The act of someone sitting at a brand new Mac, with a never-before-used interface, and immediately clicking the computer icon to drag it to the trash, is such a powerful image for me.
The statement of, “this is what I think of this computer” is so strong, because I have to believe that whomever did that must have been a tech person to be at the event; but perhaps they just thought it was a shortcut and didn’t like shortcuts on their desktop so they tried to remove it? Like, you can do this with Windows… Because the computer object (in Explorer) is immutable, and any reference to it is simply a link to that object.
I prefer the thought of them just being like “this computer is trash” and doing that, and causing the system to crash.
I think it’s more like they thought they were supposed to do that. I’m guessing they had no idea what to do, and putting an object in trash or recycle is something everyone understands, so that’s what their brain told them to do.
Moments like that are why I belive in timetravel, in the real timeline it took two years to find that bug and it was resolved quietly but of course someone is going to come back and troll them by doing it on day 1.
Me and dumb compact design blueprints on Dyson Sphere Program. I’ve had to tear parts of builds down an embarrassing amount of times to get unstuck because of the way hitboxes on refactionators and a few other buildings work in close proximity.
One of my favorite examples of the difficulty in idiot-proofing things comes from a national park ranger talking about the difficulty of designing a bear-proof garbage can. He said “There is considerable overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans.”
And I think that hits on the truth, which makes this less “iamverysmart”. It’s not that the tourists are dumb, it’s that they’re new and not willing to pay much attention to things like trash can design. 1% of a normal person’s attention presents a lot like a really dumb person.
Is it 1%? Maybe when they first try to open it they’re distracted But when doesn’t open and now they’re concentrating on the problem and still fail, then we have to kinda own up to the fact that a lot of people aren’t smarter than a bear.
I can’t believe this comment chain is this long and no one has pointed out that drunk and stoned humans are terrible at figuring stuff like this out.
You’re not planning for the dumbest human trying in earnest. You’re planning for humans who are tired, distracted and/or chemically altered. A 80 IQ person can figure out a weird trash can eventually if they are trying.
These comments (not just yours) feel misanthropic. I haven’t been to a campsite in ages so I don’t know what sort of trash can puzzlebox we’re talking about, but I work somewhere with alcohol so I can guess what the true issue is.
I think if they can score 100 on an IQ test, they can figure out any reasonable trash can eventually, assuming the moving parts are visible. Many people would rather just litter.
100 is the average, implying half the population is lower than that
At the risk of pedantry, if 100 is the average (the mean), we’re saying “most people are at 100”. If it were the median, then we’re implying “100 is the middle score of those sampled”. A subtle, but important difference.
i’m not really sure what IQ has to do with this. it was originally designed to measure people’s proficiency in school. it was not designed to be a general measure of intelligence. that was something that was co opted by eugenicists.
here’s a quote from Simon Bidet, the original creator of the IQ test, about his thoughts on the eugenicists using his test:
Finally, when Binet did become aware of the “foreign ideas being grafted on his instrument” he condemned those who with ‘brutal pessimism’ and ‘deplorable verdicts’ were promoting the concept of intelligence as a single, unitary construct.
you can read more about this stuff on his wikipedia page. (the quote is from wikipedia)
even to this day, there is quite a bit of doubt as to how accurately IQ measures “general intelligence”
I know. It’s a shorthand quantitative measure everyone’s familiar with, though, so it’s useful for communicating. Thanks for adding a disclaimer for me.
I’ve seen people carelessly throw away their garbage right next to garbage bins, because they couldn’t be bothered to get a little closer or aim.
The bear has more determination, because it has an incentive to get to the tasty, high calorie food that doesn’t require the energy expenditure of chasing it down and tearing it apart. Throwing away garbage into a designated container on the other hand is a chore that some people believe they can skip, because they are the sole protagonists in their own stupid little world.
I used to see people charitably, much like you do, until very recently. After witnessing for myself people staring into the sun and injuring themselves after being repeatedly warned, I now realize there are a substantial number of people who simply have rocks clattering around inside their skulls instead of brains
There was a listener question on a science podcast recently that asked about how the temperature changed on the moon during the recent solar eclipse.
