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by Jordan-117 7 days ago
Gemini has been indispensable for helping me move from Windows to Linux. I'm reasonably proficient, but moving to a brand-new OS brought so many random questions and weird edge cases that I never would have had the confidence, patience, or time to tackle it alone, even with pretty strong Google fu. It's been so nice to have instant access to answers for my specific problems, without judgment or having to wait on a reply.

At the same time, I moved from Chrome back to Firefox, and Gemini was great at finding equivalents for my most-used extensions -- and, when none existed, to write my own. It's also been really useful for customization/"ricing".

More recently, I got into Quod Libet as a primary music library manager, and both Gemini and Claude have been fantastic at helping me build custom plugins that make it do exactly what I want it to. Scripts to automagically download tracks with metadata and synced lyrics, a lyrics sidebar that highlights lines as you listen and lets you click to jump to a specific line, a bookmark button that lets you mark your favorite section of a track for easy browsing later. Next chance I get is something that enables lyrics search across the entire library (a feature I was already able to build for the Stremio desktop player -- it's so cool to be able to search for a line in a TV episode or movie and jump straight to it).

3 comments

ChatGPT has helped me with innumerable little technical things and feels indispensable at this point.

I can't help thinking that this is a combination of Google sucking more and more and various problems of daily getting so hard need something like a script to solve them. (Recent challenge - "what affordable campgrounds are near the Pacific Create trail and open now").

I similarly used it to finally facilitate a switch to Arch to a couple months ago. Not technically a tool, but it was very convenient to take the Arch wiki, and personalize it by saying "My hardware is X and my use case is Y, can you filter out the 90% of things from here that aren't relevant to me?"
instant access to answers for my specific problems, without judgment

For me that’s killer feature, even if we don’t achieve AGI at least we got good enough „something that will google it for me”.

It is great both ways as an expert in my niche I don’t have to waste time on reading through entry level fluff. As non expert in other fields I don’t get to be scolded for asking entry level questions so RTFM and LMGTFY will sink in history fortunately.