Comment by layer8
6 months ago
Nah, that’s different. Lmgtfy has nothing to do with experience, other than experience in googling. Lmgtfy applies to stuff that can expediently be googled.
6 months ago
Nah, that’s different. Lmgtfy has nothing to do with experience, other than experience in googling. Lmgtfy applies to stuff that can expediently be googled.
In my experience, usually what people had done was take your question on a forum, go to lmgtfy, paste the exact words in and then link back to it. As if to say "See how easy that was? Why are you asking us when you could have just done that?"
Yes is true there could have been a skill issue. But it could also be true that the person just wanted input from people rather than Google. So that's why I drew the connection.
I largely agree with your description, and I think that’s different from the above case of explicitly asking for experience and then someone posing the question to an LLM. Also, when googling, you typically (used to) get information written down by people, from a much larger pool and better curated via page ranking, than whoever you are asking. So it’s not like you were getting better quality by not googling, typically.
That's why I said it's the 2025 version of that, given the new technology. I'm not saying it's the same thing. I guess I'm not being clear, sorry.
2 replies →
In my experience what happened was the top hit for the question was a topical forum, with a lmgtfy link as a response to the exact question I'm googling.