I am so overjoyed to see that the phenomenon of computer problems magically disappearing around my presense isnt exclusive to me.
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🎶
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.
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 restarting, 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
everything is better without business majors
MBA’s need to be exiled!
it is important we are careful what we exile them to
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?
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Nonsense! Your idea is extremely well-founded!
modern computers are optimized to sell you shit and steal your data, not be efficient
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.
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.
Someone will be having a problem
Some people are bogon emitters. They radiate fundamental particles of cluelessness.
when I walk over it starts working
Some people are bogon absorbers.
No, they’re not clueless. They show me exactly what they did before and it just… works. Local apps, websites, networking issues just disappear.
Lmao that’s how it is for me too a good bit of the time.
I do feel dumber and less capable after spending time with certain people…
I call that “Threat of Administration”. Works way too often.
According to legend aving a theoretical physicist close enough can break any well designed equiment nearby. In the same way a good engineer can make the same equipment work by proximity only.
I think that some appliances have a dark soul and just hate their owners. A lot of time I will take something back to a shop because it just won’t turn on, open, rotate, heat up or whatever they are supposed to do. The person at the shop tries the cursed thing once and just like that it works perfectly and I feel like an idiot. Then, back home, it will work for a couple of times and then stop again.
And it happens also with myself in the role of the “fixer”. A colleague will show me an app that does not work, a laptop that won’t boot or a printer they can’t connect to and it all works if I try it.
Printers, for example
Though I have a similar effect on them, too.
I sometimes call it my “healing hands” when a user swears up and down that they did everything I told them to but the problem persists. Until I demonstrate it personally and voilá, the problem is gone.
I have that too, that drives people insane.
Maybe it’s time. E.g. waiting for IT to walk over or remote in, or doing something slower because the user is explaining what they’re doing.
I find that waiting for the click to have a result makes some problems not appear, vs. the user double/right clicking something 6 times because they don’t want to wait. Me waiting for the OS to finish loading everything, vs. the user clicking something 6 times while services or even UI elements are still loading.
I’ve thought that but there doesn’t seem to be a time limit on it.
I feel like there’s a hierarchy to it. The presence of people above me will make my things start working. My presence among them will make their things stop working. The presence of people below me will make my things stop working, and my presence will make their things start working.
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.
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.
that kind of thinking will get you burned at the stake before the temple of the holy Linux, his son self-hosting, and the spirit, FOSS.
Part of me would quite like to fuck around installing Linux and creating a home NAS.
I used to tinker for hours on our family pc back in the 90s and 00s trying to optimise it/make it work.
But now? The other, bigger part simply cant be arsed. Windows 11 just works. It does what I need it to do.
The bigger Linux distros have all “just worked” for the better part of two decades
Do they come pre-installed on machines ready to be used out of the box?
hardware, which gets delivered to you with all drivers preinstalled for an “out-of-the-box” Linux experience.
That’s awesome, this would make me use Linux.
Honestly it’s generally really easy to install Linux these days, first time I did it back in 2008ish when I was like 12 on a shitty win xp laptop was not too bad either tbh.
Not for me haha.
I’m happy on Ubuntu, but I’ve had my share of weird bugs and ux issues. And they do a pretty good job.
If I was on Ubuntu and never configured anything or installed any software, I’d have a slightly better track record.
Switch to an immutable distro for stability and ease of use.
If you do more advanced stuff, Debian will also offer stability.
Ubuntu is definitely not something I would put in the “just works” category anymore, unless it’s Server on CLI.
But it also has some extra features like surveillance I don’t want it to do
I thought I’d finally found the perfect balance between minimal tinkering and the features I want with Noctalia Shell. Then I switched to a systemd-free distro and it doesn’t work any more. Back to .config I go.
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
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
Giving a piece of technology a name and then cursing at it using said name will make it function better…
