It's funny how out of touch AI is with seeing the big picture of problems.

Here's an example I encountered last week:

Someone in my neighborhood is a 75 year old chemical engineer who likes computers and got into Linux a few months ago. I see him from time to time when walking around, he's a nice guy and overall has a scientist's mindset. He doesn't make a lot of assumptions and tries to think things through but sometimes he has big blind spots in unfamiliar fields.

I helped him install Linux and also hook up an SSD to one of his older machines and now it flies.

On his own he had an old sound card that he wanted to use on that machine. He asked me if the card is compatible. I told him it almost certainly is because the Linux kernel has drivers for a ton of devices. His motherboard's built-in sound card was fine but he likes tinkering with audio in general.

He managed to physically install the card correctly but called me and said there's no sound playing. Then he says he spent 12 hours troubleshooting the issue, using ChatGPT and Googling for assistance.

Over the phone he told me he tried many different things. Installing, tweaking and configuration ALSA, PulseAudio and PipeWire related tools and tweaking everything you can imagine. Nothing worked, no matter what happened, it never played sound through his speakers.

He asked me if I could come over to help so I did.

In 30 seconds I solved the problem.

I went to his sound settings in his desktop environment and saw that his sound card was being picked up. I looked at the back of his machine and noticed this card had 2 black ports with the bigger style jack for headphones. There was no usual green port which is usually used for output. I shined a flashlight to look closer. One of the black ports was labeled headphones and the other was unlabeled. His was connected to the unlabeled one. I swapped it to the other port and everything worked right away.

All of that to say, as a software engineer I have second hand embarrassment that a trillion dollars invested into AI didn't think to respond with "did you double check to see which port you connected the speakers to?". I asked him if AI ever suggested that and he said no, it immediately went into polluting his system with a bunch of unnecessary tools and chasing incorrect rabbit hole after rabbit hole. AI understands nothing.