To me it sounds like a complaint about what are variably called “cargo-cult”, “voodoo”, or “superstitious” practices in IT: repeating curative procedures that are available to mind, without understanding why (or if) they ever worked, in situations where they may not have any application. There are a lot of procedures that users can learn by rote without having to know why they ever work, and that are cheap and safe enough that using them when they don’t do any good isn’t likely to do any harm either.
I think it is a comment on the tendency of human minds to model complex systems as simple ones and therefore stick strongly to a few remedies whether they are sensible or not—ancestrally “whack it with a club” but in the case of computers, “reboot it”, “run the virus scanner” and “defrag it”. Admittedly, for old computers that relied on vacuum tubes whose connections would sometimes work loose, “whack it with a club” did, in fact, occasionally work.
Admittedly, for old computers that relied on vacuum tubes whose connections would sometimes work loose, “whack it with a club” did, in fact, occasionally work.
Occasionally for more modern computers, too! This can happen when volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the air get adsorbed by circuit board contacts, where the VOCs react to form frictional polymers. Then...
Sometimes an apparently faulty circuit board starts to work again when it is unplugged and plugged back in again. Engineers call this a “no-problem-found” job. Frictional polymers are bound loosely to the boards, so a smart tap can be enough to clear the problem, in the same way that a thump to an errant TV or video often fixes the fault.
It sounds like Michael Wilson’s “We must program the AI in LISP, because if we don’t, LISP purists will spend the next several subjective millennia arguing that it should have been done in LISP.”
EDIT: Read the XKCD. It sounds like typical Strossian cynicism about how the ‘Singularity’ will look like a malfunctioning computer or something. Obviously not talking about the intelligence explosion.
Randall Monroe, xkcd 1180.
I could think of several possible interpretations of this, but I’m not sure which one you or Munroe have in mind. Can you justify it?
To me it sounds like a complaint about what are variably called “cargo-cult”, “voodoo”, or “superstitious” practices in IT: repeating curative procedures that are available to mind, without understanding why (or if) they ever worked, in situations where they may not have any application. There are a lot of procedures that users can learn by rote without having to know why they ever work, and that are cheap and safe enough that using them when they don’t do any good isn’t likely to do any harm either.
I think it is a comment on the tendency of human minds to model complex systems as simple ones and therefore stick strongly to a few remedies whether they are sensible or not—ancestrally “whack it with a club” but in the case of computers, “reboot it”, “run the virus scanner” and “defrag it”. Admittedly, for old computers that relied on vacuum tubes whose connections would sometimes work loose, “whack it with a club” did, in fact, occasionally work.
Admittedly, rebooting works surprisingly often (especially on Windows).
And don’t we all know it…
For those unable to risk whacking, ‘disassemble and reseat all cables’ also works. Did it yesterday.
Occasionally for more modern computers, too! This can happen when volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the air get adsorbed by circuit board contacts, where the VOCs react to form frictional polymers. Then...
(From a 1997 New Scientist article (PDF).)
Although the majority of problems encountered at my school’s IT desk can be solved by rebooting the ones that can’t are a pain to fix.
It sounds like Michael Wilson’s “We must program the AI in LISP, because if we don’t, LISP purists will spend the next several subjective millennia arguing that it should have been done in LISP.”
EDIT: Read the XKCD. It sounds like typical Strossian cynicism about how the ‘Singularity’ will look like a malfunctioning computer or something. Obviously not talking about the intelligence explosion.
Not sure I see that—this is about how non-computer people think about computers, not about the real behaviour of a real singularity.