They almost got what a solar eclipse was, but not quite. During a solar eclipse, the moon gets between the sun and the earth, blocking the light getting to the earth and casting a shadow on the earth. The side of the moon facing the earth is completely dark because the thing that normally lights it up (the sun) is completely behind it. But, the back side of the moon is getting full sun and just as hot as normal.
I think part of the problem with understanding all this is that the sun is just so insanely bright. Like, it’s a bit hard to believe that the full moon is so bright just because it’s reflecting sunlight. It’s also amazing that the “wandering stars” (planets) look like stars when they’re just blobs of rocks or gases that are reflecting the insanely bright light of the sun.
It’s amazing if you think about it. Light comes out of the sun in every possible direction. A tiny fraction of it hits the surface of Mercury, and only some of that light is reflected back out. The light reflected from Mercury goes in almost every direction. A tiny fraction of it hits the earth. But, even with that indirect bounce, it’s bright enough to see with the naked eye.
Answer: Light travels in straight lines (well, for this purpose) and the moon is roughly an opaque sphere. Maybe you could see it with earthshine, but I get the impression the corona is still much brighter.
There was a solar eclipse when I was in grade six. One of my classmates was riding his bike home, and was stupidly looking at the eclipse, and got hit by a car. The irony.
It was pretty bad. He missed a lot of school. I think he ended up repeating grade six. I never saw him much after that, but I did hear that he got married to another person I went to school with eventually, so presumably his life wasn’t ruined or anything.
Holy shit this.
And not even “educated” people.
Where I work is about half degree holding engineers… many of these engineers were seen outside staring at the partial eclipse Monday.
You’re immediately taking the argument to the extreme. You won’t immediately go blind, but it will damage your retina in ways you sometimes don’t notice because the brain compensates for it. It happened to my uncle when he was a welder, he had a second blind spot where he couldn’t see sharply, but it didn’t really affect his quality of life.
Glancing at the eclipse while it’s in totality is not going to give you permanent damage. Now if you stare at it until totality is over and the sun is on full blast again…
This reminds me of that poster in my highschool chem lab:
Same with shooting without eye/ear pro. I dunno about other folks but I use my eyes and ears a lot, and I’d hate to miss out on music and color the rest of my life because I thought I would have a transcendent experience blowing them out for a minute. 😬
Eclipses happen every year like clockwork (it basically is clockwork, but on a huge scale). Eclipse seasons are spring and fall, around the equinoxes. You could very easily fly to see a total eclipse every few years if you want to, because we know when they are going to happen and where will have totality - it’s very routine stuff. There’s literally nothing special at all about the one that just happened, except that a lot of people haven’t seen one before because it hasn’t happened -at that location- in a time.
So no, absolutely not something you’ll never get a chance to see again, tho you won’t be able if you go blind like a fucking moron.
Total eclipses aren’t rare, but them being in an accessible location and not just over some random place in the ocean is. I looked this up the other day, and any one particular location on Earth will see a total eclipse once every 350 years or so.
Except they aren’t just visible from a single location, so almost every time they are over an accessible place on land. Not for the whole thing, sure, but visible all the same.
This might be helpful for reference. It’s maps of where the next 50 years worth of total eclipses fall. The first one that isn’t really visible by people is 2039 in Antarctica. There’s a few like that. Other than that, there’s at least an island you could go to for it, and see one every few years. Eclipses being totally unavailable to view is actually far more rare than seeing one :)
If I had someone run through hot coals I would scold them, sure. Much like for being angry about others not believing in zombie carpenters or letting quacks give their kids overpriced sugar pills. But that’s jot the context right now, is it?
The monitor disappeared rather than the computer, but we can assume the tower somewhere under the desk did as well. But what of the keyboard? It’s in the icon, yet remains after deletion!
I’m probably missing a joke here, but irrecoverably as in they most likely needed another computer to fix it: In this case, create a new startup floppy disk - there was no hard drive, after all.
The computer is inaccessible, and if you did that, the best way to fix it, while also avoiding any other potential issues stemming from that, is just to reinstall the thing.
As a programmer, I consider The User to be the enemy. No matter how thoroughly I seemingly test my code, the second the user gets their hands on it, it breaks left and right from all the crazy shit they do.
