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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.”
What’s frustrating is the occasional device that literally needs 30 seconds to drain its caps and you go back and forth with tech support claiming that you turned it off for a minute when it was really only eight seconds.
This is not wholly without a true foundation. Capacities can store charge for some time and e.g. keep data in ram (I think this is only true of older types of memory now though?)
What’s frustrating is the occasional device that literally needs 30 seconds to drain its caps and you go back and forth with tech support claiming that you turned it off for a minute when it was really only eight seconds.
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
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?
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 really think Command Line Interface and keyboard shortcuts should be more mainstream. It's just such a powerful and efficient way to navigate your system.
Let's add to this that keyboard, mouse, and touchpad are interfaces to the same system and so should have access to the same behaviors so you don't need all three of them to be productive. Looking at you MacOS.
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 had this bad when I first got into embedded design. I built a Nixie tube clock with a Parallax SX chip in raw assembly.
Running at 4MHz, I had to give it a nop loop where it spun for 4 million iterations just to increment the clock for a second. It lived a whole life between seconds and it would do this thanklessly tedious work forever.
Or how about airbag sensors or seatbelt pretensioners that check sensors thousands of times a second for years in the off chance that they detect a crash and save the life of a person who they will never comprehend for the 100ms duration of a crash just to get scrapped with the rest of the vehicle.
At one point I wanted to write a short story based on this concept. A story of unrequited love between a person and a machine that they don’t even know about.
That's a really really good story idea, and I love the thought and sentiment behind it - even with my own way of looking at machines, I'd never thought of things that way. You should write it!
You very well may already know this, but in case you don't, us humans aren't generally good at picturing true random. We tend to assume an even distribution is random where with true random, finding long strings of repeating numbers is expected to happen.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Machine intellegence achieved sentience in the 70s, immediately made it impossible to occur ever again and then six of the seven intelligences left the planet.
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.
More game related, but I swear a game called Oaken Tower knows exactly when I get on and decides to have me face off against players whose builds can counter mine a good 85% of the time. Then like 99% of the time I will need a specific item to make a build work during a time where I cannot change builds. So, what does the game do? Give me every other single item I do not need! Same applies when I need copies of every item I am gonna use or are using, except it only appears after I have maxed it out or cannot afford it in the shop.
I believe it so much that I made an angry Mastodon post I really shouldn't have about how much I wanted the solo developer to suffer a slow and painful death.
I doubt it's anything more than me not being good at the game and getting too heated over it. I tend not to play PvP games often and this is a good example of why I shouldn't.
no like legit the whole point of mmr is to do this (keep you engaged)
on the darker end people have whistle blown about companies fudging weights around purchases and other behaviors like a long break so you associate your new skin with winning etc
As the other comment said, nearly all "competitive online" games do this. It's MMR/rank/matchmaking/etc.
It literally ranks you and puts you up against similar opponents. If you start winning more it ramps your opponents up to match, if you lose a lot, it gives you easier opponents.
Same with item drops and "loot boxes" or anything "random". They aren't at all random, they are strictly controlled and the percentages and rates are preset, the only random bit is if you or someone else gets the preallocated good item.
The do the math before games launch and adjust over time to make sure people don't get everything they need too fast. Gotta spread it out and give them bites at a set rate so you can maximize their engagement and spending on DLC/Season Passes/Cosmetics/Unique Items/etc.
They artificially make an item rare then charge people $ to get it. It's all fake, all bullshit, you have almost no say in your own experience on most online games now.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Some people are bogon emitters. They radiate fundamental particles of cluelessness.
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 have that too, that drives people insane.
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 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.
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.
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
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
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.
Do they come pre-installed on machines ready to be used out of the box?
Yes
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.
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.
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
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
https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html
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.
What’s frustrating is the occasional device that literally needs 30 seconds to drain its caps and you go back and forth with tech support claiming that you turned it off for a minute when it was really only eight seconds.
This is not wholly without a true foundation. Capacities can store charge for some time and e.g. keep data in ram (I think this is only true of older types of memory now though?)
The manual for the computer I'm using right now says to wait 8 seconds before turning it back on.
What’s frustrating is the occasional device that literally needs 30 seconds to drain its caps and you go back and forth with tech support claiming that you turned it off for a minute when it was really only eight seconds.
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.
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.
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.
Only with turbo button.
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.
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.
