A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
Tom Knight and the Lisp Machine
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.
Source: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/index.html Section IIIA
Go bigger than IT problems.
Most desk jobs are simply finding information: a suitable combination of 1s and 0s until someone else agrees that the combination is correct.
Then, as a reward, the business slightly changes the 1s and 0s of my bank account.
It’s 1s and 0s all the way down.
No, sometimes the answer is just turn it off.
Under the same logic, All problems are also caused by turning it off and on again.
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.
One token ring to crash them all!
Turning it off and on again is a universal truth. A defibrillator works by turning the heart off then on again.
(You don't defib a patient who is flat lining. You defib to fix an erratic heart beat.)
Our University is a cosmic machine that has been running for billions of years, and as an IT guy reboots a computer when it's been running for too long and has problems, will inevitably implode on itself and tear itself apart, which is the equivalent of God turning it off and on again.
ECT basically does that too but for brains. Too sad and Prozac isn't fixing it? We're gonna put you under and slap the reset button every other day until you're not. Shit works too its fucking wild.
I believe there is also a medical treatment that consists of wiping out your white blood cells entirely so your body has to make new ones.
"Have you tried turning the immune system off then on again?'
In theory. In reality it's not on or off it's always on and it's high vs low voltage.
Ah, so the answer is just to get high!
Orrrr get low
To the windowwwwwww...
I'm old
To the wall
Thx now I have Need for Speed Underground in my mind
Man I loved that game. I didn't even play the story much. It's was just a fun drive around game
It had a story?
I... Thought it did....
Maybe I'm misremembering (or it's just old knowledge and new chips are more sophisticated) but despite it being low voltage vs high voltage the outcome is still on or off because there's a resistor in the semiconductor that either allows current through or not. If it were a light switch it would be the equivalent of turning the light on or off.
Ya. It's more like "current go this way or current go that way" than it is high/low voltages.
And yet I still have electronics to this day that require me to pull the plug to get going again 😂
Our LG washing machine does this once every year and a half almost like clockwork. It will simply refuse to do anything until it is unplugged and then plugged back in.
It may be clockwork. If its power hasn't been interrupted in the interim, i.e. you have very stable power at your house, that's got to be some kind of overflow bug in its software. A timer somewhere is running out of room to count clock ticks and it barfs.
washing machine
overflow
heh 🫧
That's actually why. You have to drain the power from the circuits.
Studied computer science. The answer is yes.
A computer is a funky thingy that's a jumbled city of stuff turning on and off with the one master on/off thingy which is the clock on the processor.
When it switches from negative to positive a lot of small switches everywhere switch, some stay the same, some flip. It's all just a bunch of rythm dancing of switches going off and on.
If you used mechanical switches, would it be possible to build a large version of some modern semiconductor chip? If so, I would expect that contraption to be slower and louder than the original.
If you're willing to sacrifice the clock speed it's possible. One of the issues will be that the insane amount of logic gates would have to propagate through every cycle which happens stupid fast on modern chips. Still possible to model it and do a timelapse.
It would be considerably slower, it's also possible to make pneumatic logic gates
This is pretty cool. I don't care how slow it is. It just shows that that it can be done. If you want something useful, use silicon. If you want something awesome, use creative alternatives like pneumatic pipes and valves. :D
Until some stray gamma ray hits just the right spot, flips a bit and either nothing at all of everything all at once happens.
Advanced speedrun strats.
Studied computer science. The answer is yes.
NP = P, folks. Pack it up and go home.
We need a cells at work type of anime but about computers.
It’s all just a bunch of rythm dancing
Sometimes the fix is to turn it off, take it out back and beat it with a stick.
Damn it feels good to be a gangsta
I got a killa up inside of me
That would also mean that all IT problems are caused by turning something off and on again at some level.
If you just stopped using your computer it wouldn’t crash.
[ticket closed]
