Ask Lemmy

Printers must be treated with intimidation for them to behave, because they smell fear and only respect violent hierarchy.

I keep a hammer on hand when I need to print something for this reason.

I have a little foundation for this:

I've seen a lineup of hundreds of identical PCs all get the exact same OS image, and inevitably you'll get one or two that are significantly slower than the rest.

Its my belief that sometimes there's some sort of deeply embedded hardware flaw that makes some computers suck and there's no amount of tweaks or reinstalling an OS that will fix it.

The internet was better when it was just the nerds on it

It’s not without foundation, but I feel like I have a magical power to make computers work. Someone will be having a problem and when I walk over it starts working. And then when I walk away it happens again.

And I think this power is hereditary because one of my kids appears to have it.

Modern computers struggle to do tasks they did even faster 45 years ago because modern people don't know how to do anything except use 3 trillion lines of code that were written by other people.

Some people - even technologically literate ones - just want computers and operating systems to work straight out of the box with no building or tinkering and there's nothing wrong with that.

Some people have an aura around them that computers disrespect, its why we have repeat idiots that log faults and we send a tech down and get them to do it again and it works. In the presence of IT support they tend to behave

I work with fixing specialised software and hardware.

I belive that there is truth to the Tom Knight and the Lisp machine koan. Several times per year I bill customers for doing this.

If you've not heard it before: A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

Waiting 8 seconds after turning off a device, before turning it back on. Any electronics, really.

Turning the TV on off? Wait 8 seconds.
Blender not working? Unplug, 8 seconds, replug.
Replacing batteries? 8 seconds.

10 seconds is too long, 5 seconds isn't enough sometimes. 8 seconds is perfect.

My first gaming PC I built in 2004 is still the fastest computer that has ever been.

Desktops are for gaming. Laptops are for browsing the Internet.

Does my laptop have a decent GPU? Sure does. Great for browsing the Internet.

Bonus:

Some tasks are phone tasks while bigger things are computer tasks. Think buying a movie ticket versus buying plane tickets.

That I've got a special click when I specifically need something to work. It involves a lot of deliberation on the mouse, a small pause before starting to click, and a ~0.5s longer click time. That's my "okay carefully now..." Click.

Reserved for tasks like a bank transfer, an important form filling out, etc

If I hold a keyboard button down harder it will work faster.

My work computer runs better because I listen to music and browse the Internet not just work work work. I keep it entertained, and in return it runs better than those of my fellow employees, I have far fewer problems.

ETA reading below, I do restart each day. Maybe that is all that is happening to keep it happy. How disappointing. Do people really not do that? On their WORK machines?

Zelda BOTW knows when you're climbing a big cliff and it's more likely to rain.

I believe artists have an negative technology field around them that electronic hardware doesn't work for them the same way it does everyone else.

Videogames taste better after midnight.

The RNG detects me at my PC or console, and proceeds to dole out shit rolls.

Every-day pedestrian computer tasks should be easy to complete with the keyboard only. Mice were bad enough as a crutch for lazy users, but now it's a crutch for lazy developers.

Let me pick on Mozilla for a second. In many of Firefox's menus, they have alt keys. You know, an underlined letter in a word that you can select by holding the alt key and pressing that letter. In FF, many of these letters are capitalized. So now you have to press shift+alt+whatever letter. Criminally bad design.

I need more ram

I (mostly jokingly, but also a little bit really and sentimentally) believe that physical baremetal computers/servers have souls, and must therefore have hostnames that are names, because names are powerful and soulful and you should have respect for things that have souls. Which is why I kind of hate the "cattle, not pets" model in my own practice.

Stick identifying categorizing prefixes on it, of course, and you can group clusters under the same name with a numeric suffix, but it's gotta have a real name in there somewhere.

I am so overjoyed to see that the phenomenon of computer problems magically disappearing around my presense isnt exclusive to me.

Giving a piece of technology a name and then cursing at it using said name will make it function better...

Its funny how a few people have interpreted 'belief' here as in a value, like "I believe in free speech." I assume it was meant to "thing I think is factually true" because "without any foundation" makes more sense there.