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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
The internet was better when it was just the nerds on it
every is better without business majors
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.
Nonsense! Your idea is extremely well-founded!
modern computers are optimized to sell you shit and steal your data, not be efficient
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!
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
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🎶
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.
I like to game on my couch, so I game on my laptop.
Oh, no doubt. It’s the without foundation that I hold this belief.
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.
That intuition is correct. Hardware isn’t a magical exactly perfect thing every time. Everything has “flaws” and so you set tolerance levels and do your best.
CPUs and GPUs and RAM and drives all have specs they are aiming for, like a CPU manufacturer may want the next chips on the assembly line to be >4ghz, they crank out 1,000 of them and benchmark them. Some hit 4, some do 3.9, some may be 4.1 even. As long as it’s above spec it gets labeled the 4ghz Ultra or whatever brand. But the chips that run fine, but are slower, say 3.5ghz, then they just slap the 3.5ghz Mideange Label on those and sell for %20 less. The ones coming out at 3ghz get the Low End Label and are half the price.
That way they sell them all and everyone is happy (mostly).
Also that pesky law of thermodynamics ruins our fun and hardware gets worse over time too. Depends on the defects and lots of variables, but maybe one case didn’t cool as well so the CPU gets hotter and it had a defect that degraded it’s speed a bit so now that 4ghz Ultra is actually running at 3ghz, but that happened after the user bought it, so it is just “a slow machine” as you said.
It’s very real and you aren’t crazy for feeling like or even proving that some really are slower than others.
I have a really weird story related to this:
I was doing IT for an esports event, with 10 identical PCs on stage. Identical hardware, identical images, everything. One of them had much worse FPS than the rest. Okay, weird. Probably the player did something weird with their config.
- New SSD with fresh image: same.
- Switch SSDs with the next PC over: FPS still low, but fine on the other PC now using the SSD from the problem PC.
- Switch entire PC with spare: still low FPS on the spare
- Switch literally everything, including monitor and every single cable: still no improvement. Somehow this spot is cursed.
- Move the PC out from under the table and put it on a chair one metre to the side: FPS issues magically fixed.
My best guess is there was some kind of electrical interference manifesting in that one particular location. Never seen anything like it before or since…
My bet is on some of the systems having SSDs and some of them having spinning disks. They need separate images from hardware native installations. This results in exactly this scenario. Also not everything labeled ssd contains ssd. Dell used to slip sshds into they systems even in the pricy segment.
some computers suck and there’s no amount of tweaks or reinstalling an OS that will fix it.
And somehow I’ve owned every single one of them.
Just search for “cpu binning”, anything that slips through the cracks of that process are exactly this.
yeah it’s called a defective or out of spec component. those are the ones that fail typically.
Or in spec when the spec is very broad.
See also “silicon lottery” in the world of overclocking.
Or in spec when the spec is very broad.
See also “silicon lottery” in the world of overclocking.
I have a little more foundation for that.
I think you’re right.
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.
Like, the novice was unsuccessfully getting the machine to work, and then when Knight did the same thing it worked?
Exactly.
Holy Baader–Meinhof, Batman! I just found out about that 2 days ago
