For me it’s the paranoia surrounding webcams. People outright refuse to own one and I understand, until they go on and on about how they’re being spied. Here’s the secret - unplug the damn thing when you think you won’t use it or haven’t used it in a while.
They, whoever it is, can’t really spy on you on something that’s already off and unplugged!
Honestly, just Googling (or DuckDuckGo-ing) things. I tend to be the “tech person” that people ask about their computer problems quite often, and 9/10 times I just copy-paste the error code into the search bar and it tells me what to do. I’m not secret about it either, I’m like you can literally just Google it and it’ll usually work. But people still seem to think it’s magic lol.
There’s a hidden skill in there that allows you to filter out the bullshit/scam/unhelpful solutions and zero in on the helpful, legitimate stuff.
My colleague (we work in web dev) will literally sit there staring at an error message but apparently not reading it, and then he’ll open ChatGPT and start asking it what to do. The fucker never even Googles error messages, it’s an absolute nightmare.
ChatGPT can be super useful, but I’m kind of worried about people learning to use it exclusively.
I tried helping a PhD student assemble a set up for measuring transistors. He used ChatGPT to do all the code for the software control (python), which is fine, even if he relied on it to fix every single part of his code when a quick trip to the reference manuals of the equipments would solve the problem instantly.
At a certain point I realized I maybe had misunderstood his set up design and asked him “wait, which device do you want to connect to your gate? Which terminal even is the gate?”
And I kid you not, the dude asked ChatGPT which terminal in his device was the gate
(he also reeked of weed so there’s that)