Computer-touchers!
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Computer-touchers! Do you believe, deep in your heart of hearts, and against all material evidence, that computers recognize and behave differently around different people? They’ll gaslight some users when they are alone; other people can coax them into weird modes just with a touch; they fear the presence of the sysadmin and immediately work properly again.
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Clemens aka datareplied to Deborah Pickett last edited by
@futzle I'm an embedded linux engineer mostly working with industrial hardware, I debugged so many weird edge cases that I do have actual proof that our hardware behaves differently depending on environment and people. I measured the timing difference that lead to a race condition one co-worker would regularly hit, but nobody else could reproduce.
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Deborah Pickettreplied to Deborah Pickett last edited by
I never watched The X-Files, but I want to believe [sorry] that there was an episode where Mulder was convinced of some paranormal reason that computers behave this way, and Scully was able to demonstrate that no, it was just some race condition between the network and UI threads. Please regale me with your lived experience of the series.
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@futzle so one of the tropes of this series was exactly that it introduced plots that could be explicable either through scientism or the paranormal, and [before the whole series went completely off the rails] left it up to the viewer.
And IMO it’s the same with touching computers, the complexity is so powerful that you can explain it with technology or you can explain it by anthropological means: if the PC really is fucking with you for shits and giggles, there’s no way you’ll ever know
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@[email protected] @[email protected] having dealt with hundreds of the exact same systems being used by hundreds of individuals at places like schools, hospitals, and call centers ... can confirm. it's the person, not the machine. i blame the unique electromagnetic & gravitational fields that each person has. you either make good connection with the machine's spirit, or you don't.
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@futzle this is incidentally the exact niche in which folk magic and esoteric practices thrive, where there are known functions but the actual working is subject to so much randomness you may as well say a prayer to Pan
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@liamvhogan I get you, but I don't think we should ascribe any form of magic to a computer, that's how you get a whole lot of people trying to create AI jesus. I do think we've made computing too difficult and we continually make both software and hardware worse, though. @futzle
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Elizabeth M, book bothererreplied to Liam :fnord: last edited by
@liamvhogan @futzle (as someone with a background in studying medieval magic practices) you're not wrong: if your magic didn't work was it because the magic doesn't exist or was it you not trying hard enough to prepare and discipline yourself to make the magic work?
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@voltagex @futzle actually that’s important to note. Up until now the computer touchers have always said, with justification, that these are just fancy logic machines. They must respond exactly to inputs, consistently, in a way that’s amenable to testing.
But the more AI functions get brought in, the more that ceases to be true, and the more computers will be items of magic, in the full sense.
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An OpenGL Rendering of a Skullreplied to Liam :fnord: last edited by
@liamvhogan @futzle my take on this is that the observer effect is real because the original user behaves differently in ways they are not aware of when tech support is looking over their shoulder
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@elzbethmrgn @futzle exactly exactly! There was a great academic-popular history of magic I read a few years ago [& which escapes my memory] which pointed out, when we say something ‘worked like magic’ we don’t mean it failed
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An OpenGL Rendering of a Skullreplied to An OpenGL Rendering of a Skull last edited by
@liamvhogan @futzle my second take is that the computer's persona, even if it's a psychosocial entity created by the users' imagination, is a factor in the whole process, and yes I'm aware that this could lead to a chaos magic theory of tech support
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Liam :fnord:replied to An OpenGL Rendering of a Skull last edited by
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@liamvhogan @futzle I have in my server rack a small altar to Lain.
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@liamvhogan @fsvo @futzle Hey do you guys remember when we had CRT TVs and analogue signals how sometimes it seemed that poor signal quality and high static wouldn’t appear as bad during ad breaks from time to time? Or how reception would always improve as long as you weren't fully sitting in the most comfortable chair?