• mindbleach
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    11 months ago

    I once had “blow on it” work.

    I’d tried that, of course. Repeatedly. I’d handled, manipulated, fondled, molested, and all but fucking probed some Alexa gizmo, testing every feasible input, and of fucking course I’d yanked the power a few times. So in desperation, I… called the help line. (Eugh!) I finally get through to someone who has me do one or two of the steps I’d already done or two times. And it worked. Because go fuck myself.

    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.