• rtxn@lemmy.worldM
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      4 months ago

      Most people were conditioned by more “user-friendly” systems to ignore the content of error messages because only an expert can make sense of “Error: 0x8000000F Unknown Error”. So they don’t even try, and that’s how they put themselves in a Yes, do as I say! situation.

      • Boomer Humor Doomergod@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        It’s not even obscure, context dependent errors. I’ve had many professional system administrators not understand what “connection was closed by peer” meant.

        • Pika@sh.itjust.works
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          7 days ago

          In the admins defense. “Closed by peer” can indicate everything from a safe closure to an unsafe closure to a server connection terminating which causes the peer to terminate.

          Like that’s a fair point of confusion.

          What bugs me is when the error says something stupid specific and obvious such as JavaScript heap out of memory or dd: error writing *pathname*: No space left on device

      • A_norny_mousse@feddit.org
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        4 months ago

        But most error messages are in plain English first (plus some numbers and codes).
        No, they see white (gray actually) blocky text on a black background, they think the machine is broken and go into panic mode. Instead of reading.
        Which is kinda what you said.

    • croizat@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago

      And because people don’t read error messages, many applications/sites/etc don’t even put them, or if they do they either don’t have any public facing documentation to actually figure out what that code means, or they do and it might as well be nothing

    • Pika@sh.itjust.works
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      7 days ago

      that’s why any manual worth their salt has a “quick start” section at the beginning (I say this knowing most man pages fail at this or put it at the end which is super unhelpful)

      Just give me common uses and flags, you can have your more indepth stuff at the end