A belief without anything to base it off? CPU’s shouldn’t have tried so hard to get faster and should just have gotten more cores a decade ago. Why bother with fancy branch prediction systems to make one thing faster than it should when it’s switching between hundreds of tasks anyway.
I am so overjoyed to see that the phenomenon of computer problems magically disappearing around my presense isnt exclusive to me.
Clippy was cool
You might get swatted stating this out loud! Be careful, friend.
it gained renewed cult following due to rights-to-repair advocate New Yorker Louis Rossman said clippy only wanted to help (paraphrased, don’t quote me) compared to the privacy abomination copilot.
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.
Must doctors and nurses too.
Giving a piece of technology a name and then cursing at it using said name will make it function better…
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.
In order to keep printers working properly they require regular blood sacrifices, tears are also acceptable. Most printers get these by accident as people clear paper jams, refill ink or toner cartridges, etc. Some printers clearly behave and perform better long term than others. More complexity (colors, 2 sided printing, large format, etc.) usually correlates to a larger thirst for blood/stress/anxiety. Remember Colin Robinson, the psychic vampire from “What We Do in the Shadows”? I’m pretty sure his spirit animal would be a color inkjet printer/scanner combo from late 90’s.
Zelda BOTW knows when you’re climbing a big cliff and it’s more likely to rain.
Get that Froggy suit, son.
Got to get Tears of the Kingdom for that.
I have seen machines develop ghosts and I believe all electronic devices could develop said ghosts but only if built with quality components that have large tolerance between normal operation values (voltage, current, etc) and fail values. If not then they fully fail to function before they start operating outside of normal parameters.
With the rise of bio computing currently by using rat neurons which I think will collide with LLMs with their hallucinations to produce full on machine spirits within the next 20 years.
I say this has no foundation as the only “evidence” I have is my own anecdotes and the rest is merely a hypothesis.
William Gibson would like a word with you about copyright…
Eh can one really copyright the idea of an emergent machine spirit when engineers from the industrial revolution were already ascribing personalities to machines and Assimov had already wrote about machine ghosts?
Yes yes, but did they have Voodoo!?
Who do?
The intelligence AGIs. They adopt voodoo as a metaphor for how they work, so humans can (somewhat) understand it.
That sounds familiar, I take it that was in Neuromancer? It’s been a while since I read that book and The Difference Engine.
Second book in the same trilogy as Neuromancer - Count Zero.
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 heard that being called computer mana.
If you don’t have enough, you’ll encounter all kinds of errors that’ll disappear as soon as someone with a higher amount of mana approaches
That explains why all my coworker’s computer problems would go away when I walked by.
it’s because most errors are software state issues and those kinda people never ever power cycle regardless of what they claim
source: 7 years of phone tech support
I did IT for 10 years. fuck.
“Have you tried restarting?”
“yes”
Uptime: fucking millennia.
I used to be nice and not remotely restart their machine without telling them. Used to be.
Channeling the BOFH.
That’s because they think logging off or turning the monitor off/on is the same as reatarting, or, in the case of laptops / rackmount KVMs closing the lid and reopening
I need more ram
i have a website for you!
I thought they closed it
Let me get you the address of a ranch that is exactly what you’re looking for
The internet was better when it was just the nerds on it
everything is better without business majors
MBA’s need to be exiled!
it is important we are careful what we exile them too
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.
modern computers are optimized to sell you shit and steal your data, not be efficient
Nonsense! Your idea is extremely well-founded!
I think it has more to do with expanded computing resources allowing for devs to skip optimizing their code since it is no longer absolutely necessary to get something useable.
Combine that with multiple apps by unrelated devs all taking more than their fair share of system resources. And library developers building towers of abstractions to get as far as possible from that icky hardware!
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.
It’s not just printers. Laptops recognise people who are willing and able to crack them open. I’ve had multiple family members claim their problems disappeared the instant I gave their device a stern look.
IT person here. I concure.
On bad imposter syndrome days I dont feel like a professional, I feel like the computer whisperer. Gets ticket for problem, decides to stretch my legs snd walk over, issue is fixed before I arrive, like magic (its not, but I didnt see the problem so I cant make any notes other than a wizard fixed it).
similar job, my phrase I always used was
“I’ve been known to intimidate some electronics in my day”
🎶Back up in your ass with the resurrection🎶
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
