> against some guy whose newfound obsession was whether you had an XY Problem

Against some volunteer who's encountering their fourteenth clear XY problem of the day.

TeMPOraL 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Against some volunteer who's encountering their fourteenth clear XY problem of the day.

Fourteenth clear as imagined in their head XY problem of the day.

By far most of the "XY problems" I saw, on SO or elsewhere, were actually "XY problem problems" - i.e. a responder having so limited imagination and character (or, to be charitable, just running very low on energy and focus), that upon coming across a question they couldn't comprehend, they would assume the person asking the question must be confused instead.

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StableAlkyne 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's the thing though, it was voluntary.

If it isn't fun to do, and simply causes frustration, that hypothetical person constructed in the comment could just step away for the day.

I get that dealing with low quality questions wasn't great, but imagine spending an afternoon researching a weird thing using some tools your organization mandates, writing it up, only for that person to skim it and just assume you really wanted to do $otherThing.

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ceejayoz 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> If it isn't fun to do, and simply causes frustration, that hypothetical person constructed in the comment could just step away for the day.

That frustration is likely part of the decline, yes.

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StableAlkyne 5 hours ago | parent [-]

And also part of the decline from the asker side, once a less abrasive alternative became available

	▲	ceejayoz 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Again: the "less abrasive alternative" is built off the labor and knowledge of those abrasive folks. They're a large part of the reason it knows what to less-abrasively suggest.

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TeMPOraL 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This. And it's even starting to be a problem with LLMs - noticed that with Claude and Gemini this week.

Yes, I am specifically asking if it's possible to do X with Y. No, I'm not interested in how to do ${unrelated except for name} thing A with Y, or ${manual variant of X} by hand to ${subset of Y}, nor do I want to use tool Q instead. I specifically want to know how to do X with Y, for reasons that are my own and borne of frustration with Y being a toy I'm trying to use for productive work, which apparently means pushing it past its operational envelope, but I have a deadline...