It's not just printers. Laptops recognise people who are willing and able to crack them open. I've had multiple family members claim their problems disappeared the instant I gave their device a stern look.

🎶Back up in your ass with the resurrection🎶

some computers suck and there's no amount of tweaks or reinstalling an OS that will fix it.

And somehow I've owned every single one of them.

Just search for “cpu binning”, anything that slips through the cracks of that process are exactly this.

I have a little more foundation for that.

I think you're right.

yeah it's called a defective or out of spec component. those are the ones that fail typically.

That intuition is correct. Hardware isn't a magical exactly perfect thing every time. Everything has "flaws" and so you set tolerance levels and do your best.

CPUs and GPUs and RAM and drives all have specs they are aiming for, like a CPU manufacturer may want the next chips on the assembly line to be >4ghz, they crank out 1,000 of them and benchmark them. Some hit 4, some do 3.9, some may be 4.1 even. As long as it's above spec it gets labeled the 4ghz Ultra or whatever brand. But the chips that run fine, but are slower, say 3.5ghz, then they just slap the 3.5ghz Mideange Label on those and sell for %20 less. The ones coming out at 3ghz get the Low End Label and are half the price.

That way they sell them all and everyone is happy (mostly).

Also that pesky law of thermodynamics ruins our fun and hardware gets worse over time too. Depends on the defects and lots of variables, but maybe one case didn't cool as well so the CPU gets hotter and it had a defect that degraded it's speed a bit so now that 4ghz Ultra is actually running at 3ghz, but that happened after the user bought it, so it is just "a slow machine" as you said.

It's very real and you aren't crazy for feeling like or even proving that some really are slower than others.

everything is better without business majors

Someone will be having a problem

Some people are bogon emitters. They radiate fundamental particles of cluelessness.

when I walk over it starts working

Some people are bogon absorbers.

According to legend aving a theoretical physicist close enough can break any well designed equiment nearby. In the same way a good engineer can make the same equipment work by proximity only.

I think that some appliances have a dark soul and just hate their owners. A lot of time I will take something back to a shop because it just won't turn on, open, rotate, heat up or whatever they are supposed to do. The person at the shop tries the cursed thing once and just like that it works perfectly and I feel like an idiot. Then, back home, it will work for a couple of times and then stop again.

And it happens also with myself in the role of the "fixer". A colleague will show me an app that does not work, a laptop that won't boot or a printer they can't connect to and it all works if I try it.

I sometimes call it my "healing hands" when a user swears up and down that they did everything I told them to but the problem persists. Until I demonstrate it personally and voilá, the problem is gone.

I have that too, that drives people insane.

Maybe it's time. E.g. waiting for IT to walk over or remote in, or doing something slower because the user is explaining what they're doing.

I find that waiting for the click to have a result makes some problems not appear, vs. the user double/right clicking something 6 times because they don't want to wait. Me waiting for the OS to finish loading everything, vs. the user clicking something 6 times while services or even UI elements are still loading.

I feel like there's a hierarchy to it. The presence of people above me will make my things start working. My presence among them will make their things stop working. The presence of people below me will make my things stop working, and my presence will make their things start working.

I think it has more to do with expanded computing resources allowing for devs to skip optimizing their code since it is no longer absolutely necessary to get something useable.

Nonsense! Your idea is extremely well-founded!

modern computers are optimized to sell you shit and steal your data, not be efficient

that kind of thinking will get you burned at the stake before the temple of the holy Linux, his son self-hosting, and the spirit, FOSS.

Part of me would quite like to fuck around installing Linux and creating a home NAS.

I used to tinker for hours on our family pc back in the 90s and 00s trying to optimise it/make it work.

But now? The other, bigger part simply cant be arsed. Windows 11 just works. It does what I need it to do.

I thought I'd finally found the perfect balance between minimal tinkering and the features I want with Noctalia Shell. Then I switched to a systemd-free distro and it doesn't work any more. Back to .config I go.

I heard that being called computer mana.

If you don't have enough, you'll encounter all kinds of errors that'll disappear as soon as someone with a higher amount of mana approaches

it’s because most errors are software state issues and those kinda people never ever power cycle regardless of what they claim

source: 7 years of phone tech support

Like, the novice was unsuccessfully getting the machine to work, and then when Knight did the same thing it worked?

Holy Baader–Meinhof, Batman! I just found out about that 2 days ago

https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html

The manual for the computer I'm using right now says to wait 8 seconds before turning it back on.

This is not wholly without a true foundation. Capacities can store charge for some time and e.g. keep data in ram (I think this is only true of older types of memory now though?)

What’s frustrating is the occasional device that literally needs 30 seconds to drain its caps and you go back and forth with tech support claiming that you turned it off for a minute when it was really only eight seconds.

I like to game on my couch, so I game on my laptop.

Only with turbo button.

Get that Froggy suit, son.

Must doctors and nurses too.

Let me get you the address of a ranch that is exactly what you're looking for

Hello fellow X-COM player.

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.

Reminded me of the book “The Name of the Wind”.

You very well may already know this, but in case you don't, us humans aren't generally good at picturing true random. We tend to assume an even distribution is random where with true random, finding long strings of repeating numbers is expected to happen.

Yeah, but I’m still liking the answers, though. Maybe I should’ve worded it differently.

I really think Command Line Interface and keyboard shortcuts should be more mainstream. It's just such a powerful and efficient way to navigate your system.

Let's add to this that keyboard, mouse, and touchpad are interfaces to the same system and so should have access to the same behaviors so you don't need all three of them to be productive. Looking at you MacOS.