I’ve seen multiple new users drag Macintosh HD or Documents to Trash in literally the first minute of using a computer. It was perhaps the most common first action I witnessed. Fortunately, none of them located the “Empty Trash” command before I stepped in.

It never crashed the system, but this was in the 90s when we were already on System 7 or even OS 8, so I’m not sure how the older versions handled it. Dragging a disk icon to the Trash on the classic Mac OS ejected the disk, so I wouldn’t be surprised. Simply dragging the System Folder shouldn’t cause an instant crash, but it would fail to boot if you restarted for sure. So the story could be mostly accurate but just missing a step.

Which is the greatest use case for ChatGPT.

It’s been a while since I picked up a new language, but I remember the last time I did, the hardest part was just figuring out how to do trivial things. It’s crazy how long it took me to figure out how to do a simple thing like split a string into fields by a delimiter. I can literally paste a line of code into ChatGTP and say “convert this Python line into JavaScript” and it’ll just do it. Fantastic.

Or yeah, I could spend five minutes reading the man page to remind myself of strptime’s date format every time I need to format a date. Orrrrrr I can just ask the bot something like How do I format this date to look like "YYYY-MM-DD HH-MM-SS" in python? Wed Oct 25 05:37:04 PDT 2023.

Does it need to be accessed by multiple people? Does it need to be updated frequently? Does it need to be accessed programmatically? Does performance matter? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you should probably use a database.

If it’s something you interact with manually, has less than 100,000 rows, and is mostly static, then sure, use a spreadsheet.

I used to have some scripts to convert and merge between CSV and sqlite3. Even a lightweight db like sqlite3 has value. Google Sheets fills some of the gaps with its QUERY statement but I still find it a bit awkward to use a lot of the time.

Lemmy promotes using Matrix, which is a separate service, so instance admins don’t need to be in the business of hosting private conversations.

Matrix is end-to-end encrypted so even the admins of your Matrix server could not provide your chats to law enforcement.