The command in question recursively changes file ownership to account “user” and group “user” for every file and folder in the system. With linux, where many processes are run as root and on various other accounts (like apache or www-data for web server, mysql for MySql database and so on) and after that command none of the services can access the files they need to function. And as the whole system is broken on a very fundamental level changing everything back would be a huge pain in the rear.
On this ubuntu system I’m using right now I have 53 separate user accounts for various things. Some are obsolete and not in use, but majority are used for something and 15 of them are in active use for different services. Different systems have a bit different numbers, but you’d basically need to track down all the millions of files on your computer and fix each of their permission by hand. It can be done, and if you have similar system to copy privileges from you could write a script to fix most of the things, but in vast majority of cases it’s easier to just wipe the drive and reinstall.
Because I have been completely unable to find it again and this seems like a relevant place to ask: does anyone have a link to an article similar to this, that I believe might have been titled ‘My First Name is My Last Name’? This is made extra hard to look up because I’ve forgotten the specific culture and details it’s talking about, but it’s about the same basic issue with cultural conventions on names.
I used to work with a Greek guy called Argyros Argyros - cool guy, but suspect he was an outlier. Named after his dad, so certainly some people are named that way. Icelandic for instance would traditionally use “Given Name” “Patronym from father” - Magnus Magnusson was quite famous in the UK; Björk Guðmundsdóttir might be the most famous internationally, but she’s not a “double”. There’s quite a few cultures - Hungarian, Chinese, Japanese, … - that write their names as “Family Name” “Given Name” as opposed to the other way around, if that’s what you mean?
Apologies for being so sketchy on the details but I really can’t remember too many of the specifics. I’m fairly certain it wasn’t that his family name came first, because that’s fairly straightforward. I think the author might have been from an east or southeast Asian culture? I think that part of the essay might have been about how addressing him as Mr. Firstname is actually more formal than Mr. Lastname, even though Firstname is not his family name. I don’t want to keep guessing on more details about how the naming conventions were different because I’m probably going to get it wrong, I have fairly low confidence in what I remember from it.
I think that part of the essay might have been about how addressing him as Mr. Firstname is actually more formal than Mr. Lastname, even though Firstname is not his family name
Could it be Turkish? Just stumbled on this section on the Wikipedia article on mononyms
Surnames were introduced in Turkey only after World War I, by the country’s first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, as part of his Westernization and modernization programs. Common people can be addressed semi-formally by their given name plus the title Bey or Hanım (without surname), whereas politicians are often known by surname only (Ecevit, Demirel).
I work in QA, my colleague is exactly this guy. Breaks everything without even trying. Doesn’t even have much of an IT background, but man he’s good at breaking things.
The problem there is that you have to know exactly what you’ve done to mess it up in order to fix the bug, and when I fuck up my system, I usually have no idea what I did.
One of the things I like most about my customer-facing technical role is that users find the craziest bugs. My favorite is a bug in a chat program that would keep channels from rendering and crash the client. The only clue I got was “it seems to be affecting channels used by HR more than other departments, but it’s spreading.”
Turns out the rendering engine couldn’t handle a post that was an emoji followed by a newline and then another emoji. So when the HR team posted this, meaning “hair on fire” it broke things:
I did actually find a very similliar bug in the experimental rendering engine of element (the matrix client). So yes, this is something that exists somewhere else too.
User reported bugs can be wild. I had one where the user was tapping a button repeatedly so fast that the UI was not keeping up with the code and would no longer sync certain values properly. I’m talking like tap the button 15 times in a second. Another issue involved flipping back and forth between the same page like 10 times then turn the device Bluetooth off and immediately back on.
Why the fuck are your users flipping a page back and forth 10 times. I understand the Bluetooth bit, they wanted it to restart probably from a device not showing up. Also what was the issue
I can’t remember what the exact issue was that was produced by those steps. I want to say it was some sort of visual bug where parts of the page wouldn’t load. I do know that it only happened if you toggled Bluetooth within seconds of flipping the pages so many times. I honestly have no idea why the user decided to change pages so many times. You could take a little bit of time changing the pages, so maybe they kept viewing a page and backed out only to want to view the page again?
Gotta love user reported bugs. I had one that reported a product of ours crashed only on Mondays. We spent a total of 5 minutes thinking of a cause and appointed customer support for a Friday morning. Lo and behold the app still crashed.
