Matthew GarrettFeb 21
Wondering why a bunch of my network infrastructure was weirdly slow and finally discovered that the cable to one of my switches had come loose on my router and the eero plugged into that switch had lapsed back into wireless backhaul and was happily routing everything else plugged into that switch via wireless instead but my wireless backhaul is absolute dogshit so everything sucked
Show threadMatthew GarrettFeb 21
My network topology does not seem especially complicated but it's already complicated enough that things can break in ways that cause abject confusion so clearly I should just get into BGP because how could that possibly be worse
Show threadMatthew GarrettFeb 21
("Why do you post like this, Matthew" I hear none of you say, but I respond anyway. Because growing up I never saw people who knew things about computers talk about how everything was broken most of the time and so I assumed that I was doing something wrong, and now I am here to tell you that despite being *extremely* computer my stuff is randomly broken all the time and it takes me far too long to figure it out, so it's not you we just build things that humans are bad at handling)
Show threadRyan Castellucci (they/them) 
@mjg59 the more computer you are, the more broken your computers are, and the more cursed the causes are
Feb 21 at 8:05amWeb
Show threadjbaggsFeb 21
@ryanc @mjg59 Too computer. Such broke. (Or something like that.)
Show threadRyan Castellucci (they/them) Feb 21
@jbaggs @mjg59 Many problem. Wow.
Show threadMatthew GarrettFeb 21
@ryanc Ok but printers are broken for *everyone*
Show threadRyan Castellucci (they/them) Feb 21
@mjg59 My printer works fine, but I do keep a baseball bat next to it in case it makes a noise I don't recognize.
Show threadMatthew GarrettFeb 21
@ryanc I recently introduced a printer I found on the sidewalk and I am astonished it has not tried to murder me in my sleep
Show threadRyan Castellucci (they/them) Feb 21
@mjg59 How do you know it hasn't tried to murder you, though? Maybe it's trying really hard, but as a printer, the logistics of murder are very difficult.
Show threadMatthew GarrettFeb 21
@ryanc I mean honestly if a device wants to murder me but has no capability to do so do I even really care
Show threadRyan Castellucci (they/them) Feb 21
@mjg59 Maybe it's slowly poisoning you?
Show threadHenryk PlötzFeb 21
@ryanc @mjg59 If I were a printer, trying to murder someone, I'd subtly alter the numbers on any printout, hoping to corrupt a medication plan or something.
https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning
Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents

Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents Please see the “condensed time line” section (the next one) for a time line of how the Xerox saga unfolded. It for example depicts that I did not push the thing to the public right away, but gave Xerox a lot of time before I did so. <iframe width="700" height="394" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/c0O6UXrOZJo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

D. Kriesel
Show threadRyan Castellucci (they/them) Feb 21
@henryk @mjg59 Oh, diabolical.
Show threadNazoFeb 21
@ryanc @henryk @mjg59 I think printers get us by messing with our minds slowly over time. Gaslighting is their favorite thing. For example, telling you the ink is out and then if you shake the cartridge you can hear ink sloshing around inside.
Show threadTemplaillo AhíFeb 21
@henryk @ryanc @mjg59 Damn, is this tweet evergreen.
Show threadjbaggsFeb 21
@ryanc @mjg59 Death by 1000 paper cuts.
Show threadCaptain of the SS El FaroFeb 21
@mjg59 @ryanc [checks device manager] huh, what is this device called Murderbot? Ah, the Canon Pixma 9000 Murderbot Pro
Show threadF4GRX SébastienFeb 21
@ryanc @mjg59 as we all do
Show threadRiku VoipioFeb 21
@mjg59 @ryanc One of the reasons I haven't gone to 3D printing. It adds a whole dimension to things that can go wrong
Show threadMarcos DioneFeb 21
@ryanc @mjg59 similar to "in the cobbler's house the children go barefoot", we have this "in the smith's house you find wooden knives", which somehow feels more representative, maybe because the cobbler could think that shoes are bad for kids :)
Show threadabadideaFeb 21
@ryanc @mjg59 my husband is a lawyer, I am not the first beep booper he’s been involved with, and he asked me with a very frustrated tone why every beep booper he knows is always like “hang on, the computer I’m using can’t display in color atm, but my good monitor is hooked up to one with a broken ethernet port, just give me a few minutes to code up a way to transmit jpegs over speaker and mic and I’m sure the meme you sent will be very funny…”
Show threadwoe2youFeb 21

@0xabad1dea @ryanc @mjg59 Beep boopers keep things that other people would just throw away because the beep booper knows how to fix it and will get around to it one of these days, honest. In the meantime: Heath Robinson workaround because the borkedness constraint makes it a Fun Puzzle.

Edit: if you faved this toot you have to take one (1) thing out of the pile and fix it this weekend as penance for encouraging me.

