• HStone32@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    SO in a nutshell:

    “I need to do X”

    “Have you tried Y?”

    “No, because I don’t need Y, I need X.”

    “Well you can do Z if you can’t do Y.”

    “OK, sure. But how do I do X?”

    “Why do you need to do X?”

    (Explains why in my hyper-specific situation, I need to do X, and Y and Z won’t work)

    This question has been marked as a duplicate of “How to do Y”

    • winterayars@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      I would say it’s more like: “How can I do X?” “Here are some reasons you can’t do Y.”

      The answers should have been “Here are some reasons doing X is hard, but here’s an attempt at it anyway and also some more robust alternatives to doing X.” That would have been an excellent answer. (If you go down far enough you do start to see things like this but they’re hindered by people still responding that you can’t do Y or downvoting because they don’t understand what’s happening.)

    • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      Always start SO questions with X/Y problem pre-empting

      These people are everywhere and will stop at nothing to make you click on one of these

      https://xyproblem.info/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34444353 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem

      They are trying to derail your question, which was already a generalized version of what your actual question was. And of course, you would need to explain everything you generalized out of your question (which would probably all get deleted by someone editing your question and removing all the irrelevant facts) by which point your question becomes so complicated nobody can answer it, even though they could have answered the generalized version.

      My advice, just use chatgpt or mistral, 99% you will get a better answer than stackoverflow. And you will get this actionnable answer IMMEDIATELY !