In theory. In reality it's not on or off it's always on and it's high vs low voltage.
this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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Showerthoughts
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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. The most popular seem to be lighthearted, clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts: 1
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Ah, so the answer is just to get high!
Orrrr get low
To the windowwwwwww...
I'm old
To the wall
Till the sweat drip down my balls
And yet I still have electronics to this day that require me to pull the plug to get going again 😂
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 🫧
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That's actually why. You have to drain the power from the circuits.
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.
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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.
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.
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
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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.)
ECT basically does that too but for brains. Too sad and Prozac isn't fixing it? We're gonna put you under and slap the reset button every other day until you're not. Shit works too its fucking wild.
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Mostly, though there's also fire-fighting too.
At a Sea Parks‽
I don’t want to talk about it.
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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]
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Under the same logic, All problems are also caused by turning it off and on again.
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
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.
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Go bigger than IT problems.
Most desk jobs are simply finding information: a suitable combination of 1s and 0s until someone else agrees that the combination is correct.
Then, as a reward, the business slightly changes the 1s and 0s of my bank account.
It’s 1s and 0s all the way down.
Tom Knight and the Lisp Machine
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.
Source: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/index.html Section IIIA
"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.
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No, sometimes the answer is just turn it off.
That's in short what digital means.
Digital means that it's discrete compared to analog which is continuous. Some of the first digital computers were decimal, but in general binary is simpler to use so that's why it's everywhere.
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Upvote for username :)
Ooof. That's deep.
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