Ask Lemmy

Why the hell would you ask an AI model to write the script for you? It's a one-liner, took me just a minute to write. Even if you know very little of Bash I can't imagine it would take more than a few minutes of research to figure it out.

curl $(curl https://ubuntu.com/download/alternative-downloads | grep -o "https.*desktop.*torrent" | tail -1) -o ubuntu-latest.torrent

AI is mediocre at best when it comes to writing code, and if you don't have the skill to troubleshoot its garbage outputs you shouldn't be using it at all.

It took me more time to read this thread than it did for me to learn the basics of Bash scripting.

Do like we did back in the day, RTFM

Just write it yourself 🤦‍♂️

Probably a stupid comment, but still: if you're a coder, you might be quicker just writing such a script yourself. Just fetch the links, slice them up, sort them by version and wget the one with the highest number.

If you're not a coder, maybe someone here can help out?

AI isn't stupid because it doesn't possess any intelligence to begin with, the term "AI" is just a marketing misnomer.

Language Models are essentially really advanced Markov Chain generators. Once you understand that, you'll realize why your question is like "I keep asking these water mills to make me a cup of coffee, but they all taste like dirt": wrong tool for the job, it just happens to be tangentially related.

You're also asking if there's a way to precisely word a request so that the computer will do what you want it to do. Luckily for you, there is! It's a trick that's been around for ~60 years and it's called "programming languages"

Dude just stitch stack overflow answers together like the rest of us

AI certainly can do it. But here's the thing with generative AI: the answer is only as good as the question you ask. If you don't know exactly what to ask for and which details are important, the AI doesn't know what you meant to ask and can't infer that. AI usually does not pick up implied context that an experienced person would. A person would be able to make an educated guess about what you actually meant and answer that question.

As someone with 20 years of programming experience, I would recommend against using AI to learn to program. You're asking something that doesn't actually know how to program to show you how to do it. From my experience with coworkers using AI, it doesn't improve their work; it simply accelerates the rate at which they can produce low quality work.

Once you're more skilled than the AI, you can use it to speed up menial tasks, like generating boilerplate and stubbing things out. It absolutely will be wrong in some ways, and you need to be able to tell when it's wrong and know how to fix it.

@[email protected] I bet there is a RSS feed for Ubuntu releases. Instead of using AI to get the link you would need to read consume the feed.

In my experience, Chat GPT is much better at the general programming patterns and concepts than specific API implementations. Especially less commonly used ones, where it often gives a solution that only looks reasonable but uses the totally wrong methods. I guess it's similar with scraping the HTML of the Ubuntu releases page to get the latest torrent. It doesn't know the exact HTML layout, so it guesses what is a likely one, even though it is wrong.

The AI will provide methods you could try, but ultimately a human will need to review and edit the code.

Try scraping it from this page.

https://ipv6.torrent.ubuntu.com/tracker_index

You are a powerful terminal assistant. You will answer in the most helpful possible way and provide the user with Linux bash commands to accomplish their tasks. Use Google and internet search to fetch all necessary information. Always format your answer in markdown format.

User question: How do I download the latest Ubuntu ISO torrent? Make sure it's the latest version from ubuntu.com Make sure to also include the curl or wget command to download the torrent file itself.

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