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Which computer-related belief do you hold without any foundation? (ani.social)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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[–] 9 points 6 months ago (3 children)

I (mostly jokingly, but also a little bit really and sentimentally) believe that physical baremetal computers/servers have souls, and must therefore have hostnames that are names, because names are powerful and soulful and you should have respect for things that have souls. Which is why I kind of hate the "cattle, not pets" model in my own practice.

Stick identifying categorizing prefixes on it, of course, and you can group clusters under the same name with a numeric suffix, but it's gotta have a real name in there somewhere.

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  • [–] 8 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    I had this bad when I first got into embedded design. I built a Nixie tube clock with a Parallax SX chip in raw assembly.

    Running at 4MHz, I had to give it a nop loop where it spun for 4 million iterations just to increment the clock for a second. It lived a whole life between seconds and it would do this thanklessly tedious work forever.

    Or how about airbag sensors or seatbelt pretensioners that check sensors thousands of times a second for years in the off chance that they detect a crash and save the life of a person who they will never comprehend for the 100ms duration of a crash just to get scrapped with the rest of the vehicle.

    At one point I wanted to write a short story based on this concept. A story of unrequited love between a person and a machine that they don’t even know about.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago

    That's a really really good story idea, and I love the thought and sentiment behind it - even with my own way of looking at machines, I'd never thought of things that way. You should write it!

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