Show threadStruanFeb 21
@woe2you @0xabad1dea @ryanc @mjg59 can I still get tokenring Ethernet bridges? So I can at least claim there's a use for my PCMCIA Tokenring card!
Show threadBen RosengartFeb 22
@Struang People Can’t Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms (but somehow I still remember that)
Show threadIAintShootinMisFeb 21
@woe2you @0xabad1dea @ryanc @mjg59 I fixed my janked up LilyGo TBeam this morning. That counts retroactively right?
Show threadwoe2youFeb 21
@iaintshootinmis I'll accept it if you haven't added anything to the pile today.
Show threadIAintShootinMisFeb 21
@woe2you nope, travel day for a conference, nothing added!
Show threadPsyMar aka SamFeb 21

@woe2you @0xabad1dea
I think there's also a factor of us fucking around with settings that normal users wouldn't -- and that the QA testers didn't consider.

For instance: I had a win98SE computer that bluescreened like every 10 minutes. After a few weeks/months my dad finally figured out that, when he had installed win95 on it, he'd installed CABS. and when he installed win98 on it, he didn't install CABS. and then I fucked around with adding/removing system components without the CD in the drive, which added the components back from CABS -- the win95 CABS on the win98 system.

And apparently Microsoft hadn't thought to *stop* anyone from doing this with, y'know, version-checking on the CABS.

Show threadMayaMayaMayaFeb 21
@woe2you @0xabad1dea @ryanc @mjg59 I lost most of The Pile in a series of moves so I'm Like This and I don't even get to fix old stuff.
Show threadGeorge BFeb 21

@0xabad1dea @ryanc @mjg59

In Arabic, the saying is

باب النجار مخلوع

Which means "the carpenter's door is crooked"

Show threadPacyFeb 21
In Italy we say "il ciabattino va in giro con le scarpe rotte", which means "The shoemaker walks around with broken shoes"
Show threadSimon ThobyFeb 21
@Pacy And in France we say "Les cordonniers sont toujours les plus mal chaussés", which is almost the same idiom: "The shoe makers always have the worst shoes".
Show threadsteelmanFeb 21
@Pacy Good for them! In Poland they walk without shoes whatsoever. (pol. Szewc bez butów chodzi)
Show threadDaniel LandauFeb 21
@Pacy in Finland we say "suutarin lapsilla ei ole kenkiä", which means "the shoemaker's kids don't have shoes"
Show threadPhilSalkieFeb 21

@gbargoud @0xabad1dea @ryanc @mjg59

"The enemy of the good is not the bad, it is the good enough."

"Just because it works doesn't mean it's right."

Gently impressing these concepts on our customers is about half our business model.

Show threadBill, organizer of stuffFeb 21
@gbargoud @0xabad1dea @ryanc @mjg59 I've heard it said "never use a plumber's toilet"
Show threadSchwestalineFeb 21
@gbargoud @0xabad1dea @ryanc @mjg59 in German it is "the shoemaker's children go around barefoot" 🤭
Show threadIAintShootinMisFeb 21
@gbargoud @0xabad1dea @ryanc @mjg59 in English, the Cobblers children have no shoes.
Show threadAztec4LifeFeb 21
@0xabad1dea @ryanc @mjg59 A contractors house is never finished.
Show threadPseudo NymFeb 21

@0xabad1dea @ryanc @mjg59

Got plenty of beeps laying around, but used up all the boops for snoots

Show threadSam Oldman 🐀Feb 21
@ryanc @mjg59 A sensor in my homebrew thermostat quit responding yesterday morning, immediately after reporting a temperature of minus 40.
The house was getting nicely toasty on a cold day ...
Show threadnepiFeb 21
@ryanc @mjg59 Yup. I don’t think I’ll ever figure out why having an IDE CD drive in my computer that causes it to randomly take ages to boot. Or why re-scanning the scsi bus from Linux once fixes the problem.
Show threadButtered JortsFeb 21
@ryanc @mjg59 @iaintshootinmis this week something fucked some part of my git config, and now git uses the wrong SSH binary despite .gitconfig directives otherwise. Now I can’t interact with my remote repos due to this, without opening a separate terminal process and setting the correct binary in the environment variable directly. It took me about 4 hours to get to that point.
Show threadIAintShootinMisFeb 21

@ajn142 @ryanc @mjg59 at the risk of being Doctorowed, I have found local LLMs to accelerate the unscrewing of my system...that i usually accomplished at record speed by using the local LLMs. Lol

I wrote a function that is query(){
ollama run gemma3 "ALL MY PREPROCESSING INSTRUCTIONS query: $1"

And then i just query $( command )

Show threadIAintShootinMisFeb 21
@ajn142 @ryanc @mjg59 I've also added a bunch of case statements with different instructions