In this case the app only crashed on Mondays… because that’s when this user actually used the application
QA in large companies seems to be first to get outsourced or at best, contacted into temp positions. First to get mixed, too. It’s the “skill-less labor” of the tech world.
In other words, blame the idiots in charge for not really investing in QA lol
Our QA manager is one of the founders of our company, so the work his team does is amazing. Doesn’t take away I get a heart attack any time I get a message from him…
Isn’t it, haha. And yet I know a place that outsources it to slavic countries to save cash. I guess they’re tech savvy, but as contract workers it’s hard to say their dedicated to their craft.
When I started working in the late 90s early 00s, every company had their own It-department.
These days it’s just some consultant or subscription to another company offering their consultants to do specific tasks.
This thread reminds me of why having an IT department makes good sense financially - today.
You can add up all the salaries, equipment and training costs and it’ll still be cheaper than wasting time and money in meetings with consultants trying to either explain the task or moan about pricing.
Shit doesn’t work, because they aren’t paid to make shit work.
I can make code that works for me and I can make code that works for you. The price is different, but you also need to know what you actually want it to do, and I don’t know how much money you are willing to sacrifice for us both fumbling around in that equation.
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The act of someone sitting at a brand new Mac, with a never-before-used interface, and immediately clicking the computer icon to drag it to the trash, is such a powerful image for me.
The statement of, “this is what I think of this computer” is so strong, because I have to believe that whomever did that must have been a tech person to be at the event; but perhaps they just thought it was a shortcut and didn’t like shortcuts on their desktop so they tried to remove it? Like, you can do this with Windows… Because the computer object (in Explorer) is immutable, and any reference to it is simply a link to that object.
I prefer the thought of them just being like “this computer is trash” and doing that, and causing the system to crash.
That one is a ‘whoever’ btw.
Okay, but can you explain why?
Whoever is the subject of the verb “did”. Whoever did something.
Whomever is an object, so whoever did something to whomever.
In other words, “whoever” does things; “whomever” has things done to them.
I think it’s more like they thought they were supposed to do that. I’m guessing they had no idea what to do, and putting an object in trash or recycle is something everyone understands, so that’s what their brain told them to do.
“okay… What happens if I do this?”
Moments like that are why I belive in timetravel, in the real timeline it took two years to find that bug and it was resolved quietly but of course someone is going to come back and troll them by doing it on day 1.
why would it take 2 years to find a bug? release something new to the public and it will always take seconds
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“I put the computer in the trash” is pretty easy to replicate.
Game makers should hire me to test their maps, if there’s a spot where I can get 100% stuck no matter what, you bet your shiny metal ass I’ll find it.
Me and dumb compact design blueprints on Dyson Sphere Program. I’ve had to tear parts of builds down an embarrassing amount of times to get unstuck because of the way hitboxes on refactionators and a few other buildings work in close proximity.
I’m so glad you can automate QA jobs
Automated tests are cool, but they definitely aren’t a panacea in place of humans
As a QA, ha! Good luck.
Why
don’t need an extra guy
Extra guys have brains that automation scripts don’t though
You sound like an asshole to work with.
what about the guy you need to maintain your test scripts.
the average developers doesn’t have enough of a test head to do a full end to end test suite
One of my favorite examples of the difficulty in idiot-proofing things comes from a national park ranger talking about the difficulty of designing a bear-proof garbage can. He said “There is considerable overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans.”
Can you put your computer in a bear proof garbage can?
You could, but who is worried a bear will use their computer?
The QA engineer obviously.
Lmao, yeah… You can make a can so secured a bear definitely won’t get in; but will people go to the effort to use it then?
Definitely some overlap there.
And I think that hits on the truth, which makes this less “iamverysmart”. It’s not that the tourists are dumb, it’s that they’re new and not willing to pay much attention to things like trash can design. 1% of a normal person’s attention presents a lot like a really dumb person.
Is it 1%? Maybe when they first try to open it they’re distracted But when doesn’t open and now they’re concentrating on the problem and still fail, then we have to kinda own up to the fact that a lot of people aren’t smarter than a bear.
I can’t believe this comment chain is this long and no one has pointed out that drunk and stoned humans are terrible at figuring stuff like this out.