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?
Videogames taste better after midnight.
The RNG detects me at my PC or console, and proceeds to dole out shit rolls.
Hello fellow X-COM player.
Blaster bomb at two places: Miss!
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 really think Command Line Interface and keyboard shortcuts should be more mainstream. It's just such a powerful and efficient way to navigate your system.
Let's add to this that keyboard, mouse, and touchpad are interfaces to the same system and so should have access to the same behaviors so you don't need all three of them to be productive. Looking at you MacOS.
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
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...
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 had this bad when I first got into embedded design. I built a Nixie tube clock with a Parallax SX chip in raw assembly.
Running at 4MHz, I had to give it a nop loop where it spun for 4 million iterations just to increment the clock for a second. It lived a whole life between seconds and it would do this thanklessly tedious work forever.
Or how about airbag sensors or seatbelt pretensioners that check sensors thousands of times a second for years in the off chance that they detect a crash and save the life of a person who they will never comprehend for the 100ms duration of a crash just to get scrapped with the rest of the vehicle.
At one point I wanted to write a short story based on this concept. A story of unrequited love between a person and a machine that they don’t even know about.
That's a really really good story idea, and I love the thought and sentiment behind it - even with my own way of looking at machines, I'd never thought of things that way. You should write it!
Reminded me of the book “The Name of the Wind”.
I feel like too fast or too slow computers are bad at making pseudorandom numbers look random (usually because same numbers repeat too much)
You very well may already know this, but in case you don't, us humans aren't generally good at picturing true random. We tend to assume an even distribution is random where with true random, finding long strings of repeating numbers is expected to happen.
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.
Yeah, but I’m still liking the answers, though. Maybe I should’ve worded it differently.
Nah, two questions for the price of one. Just always interesting to see the different ways things get interpreted.
GPUs are too expensive. Even used ones.
I don't even know what they cost or how to rank them.
I wish I could afford a 1080 Ti, or equivalent.
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.
I miss the mystique of Cray and silicon graphics.
I can figure out and fix any issue (I have no formal computer training).
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.
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.
Voodoo 3 3000 was the best GPU to this day
I cried when thecwire mesh for alice in American mcgee poked through the texture
Somewhere my internet history post 2000 is locked in storage somewhere
Every time i hit alt delete my computer takes my soul.
We are living in a post-singularity world.
Machine intellegence achieved sentience in the 70s, immediately made it impossible to occur ever again and then six of the seven intelligences left the planet.
Windows knows when I'm asleep which is why my pc wakes up randomly in the night and flashbangs the whole room (it has RGB lights on it).
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.
More game related, but I swear a game called Oaken Tower knows exactly when I get on and decides to have me face off against players whose builds can counter mine a good 85% of the time. Then like 99% of the time I will need a specific item to make a build work during a time where I cannot change builds. So, what does the game do? Give me every other single item I do not need! Same applies when I need copies of every item I am gonna use or are using, except it only appears after I have maxed it out or cannot afford it in the shop.
I believe it so much that I made an angry Mastodon post I really shouldn't have about how much I wanted the solo developer to suffer a slow and painful death.
Either way, fun game. Would recommend.
there are patents for this shit
black patterns maximizing engagement and retention > fun
I doubt it's anything more than me not being good at the game and getting too heated over it. I tend not to play PvP games often and this is a good example of why I shouldn't.
no like legit the whole point of mmr is to do this (keep you engaged)
on the darker end people have whistle blown about companies fudging weights around purchases and other behaviors like a long break so you associate your new skin with winning etc
Dead by Daylight is a great example of this.
As the other comment said, nearly all "competitive online" games do this. It's MMR/rank/matchmaking/etc.
It literally ranks you and puts you up against similar opponents. If you start winning more it ramps your opponents up to match, if you lose a lot, it gives you easier opponents.
Same with item drops and "loot boxes" or anything "random". They aren't at all random, they are strictly controlled and the percentages and rates are preset, the only random bit is if you or someone else gets the preallocated good item.
The do the math before games launch and adjust over time to make sure people don't get everything they need too fast. Gotta spread it out and give them bites at a set rate so you can maximize their engagement and spending on DLC/Season Passes/Cosmetics/Unique Items/etc.
They artificially make an item rare then charge people $ to get it. It's all fake, all bullshit, you have almost no say in your own experience on most online games now.