A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.
Turning it off and on again is a universal truth. A defibrillator works by turning the heart off then on again.
(You don't defib a patient who is flat lining. You defib to fix an erratic heart beat.)
In theory. In reality it's not on or off it's always on and it's high vs low voltage.
Ah, so the answer is just to get high!
Orrrr get low
To the windowwwwwww...
I'm old
Thx now I have Need for Speed Underground in my mind
Man I loved that game. I didn't even play the story much. It's was just a fun drive around game
To the wall
Till the sweat drip down my balls
Maybe I'm misremembering (or it's just old knowledge and new chips are more sophisticated) but despite it being low voltage vs high voltage the outcome is still on or off because there's a resistor in the semiconductor that either allows current through or not. If it were a light switch it would be the equivalent of turning the light on or off.
Ya. It's more like "current go this way or current go that way" than it is high/low voltages.
And yet I still have electronics to this day that require me to pull the plug to get going again 😂
That's actually why. You have to drain the power from the circuits.
Our LG washing machine does this once every year and a half almost like clockwork. It will simply refuse to do anything until it is unplugged and then plugged back in.
It may be clockwork. If its power hasn't been interrupted in the interim, i.e. you have very stable power at your house, that's got to be some kind of overflow bug in its software. A timer somewhere is running out of room to count clock ticks and it barfs.
washing machine
overflow
heh 🫧
Sometimes the fix is to turn it off, take it out back and beat it with a stick.
Damn it feels good to be a gangsta
I got a killa up inside of me
Studied computer science. The answer is yes.
A computer is a funky thingy that's a jumbled city of stuff turning on and off with the one master on/off thingy which is the clock on the processor.
When it switches from negative to positive a lot of small switches everywhere switch, some stay the same, some flip. It's all just a bunch of rythm dancing of switches going off and on.
If you used mechanical switches, would it be possible to build a large version of some modern semiconductor chip? If so, I would expect that contraption to be slower and louder than the original.
It would be considerably slower, it's also possible to make pneumatic logic gates
This is pretty cool. I don't care how slow it is. It just shows that that it can be done. If you want something useful, use silicon. If you want something awesome, use creative alternatives like pneumatic pipes and valves. :D
Until some stray gamma ray hits just the right spot, flips a bit and either nothing at all of everything all at once happens.
Advanced speedrun strats.
Studied computer science. The answer is yes.
NP = P, folks. Pack it up and go home.
We need a cells at work type of anime but about computers.
It’s all just a bunch of rythm dancing
I come from the net. Through systems, peoples and cities to this place: Mainframe. My format: Guardian; to mend and defend. To defend my new-found friends, their hopes and dreams. To defend them from their enemies. They say the user lives outside the net and inputs games for pleasure. No one knows for sure, but I intend to find out.
It's all just a bunch of rythm dancing of switches going off and on.
I want this rhythm game now.
Mostly, though there's also fire-fighting too.
At a Sea Parks‽
I don’t want to talk about it.
That would also mean that all IT problems are caused by turning something off and on again at some level.
If you just stopped using your computer it wouldn’t crash.
[ticket closed]
It's why I say as a software engineer: computers were a mistake.
A million years ago some asshole fish decided to crawl on land and now I have to deal with IT problems.
"Since words can be represented in binary, thus as a sequence of ones and zeroes, [..], doesn't that mean that all questions can be answered by saying no, then yes again at some level?"
How has no one pointed out yet that this is conceptually wrong? Turning something off & on again is cycling the same switch. Solutions to IT problems are setting different bits, which is binary for "using different words".
How dare you use logic on my computer logic-related shower thought.
But yeah, I get what you mean. I had that thought at some point after posting. This is why I should probably just keep it in this silly thread and not write any philosophy essays soon.