this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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Showerthoughts

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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.

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Hello, IT. Have you tried turning it off and on again?

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 hours ago

Under the same logic, All problems are also caused by turning it off and on again.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

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.)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 150 points 1 day ago (3 children)

In theory. In reality it's not on or off it's always on and it's high vs low voltage.

[–] [email protected] 99 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Ah, so the answer is just to get high!

[–] [email protected] 65 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Orrrr get low

To the windowwwwwww...

I'm old

[–] [email protected] 10 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Thx now I have Need for Speed Underground in my mind

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Man I loved that game. I didn't even play the story much. It's was just a fun drive around game

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago

It had a story?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Till the sweat drip down my balls

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 23 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 22 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

My crippling anxiety attack

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 15 hours ago

Ya. It's more like "current go this way or current go that way" than it is high/low voltages.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)

And yet I still have electronics to this day that require me to pull the plug to get going again 😂

[–] [email protected] 12 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 21 hours ago

washing machine

overflow

heh 🫧

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 23 hours ago

That's actually why. You have to drain the power from the circuits.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 19 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 48 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 15 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

Until some stray gamma ray hits just the right spot, flips a bit and either nothing at all of everything all at once happens.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 hours ago

Advanced speedrun strats.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago

Studied computer science. The answer is yes.

NP = P, folks. Pack it up and go home.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

We need a cells at work type of anime but about computers.

It’s all just a bunch of rythm dancing

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago

I come from the net. Through systems, peoples and cities to this place: Mainframe. My format: Guardian; to mend and defend. To defend my new-found friends, their hopes and dreams. To defend them from their enemies. They say the user lives outside the net and inputs games for pleasure. No one knows for sure, but I intend to find out.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

Sometimes the fix is to turn it off, take it out back and beat it with a stick.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 19 hours ago

Damn it feels good to be a gangsta

[–] [email protected] 6 points 20 hours ago

I got a killa up inside of me

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Mostly, though there's also fire-fighting too.

img

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 day ago (2 children)

That would also mean that all IT problems are caused by turning something off and on again at some level.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 22 hours ago (3 children)

If you just stopped using your computer it wouldn’t crash.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 21 hours ago

[ticket closed]

[–] [email protected] 4 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

It's why I say as a software engineer: computers were a mistake.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

A million years ago some asshole fish decided to crawl on land and now I have to deal with IT problems.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 19 hours ago

This is only true for quantum computers.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (4 children)

"Since words can be represented in binary, thus as a sequence of ones and zeroes, [..], doesn't that mean that all questions can be answered by saying no, then yes again at some level?"

How has no one pointed out yet that this is conceptually wrong? Turning something off & on again is cycling the same switch. Solutions to IT problems are setting different bits, which is binary for "using different words".

[–] [email protected] 6 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

How dare you use logic on my computer logic-related shower thought.

But yeah, I get what you mean. I had that thought at some point after posting. This is why I should probably just keep it in this silly thread and not write any philosophy essays soon.

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