RE: Knowing what you don't know

I've been on a couple before I knew what they were and they were lost in history with my changing interests and email addresses.

I have a feeling a lot of times when I post on the listserv people see my name and they say "oh man, not this guy again"

There might be a couple but given the volume you indicated for the listserv I'm going to hazard that there are far more people thinking OH THANK GOODNESS SOMEONE ELSE KNEW HOW TO PHRASE THIS QUESTION because

My thinking is, there is likely someone else who is struggling with the same concept

And I would also lean into obscure as having researched many questions online I have often found people with the literal exact same problem as me asking their questions on Reddit or Stack Overflow or some forum with the exact same complete lack of responses. Dumb questions are really easy to answer so a lot of people with answer them even if they're being snarky arseholes telling you to "here I googled it for you" (okay congratulations you used a godawful known biased search engine to look for terms that are easy for you but might have been completely unknown to the asker) or otherwise "get informed" (which I mean fair they've probably encountered the people who don't actually bother looking and just expect someone to give them the exact answer they need but there's also the people who may have even tried but otherwise have no idea what they're supposed to be looking for).

_{having been on the receiving end of that the few times I did ask a question and also having been in a lot of geeky circles my respect levels for the people who think they're smart or cool for responding in that fashion kind of drops by an unfair amount, I give some leeway if I recognise the name enough to figure they're probably having a bad day that they really shouldn't be taking out on other people but most of us are some level of human}

In these days of Google, and AI, it might seem like resources like this are less necessary

Given that they learn from resources like the listserv (if publicly accessible otherwise it's the slowly dying forums because "everyone" just wants to ask Google/AI so they don't have to "look stupid" for not magically somehow knowing already) there will be a point where you're going to ask the AI and it will invent some answer that may accidentally be correct but more likely be wildly wrong because there is nothing to draw from.

_{oh wait maybe all those proprietary messaging systems}

I'm vaguely curious if there will be a swing back to all this archaic nonsense then.