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.
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.
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 call that “Threat of Administration”. Works way too often.
I have that too, that drives people insane.
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.
I do feel dumber and less capable after spending time with certain people…
I think that some gadgets 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.
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.
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.
Somewhere my internet history post 2000 is locked in storage somewhere
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.
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.
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.
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.
Voodoo 3 3000 was the best GPU to this day
I cried when thecwire mesh for alice in American mcgee poked through the texture
I miss the mystique of Cray and silicon graphics.
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.
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.
If I hold a keyboard button down harder it will work faster.
Only with turbo button.
Every time i hit alt delete my computer takes my soul.
I am so overjoyed to see that the phenomenon of computer problems magically disappearing around my presense isnt exclusive to me.