You’re not planning for the dumbest human trying in earnest. You’re planning for humans who are tired, distracted and/or chemically altered. A 80 IQ person can figure out a weird trash can eventually if they are trying.
These comments (not just yours) feel misanthropic. I haven’t been to a campsite in ages so I don’t know what sort of trash can puzzlebox we’re talking about, but I work somewhere with alcohol so I can guess what the true issue is.
I’d be pretty distracted by the bear waiting behind me for his go.
I think if they can score 100 on an IQ test, they can figure out any reasonable trash can eventually, assuming the moving parts are visible. Many people would rather just litter.
Yah, that’s possible too. But I can’t say I’d figure anyone that litters is much smarter than a bear either.
Stupidity is a moral flaw after all.
Ecology (or just waste management) is even more complicated and boring than a garbage can.
It’s apathy all the way down.
100 is the average, implying half the population is lower than that, but otherwise, sure
Yup. The ranger did say “stupidest”, I guess, but I feel like at 70 or something you still know to pull on stuff in a few set ways until it moves.
And bears around 130 probably know that too.
At the risk of pedantry, if 100 is the average (the mean), we’re saying “most people are at 100”. If it were the median, then we’re implying “100 is the middle score of those sampled”. A subtle, but important difference.
i’m not really sure what IQ has to do with this. it was originally designed to measure people’s proficiency in school. it was not designed to be a general measure of intelligence. that was something that was co opted by eugenicists.
here’s a quote from Simon Bidet, the original creator of the IQ test, about his thoughts on the eugenicists using his test:
you can read more about this stuff on his wikipedia page. (the quote is from wikipedia)
even to this day, there is quite a bit of doubt as to how accurately IQ measures “general intelligence”
I know. It’s a shorthand quantitative measure everyone’s familiar with, though, so it’s useful for communicating. Thanks for adding a disclaimer for me.
A bear has time and motivation to keep trying over and over again to get into the garbage. People are generally much less determined to figure it out.
I’ve seen people carelessly throw away their garbage right next to garbage bins, because they couldn’t be bothered to get a little closer or aim.
The bear has more determination, because it has an incentive to get to the tasty, high calorie food that doesn’t require the energy expenditure of chasing it down and tearing it apart. Throwing away garbage into a designated container on the other hand is a chore that some people believe they can skip, because they are the sole protagonists in their own stupid little world.
I used to see people charitably, much like you do, until very recently. After witnessing for myself people staring into the sun and injuring themselves after being repeatedly warned, I now realize there are a substantial number of people who simply have rocks clattering around inside their skulls instead of brains
What do you mean? Sun is blocked = no sun rays = not blinded when staring directly. The logic is sound! Just like in programming.
I mean, that is true when 100% blocked (totality)
Congratulations! You’ve leveled up in the game of life.
I genuinely had someone stop and ask me why you can’t see the moon during an eclipse because “it’s got light in it right”.
They’re soon to replace our HR manager.
There was a listener question on a science podcast recently that asked about how the temperature changed on the moon during the recent solar eclipse.
They almost got what a solar eclipse was, but not quite. During a solar eclipse, the moon gets between the sun and the earth, blocking the light getting to the earth and casting a shadow on the earth. The side of the moon facing the earth is completely dark because the thing that normally lights it up (the sun) is completely behind it. But, the back side of the moon is getting full sun and just as hot as normal.
I think part of the problem with understanding all this is that the sun is just so insanely bright. Like, it’s a bit hard to believe that the full moon is so bright just because it’s reflecting sunlight. It’s also amazing that the “wandering stars” (planets) look like stars when they’re just blobs of rocks or gases that are reflecting the insanely bright light of the sun.
It’s amazing if you think about it. Light comes out of the sun in every possible direction. A tiny fraction of it hits the surface of Mercury, and only some of that light is reflected back out. The light reflected from Mercury goes in almost every direction. A tiny fraction of it hits the earth. But, even with that indirect bounce, it’s bright enough to see with the naked eye.
A solar or lunar eclipse?
The solar eclipse from Monday.
Answer: Light travels in straight lines (well, for this purpose) and the moon is roughly an opaque sphere. Maybe you could see it with earthshine, but I get the impression the corona is still much brighter.
