Comment on xkcd #3134: Wavefunction Collapse
logicbomb@lemmy.world 4 days ago
This reminds me of this old hacker koan:
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. [Tom] 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.
AlexisFR@jlai.lu 4 days ago
Well it’ll work, until the unfixed root cause break the machine again.
sga@lemmings.world 3 days ago
what if the root cause was some system variable, which got reset on boot and never happens again (for example some code you wrote accidentally triggered lower voltage for your cpu, and you have hitches)
nialv7@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Just ask Tom to reboot it again.
logicbomb@lemmy.world 3 days ago
You don’t really know it will cause it to break again with no understanding of what is going on.
palordrolap@fedia.io 3 days ago
"Problems that go away by themselves come back by themselves."
logicbomb@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I thought there was a chance that AlexisFR would respond without realizing that I was repeating the important part of the koan as a joke, because you don’t always see the context when looking at replies to your comments. But I didn’t expect that a random person who had apparently just read the koan 5 seconds earlier would already have forgotten it.