might actually want to tell *something*.
@cstross @Uilebheist
Yes, but I thought that someone using a flamethrower on a crowd of Jewish people advocating Jewish thing, which included a holocaust survivor, was the kind of thing that news services worldwide would pick up on, so I didn't think I was being provincial.
Although I am sometimes provincial in my worldview, to my embarrassment.
@dougmerritt @cstross OK, since I perverted the thread from talking about product instructions to peaceful uses of flamethrowers...
Here's some other instructions. It's a bicycle horn (I have a bell to use to gently alert of my presence: I bought the horn for when "gently" turns out to be insufficient).
The instructions say: "Keep this information for future reference". That's the whole of the instructions (repeated in several languages).
@Uilebheist @cstross
> I bought the horn for when "gently" turns out to be insufficient
😆
Which is no doubt all-too-frequent. 🙄
> "Keep this information for future reference"
That would be funny if it weren't so ridiculous and sad.
@cstross @Uilebheist
Tangentially I wondered if I should keep using the word "provincial" in such contexts, so I looked at some synonyms:
I should try to avoid being a bumpkin, a hayseed, a rustic, a hick, a yokel. Someone who thinks in terms of their surrounds, not of the wider world.
Sometimes though, you don't know that until you get it in the mail, or whatever. Like my last cell phone. WTF? Nothing. Not even a quick setup guide on cardboard stock.
@addressforbots @cstross conflicting documentation in several different places is too much like work.
don't need that kind of BS for stuff I've bought & chosen to use in my own time
@addressforbots Oh I have a few spare pi4bs knocking around, that’s not the problem. It’s just that I have a few more little things to run and having two boxes sitting there mostly idle seems silly and wasteful. There’s no reason HA couldn’t be just another daemon on a little home server, as it is with the dockers.
Ah well. For now I just do without whatever extras the other thing offers and we’ll see when it breaks or gets annoying enough to bother doing something about it. ;)
I loathe it when anyone points me to a YouTube video as an explanation for stuff. I can parse text _much_ faster than any video, and I can search it for keywords, too.
Double loathing for climate change deniers who send me links to YouTube videos as "proof" for their inane blather.
@cstross The company will then point out that this can be avoided by prompt injection techniques that require you to stuff your right elbow up your left nostril, your left arm inside a burning effigy of Donald Musk and hopping clockwise about the North Pole.
They will then explain that this is what the LLM advised.