I’ve heard dumber.
There was a solar eclipse when I was in grade six. One of my classmates was riding his bike home, and was stupidly looking at the eclipse, and got hit by a car. The irony.
Omg that’s so messed up but so incredible haha, was he okay after?
It was pretty bad. He missed a lot of school. I think he ended up repeating grade six. I never saw him much after that, but I did hear that he got married to another person I went to school with eventually, so presumably his life wasn’t ruined or anything.
I’m curious if he was okay before.
So you’re somewhere between 18 and 58 than
Ladies and gentlemen, we gottem.
Holy shit this. And not even “educated” people. Where I work is about half degree holding engineers… many of these engineers were seen outside staring at the partial eclipse Monday.
“Pfff I have a master’s degree I know what I’m doing”
Sounds like your typical engineer. I passed fluid dynamics, I deserve to look at the big ball of plasma.
My eyes haven’t hurt this bad since studying for differential equations theory… Have I told you I’m an engineer?
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Being able to see properly is also something they’ll never be able to do again, so, I hope that one second was “spiritual” enough for them lol
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You’re immediately taking the argument to the extreme. You won’t immediately go blind, but it will damage your retina in ways you sometimes don’t notice because the brain compensates for it. It happened to my uncle when he was a welder, he had a second blind spot where he couldn’t see sharply, but it didn’t really affect his quality of life.
There’s a pretty big difference between temporary pain and permanent damage though.
Unless you royally fuck up walking on coals you get some pain, fuck up a little and you just get some blisters.
Glancing at the eclipse while it’s in totality is not going to give you permanent damage. Now if you stare at it until totality is over and the sun is on full blast again…
Or if you’re not in the path of totality…. The risk just isn’t worth it.
Let’s just not look up at the bright thing in the sky that can cause permanent damage at any given time.
…and ignore one of the coolest things there is to see on the sky
playing russian roulette is not going to give you permanent damage every 5/6 times
This reminds me of that poster in my highschool chem lab:
Same with shooting without eye/ear pro. I dunno about other folks but I use my eyes and ears a lot, and I’d hate to miss out on music and color the rest of my life because I thought I would have a transcendent experience blowing them out for a minute. 😬
The partial eclipse is nothing special. Any given location gets one every few years or so.
Totality is the really neat and special thing, and it isn’t damaging to your eyes. (assuming you don’t pre-empt or overshoot the timing)
Eclipses happen every year like clockwork (it basically is clockwork, but on a huge scale). Eclipse seasons are spring and fall, around the equinoxes. You could very easily fly to see a total eclipse every few years if you want to, because we know when they are going to happen and where will have totality - it’s very routine stuff. There’s literally nothing special at all about the one that just happened, except that a lot of people haven’t seen one before because it hasn’t happened -at that location- in a time.
So no, absolutely not something you’ll never get a chance to see again, tho you won’t be able if you go blind like a fucking moron.
Total eclipses aren’t rare, but them being in an accessible location and not just over some random place in the ocean is. I looked this up the other day, and any one particular location on Earth will see a total eclipse once every 350 years or so.
Except they aren’t just visible from a single location, so almost every time they are over an accessible place on land. Not for the whole thing, sure, but visible all the same.
This might be helpful for reference. It’s maps of where the next 50 years worth of total eclipses fall. The first one that isn’t really visible by people is 2039 in Antarctica. There’s a few like that. Other than that, there’s at least an island you could go to for it, and see one every few years. Eclipses being totally unavailable to view is actually far more rare than seeing one :)
https://time.com/4897581/total-solar-eclipse-years-next/
If I had someone run through hot coals I would scold them, sure. Much like for being angry about others not believing in zombie carpenters or letting quacks give their kids overpriced sugar pills. But that’s jot the context right now, is it?
The engineer in the joke should have ordered some Bobby Tables for dessert.
The monitor disappeared rather than the computer, but we can assume the tower somewhere under the desk did as well. But what of the keyboard? It’s in the icon, yet remains after deletion!
I think you found a bug. Either the keyboard is not compatible with the bin or we have a immutable peripheral and we should consider containment.
SCP should be able to secure the keyboard anomaly
Retired gif or inspired gif
Yes.
