Oh for chrisakes. I also donate to The Wikimedia Foundation, feeling secure in the knowledge that at least I could feel good about that one. Time to do some reading I guess.

The hilarious part about your comment is you’re the one over-explaining to me here. I’m super familiar with about every way a man can be characteristically shitty, happen to have witnessed most of it first hand over the years, committed some of the milder stuff before I grew up and learned how to behave, but here you are kindly helping me understand things about men. Interestingly, of all the things I have witnessed, what I don’t really see often is “mansplaining”. What I do see sometimes is a dude earnestly doing his best to offer help and someone else being totally uncharitable about that, like it’s some affront. And never to the dude oddly enough, only in a mocking, condescending way to others behind his back. The reason I see those ugly hidden reactions, incidentally, is because my behavior makes it clear I’m a solid ally of the people making those comments, and they trust me.

So I dunno. Way I see it, there’s a catalog of valid complaints about stereotypical dude behavior. But being super critical about sincere (if clumsy) attempts to support or help someone just always strikes me as deliberately nasty, for fun. But you do you.

Don’t bother with the TV sitcoms, please. “Bumbling idiot father who fucks up even the most trivial things constantly and is roundly shit on by everyone including his own children” is a core, continuous joke behind so many shows. And fuck it, often it’s hilarious, I’m not gonna get bent outta shape about it. Your “see, look how toxic, it’s been on TV forever” feels pretty weak.

Can’t forget the fun flip side too, where some guys who know a lot are unwilling to share, because they (being fuckin cowards) feel it’s necessary to protect their job security by being the only one who knows how to do certain things.

Or! The guys who know how to do things - have decided they hate doing some of those things (usually for good reason in my experience) - and therefore pretend they don’t know how to do them. I kinda sympathize with this one sometimes.

But yeah, “likes to teach” as the toxic trait? Anyone who thinks that is the toxic version of knowledge sharing is kinda just revealing how little time they’ve actually spent around men.

What! That’s awesome, what a cool idea.

Cool thanks! I haven’t tried it for troubleshooting, I’ll give that a go when I next need it.

Are you using one integrated into your IDE? Or just standalone in a web browser? That’s probably what I ought to try next (the IDE end of things). I saw an acquaintance using PyCharm’s integrated assistant to auto gen commit messages, that looked cool. Not exactly game changing of course.

Do you feel like elaborating any? I’d love to find more uses. So far I’ve mostly found it useful in areas where I’m very unfamiliar. Like I do very little web front end, so when I need to, the option paralysis is gnarly. I’ve found things like Perplexity helpful to allow me to select an approach and get moving quickly. I can spend hours agonizing over those kinds of decisions otherwise, and it’s really poorly spent time.

I’ve also found it useful when trying to answer questions about best practices or comparing approaches. It sorta does the reading and summarizes the points (with links to source material), pretty perfect use case.

So both of those are essentially “interactive text summarization” use cases - my third is as a syntax helper, again in things I don’t work with often. If I’m having a brain fart and just can’t quite remember the ternary operator syntax in that one language I never use…etc. That one’s a bit less impactful but can still be faster than manually inspecting docs, especially if the docs are bad or hard to use.

With that said I use these things less than once a week on average. Possible that’s just down to my own pre-existing habits more than anything else though.

I’ve noticed this too.

You may have ideas in mind about what kind of person they’ll be, in terms of interests, personality, etc. This can be really strong because it may come from deep subconscious wants, and you may not even realize it, but it’ll come out in your behavior. Nudging toward this activity, away from this one - that kind of thing. Be really careful with this - your kid will tell you who they are, and it can be super damaging if you don’t listen.

You can shape values, and you can show them your enthusiasm for what you think is cool, but stop short of trying to shape what they like and who they are. Accept and get excited about the things they’re into and they’ll always want to share with you and keep you involved as they get older. Enthusiasm and passion are so much more important and useful in life than liking this thing over that thing, but it can be hard to let go of your implicit ideas about their future personality.

We very much expected kind of a tomboy-ish, or at least mixed interest girl. Rough and tumble, daredevil, etc. Not at all - she is the most classically feminine, pink-loving, only-interested-in-dolls little kid you can imagine.