> You’d be surprised at just how many people believe in the supernatural. I wouldn't - the majority believes in an invisible sky friend.
Oh, please do not bring the juvenile rhetorical flair of reddit here.
Old tech is haunted
51–60 of 103 posts
Re: Old tech is haunted
#52I have a haunted TV: my 4 year old Sony Bravia (Android TV) reboots seemingly intentionally during the most interesting parts of TV broadcasts. And since a few weeks ago, it also regularly loses the Wi-Fi connection. Thanks Google and Sony!
wow I also have a Sony Bravia around the same age and this also happens to me sporadically! drives me insane when it happens, but it's infrequent enough that I haven't replaced it yet.
Beware. Newer TVs are haunted with so many persistent smart features that you might miss the Bravia
Re: Old tech is haunted
#53Haunting is overfitting data to a pattern (ghost) that can explain everything. The benefit is less thought about things that don’t matter, but missing out on learning something useful is the disadvantage.
Overfitting seems pretty great for survival - who cares if one in 100 canines is friendly - much safer to avoid them! Humans seem to be unique in that we occasionally second guess our overfit models. And in the case of avoiding dangerous animals, the result couldn’t have been more wonderful: Dogs! Confronting and undoing a casually overfit mental model is harder the more subtle and useful they are - but those are the…
> who cares if one in 100 canines is friendly - much safer to avoid them!
Hum... That's really not overfitting. In fact, that's the opposite of it, an incomplete model.
Re: Old tech is haunted
#54Many years ago, in my first tech job, we converted our typewriter-driven office to networked DOS PCs, running on Netware. One day, one of the legal secretaries, of self-described Roma ancestry, started complaining about her PC acting oddly...software not starting, spontaneous reboots ,etc. We replaced her machine to troubleshoot it, but the same thing happened with the replacement machine. We couldn't detect anything…
One time I had a horrible roommate I hated immensely. She did shit like make a friend of mine cry on her birthday. Her boyfriend broke up with her cause she was obviously a terrible person, so her response to this was visiting a witch doctor (This is an incident that happened in the third world so bear with me for a moment). His recommendation was to cut an X into limes and put them in the corner of each room in the house. He said if they were intact when she came back home from work, but if they were black when she came back from work then he'd DIE. She told me this with a smile on her face.
I was like wow you're an idiot who believes in bullshit which might actually kill someone, fuck you. Called in late to work, went to the store, bought limes, cut X's into each of them and DOUBLED THE LIMES she put in the corners of the house.
She left while paying rent for like two months and I had the best time of my life which occurred staying there after.
Re: Old tech is haunted
#55> Put it this way: I’ve never encountered groups of ghoul-lovers hanging outside abortion clinics and harassing women about hauntings.
This made me throw up in my mouth and my eyes hurt from all the eye rolls
Re: Old tech is haunted
#56> You’d be surprised at just how many people believe in the supernatural. I wouldn't - the majority believes in an invisible sky friend.
Even worse: Some of them still use proprietary software.
Re: Old tech is haunted
#57I have observed my hibernating linux desktop receiving and transmitting data through the onboard GbE interface to IPs that were owned by an ASN owned by an LLC with a registered address matching the WHOIS for the ASN - an address that didn't exist according to the postal service. Captured upstream with an OpenWRT router running a packet capture and that desktop as the only device downstream of that router.
Either ghosts or the PSP on my AMD processor chatting with spooks.
Re: Old tech is haunted
#58Many years ago, in my first tech job, we converted our typewriter-driven office to networked DOS PCs, running on Netware. One day, one of the legal secretaries, of self-described Roma ancestry, started complaining about her PC acting oddly...software not starting, spontaneous reboots ,etc. We replaced her machine to troubleshoot it, but the same thing happened with the replacement machine. We couldn't detect anything…
Little did they know, that those early computers were actually powered by garlic odors[0]! Like calculators that can be powered by light - the "magic" that we call solar power. So, of course, the user's implementatin of garlic cloves clearly "fixed the glitch". Happy pre-Halloween!
[0] No, of course garlic isn't an energy source. ...At least, not one that we (yet) know how to harness. ;-)
Re: Old tech is haunted
#59I had a haunted USB cable that would somehow cause USB to stop working in any device I plugged it into (until I rebooted the device). Once I figured out it was a problem with a USB cable, identifying the faulty USB cable required rebooting the devices after testing each cable (because any cables plugged in after the faulty one wouldn't work either).
Re: Old tech is haunted
#60Usually when my computers are “haunted”, it’s caused by corporate mandated malware.