If they crashed the computer irrecoverably did they have to throw away the computer after?
They then used an even larger mouse to drag the actual computer to the garbage bin.
The garbage bin then caught fire.
This is the origin of the dumpster fire meme.
A capybara or was it a smaller mouse then that?
I’m probably missing a joke here, but irrecoverably as in they most likely needed another computer to fix it: In this case, create a new startup floppy disk - there was no hard drive, after all.
Why can’t you just take the hard drive out of the garbage and reinstall?
The computer is inaccessible, and if you did that, the best way to fix it, while also avoiding any other potential issues stemming from that, is just to reinstall the thing.
The beepy thing, the brrr-brr thing or the flashy thing?
The box what goes bang if you poke it wrong.
Yes I believe they dragged it to the wastebasket
Thanks for the clarification - it makes sense now.
As a programmer, I consider The User to be the enemy. No matter how thoroughly I seemingly test my code, the second the user gets their hands on it, it breaks left and right from all the crazy shit they do.
As a user, I sometimes do everything I can to see what breaks a system. (Often unintentionally)
Then, I don’t do those this things.
(Learning permissions on Linux was a great way to destroy a system. Eg “sudo chown -R user:user /” didn’t work as I first thought)
Ha, I’ve done the same thing
Let me guess; does it recursively remove all permissions from the file system?
Recursively changes ownership of all files to the user, which breaks tons of system processes
The command in question recursively changes file ownership to account “user” and group “user” for every file and folder in the system. With linux, where many processes are run as root and on various other accounts (like apache or www-data for web server, mysql for MySql database and so on) and after that command none of the services can access the files they need to function. And as the whole system is broken on a very fundamental level changing everything back would be a huge pain in the rear.
On this ubuntu system I’m using right now I have 53 separate user accounts for various things. Some are obsolete and not in use, but majority are used for something and 15 of them are in active use for different services. Different systems have a bit different numbers, but you’d basically need to track down all the millions of files on your computer and fix each of their permission by hand. It can be done, and if you have similar system to copy privileges from you could write a script to fix most of the things, but in vast majority of cases it’s easier to just wipe the drive and reinstall.
I am so grateful for snapshotting file systems like ZFS. Restore the last working snapshot and continue on.
I was a QA engineer. I think one of the guys on the team I was on developed a stress response from hearing me walk over to his desk.
Lots of “page crashes if the user doesn’t have a last name”
“Why wouldn’t they have a last name??”
“No idea, but 372 users in the DB don’t, and 20 of them were created this month so it’s not an old problem”
“incoherent muttering and cursing”
It’s pretty common https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mononym
my users are not allowed to be mononym
Some cultures don’t use last names.
UPDATE User SET Last name=‘Solo’ WHERE LastName=‘’;
You can thank Disney for that one.
@jjjalljs @DharkStare https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
Because I have been completely unable to find it again and this seems like a relevant place to ask: does anyone have a link to an article similar to this, that I believe might have been titled ‘My First Name is My Last Name’? This is made extra hard to look up because I’ve forgotten the specific culture and details it’s talking about, but it’s about the same basic issue with cultural conventions on names.
I used to work with a Greek guy called Argyros Argyros - cool guy, but suspect he was an outlier. Named after his dad, so certainly some people are named that way. Icelandic for instance would traditionally use “Given Name” “Patronym from father” - Magnus Magnusson was quite famous in the UK; Björk Guðmundsdóttir might be the most famous internationally, but she’s not a “double”. There’s quite a few cultures - Hungarian, Chinese, Japanese, … - that write their names as “Family Name” “Given Name” as opposed to the other way around, if that’s what you mean?
Apologies for being so sketchy on the details but I really can’t remember too many of the specifics. I’m fairly certain it wasn’t that his family name came first, because that’s fairly straightforward. I think the author might have been from an east or southeast Asian culture? I think that part of the essay might have been about how addressing him as Mr. Firstname is actually more formal than Mr. Lastname, even though Firstname is not his family name. I don’t want to keep guessing on more details about how the naming conventions were different because I’m probably going to get it wrong, I have fairly low confidence in what I remember from it.
Could it be Turkish? Just stumbled on this section on the Wikipedia article on mononyms
I love that article. There are also ones about dates and times. The more you deal with dates and times, the more you realize how messed up they are.
