I make my living within this 20% of non-functionality.
We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
141–150 of 276 posts
Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#142Then again how much time do computers save? Washing machines and fridges freed up a ton of time for people. Maybe computers as well, then again maybe they just entertain. My personal anecdata, I was recently investigating some page load timeouts for my client and this lead me down a rabbit hole which in the end meant moving a WHERE clause from outer query to an inner one and sped up the query 100k times. Based on slo…
> Then again how much time do computers save? Unbelievable amounts, both in speed of processing and communication, and in lack of error.
Seems like AI is becoming pretty effective at undoing the “lack of error” part…
Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#143I know this will get some downvotes, but I'm the IT person in my close family. Used to get calls all the time to fix slow laptops, CD drives not working, keyboard not working, system not booting, popups everywhere, apps crashing, you name it. Each would take insane amounts of time to troubleshoot. And then sometimes their machines just needed to be upgraded because they were running the new office, and the new skype…
100% agree on Macs. Personally I have never had to play IT support when my parents had a Mac. Now with Windows, it’s basically whack-a-mole. Some days the camera stops working and some days WhatsApp doesn’t startup. And they are not power users by any means. So they don’t muck around with their setup either.
We've had to do tech support for family using Macs, but I'll admit it's been less than my Windows-using family. I have 1 family member in mind in particular that I think would have been better off with a Mac. And I probably would have been better off, too, because I could tell them I don't know much about them and send them to the store with a clear conscience. ;)
Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#144My Nest Thermostat was an example where I lost time. Sure I didn't have to walk down the stairs to change the temperature a few times, but as the Thermostat started to bug out, I spent hours trying to fix it. I lost more time than I ever saved.
The Nest never made sense to me. An offline $20 digital thermostat can program a weekly schedule and requires 1 minute of maintenance per year (swap the backup battery). Never had to deal with a crash, fear of data exfiltration, or that some underlying SAAS would shutdown.
Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#145Then again how much time do computers save? Washing machines and fridges freed up a ton of time for people. Maybe computers as well, then again maybe they just entertain. My personal anecdata, I was recently investigating some page load timeouts for my client and this lead me down a rabbit hole which in the end meant moving a WHERE clause from outer query to an inner one and sped up the query 100k times. Based on slo…
>Then again how much time do computers save? This is honestly a good question to ask at times. I remember back when I was trying to get into weight lifting. I was searching for apps and tools that would help me track milestones and progress, setting up routines and all that. I remember going through some options, then making a spreadsheet, and refining the spreadsheet and just hating the whole process. So then I open…
Reminds me of Merlin Mann's "perfect apostrophe": http://www.43folders.com/2006/06/11/perfect-apostrophe
Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#146> The computer could easily solve the problems without displaying this, while it provided a back-up version of the system for us, so that we could continue to work with our tasks undisturbed" How could this work? Teorically , the OS could detect that an application crashed and start it again. But to restore the state the application was in before it crashed, it would need to scan the application's memory and derive t…
Perhaps you are describing Erlang? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(programming_language)#...
Wikipedia says:
"When a process crashes, it neatly exits and sends a message to the controlling process which can then take action, such as starting a new process that takes over the old process's task"
But this seems only a small piece of what would be needed. And if the idea is to have a main process spawning a tread (or process) for each "thing" it has to do so that the thread can be neatly re-spawed in case of failure, how is this much better done in Erlang than in any other programming language? Can you please elaborate?
Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#147My Nest Thermostat was an example where I lost time. Sure I didn't have to walk down the stairs to change the temperature a few times, but as the Thermostat started to bug out, I spent hours trying to fix it. I lost more time than I ever saved.
I spent a couple weeks on the "learning" setting before I just disabled that. It was almost never right, and I knew I could set it to exactly the right temperatures on a known schedule. We almost never have to touch that dial.
I'm having the same problem with android phone's brightness as well. I've stubbornly left it auto-adjusting, and about once a week I have to drag it from almost the bottom to almost the top again. I don't know why it thinks that's an appropriate setting because it never has been.
Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#148As dumb as it always comes across, telling people to reboot their systems after nearly 25 years in IT support is something we're still doing to this day. And we're still doing it because it works more often than not when someone is calling about performance problems. Why? It's not unusual to see uptime numbers in the 300s or longer for some people.
We all have that story. One was someone I work with telling my his laptop was interminably slow and unusable and wondering what he could do to fix it. First question: "How often do you restart it?" Him: "What do you mean?" Me: "You know, turn it off and back on, or just select restart." Him: "Oh, I've never done that ?" Me: "Hm. How long have you had it?" Him: "Four years."
Four years without a reboot. The next week when I saw him and asked him if restarting it helped: "Yes! It's running like new again!"
My analogy for this is simple: Do you clean your house? Yes. Do you do it intentionally? Like, you know, set out to do it? Or does it just 'happen' passively without you doing anything at all? (Paying someone else to do it not withstanding.) Most people actively, intentionally clean. But you know what they don't do? Actively, intentionally get it dirty. Getting dirty is a passive action of living; of just existing and functioning. It's the same for your computer. Using it causes clutter that a reboot will clean up. But you have to do the reboot intentionally.
Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Dutch the word is "computer" also, but English is the bastard child between Dutch and French while Dutch is already a bit of a bastard child from German. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I was confident that at least the germans would back me here, after all they got words like taschenrechner. But according to my dictionary they call it computer. Danish seems like 30% english nowadays, so I can't count on them. At least swedes call it "dator" which I guess is in the right spirit.
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Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the great part about AI, because computers don't make mistakes, you can launder whatever biases you want through an objective and rational computer.
This is such an excellent way of concisely expressing a major fallacy I see whenever I talk about AI/modeling/etc. (I.e. “it isn’t racist it’s just numbers” and other nonsensical takes). I’m borrowing this language for the future.
Meanwhile, human judges, juries, parole boards, etc are racist as hell and have no update algorithm...