“Huh, I wonder” has been driving general scientific progress and heart failures in engineering since forever.
I would be absolutely amazing at this job, I do this naturally, I am inescapably an agent of chaos.
It can be a good job if you go for a lead position. Then you’re designing tests basically.
I work in QA, my colleague is exactly this guy. Breaks everything without even trying. Doesn’t even have much of an IT background, but man he’s good at breaking things.
The problem there is that you have to know exactly what you’ve done to mess it up in order to fix the bug, and when I fuck up my system, I usually have no idea what I did.
You could just blame the devs for incomplete logging.
I once deleted system32…That’s when I began calling the shots.
I’m a good enough software engineer that this isn’t true. I bet I get paid a lot more than you. 😎
(The above statement is not a truthful statement.)
One of the things I like most about my customer-facing technical role is that users find the craziest bugs. My favorite is a bug in a chat program that would keep channels from rendering and crash the client. The only clue I got was “it seems to be affecting channels used by HR more than other departments, but it’s spreading.”
Turns out the rendering engine couldn’t handle a post that was an emoji followed by a newline and then another emoji. So when the HR team posted this, meaning “hair on fire” it broke things:
I did actually find a very similliar bug in the experimental rendering engine of element (the matrix client). So yes, this is something that exists somewhere else too.
User reported bugs can be wild. I had one where the user was tapping a button repeatedly so fast that the UI was not keeping up with the code and would no longer sync certain values properly. I’m talking like tap the button 15 times in a second. Another issue involved flipping back and forth between the same page like 10 times then turn the device Bluetooth off and immediately back on.
Why the fuck are your users flipping a page back and forth 10 times. I understand the Bluetooth bit, they wanted it to restart probably from a device not showing up. Also what was the issue
I can’t remember what the exact issue was that was produced by those steps. I want to say it was some sort of visual bug where parts of the page wouldn’t load. I do know that it only happened if you toggled Bluetooth within seconds of flipping the pages so many times. I honestly have no idea why the user decided to change pages so many times. You could take a little bit of time changing the pages, so maybe they kept viewing a page and backed out only to want to view the page again?
Gotta love user reported bugs. I had one that reported a product of ours crashed only on Mondays. We spent a total of 5 minutes thinking of a cause and appointed customer support for a Friday morning. Lo and behold the app still crashed.
In this case the app only crashed on Mondays… because that’s when this user actually used the application
Why would you post this, my phone exploded and took a shit. I didnt know it could do that.
Be thankful it didn’t take an explosive shit.
Don’t worry, I had a bit too much to drink last night so it’s covered
Before we had mindblown emoji, we had this.
Before that we had ‽:-)
QA today seems to just be releasing software in whatever state and maybe fixing it later.
QA in large companies seems to be first to get outsourced or at best, contacted into temp positions. First to get mixed, too. It’s the “skill-less labor” of the tech world.
In other words, blame the idiots in charge for not really investing in QA lol
Our QA manager is one of the founders of our company, so the work his team does is amazing. Doesn’t take away I get a heart attack any time I get a message from him…
Which is funny because you need a technical AND a creative person to handle QA.
Isn’t it, haha. And yet I know a place that outsources it to slavic countries to save cash. I guess they’re tech savvy, but as contract workers it’s hard to say their dedicated to their craft.
Oh I am. Blaming the end users still buying buggy shit too.
“Users will let us know if something is really broken, then we’ll see if it’s worth fixing”
When I started working in the late 90s early 00s, every company had their own It-department. These days it’s just some consultant or subscription to another company offering their consultants to do specific tasks.
This thread reminds me of why having an IT department makes good sense financially - today.
You can add up all the salaries, equipment and training costs and it’ll still be cheaper than wasting time and money in meetings with consultants trying to either explain the task or moan about pricing.
Shit doesn’t work, because they aren’t paid to make shit work.
I can make code that works for me and I can make code that works for you. The price is different, but you also need to know what you actually want it to do, and I don’t know how much money you are willing to sacrifice for us both fumbling around in that equation.
“Look how much
money we can saveproductivity we can eliminate by outsourcing IT!”One could, indeed, argue that consulting firms make their bread and butter by not having things work but fixed temporarily.