There's an ancient idiom that explains this perfectly:
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
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We're also very good at working around, repairing, and recovering from, technology that routinely fucks up.
After the third or fourth time of diving into the browser console, debugging whatever web form was giving my wife headaches, I started to realize how bad things really are out there. I've even had to hack in form values, or correct misbehaving client-side validation, using live JavaScript and/or HTML edits. IT folks really do live in a different parallel universe online.
We have fucked up computers, and phones, and anything tech really, because we are not afraid to experiment. Sometimes experiments are messy.
For me, it depends a lot on what I'm doing with my computer. I've had phases where the tinkering with the OS was kind of the main goal and I'd often have really broken setups.
These days, I do want to use my computer for other things ~~too~~, and I do get annoyed when I can't, so I put my Very Computerness to use for making it a pretty stable setup.
yep
Very true.
We may know 100s of ways things don't work, and how to transition between most of them.
Most people may only know dozens of ways.
There are infinite ways things can break. So no, we can't move the needle.
Gasp! Is that a naughty word!? My delicate sensibilities!
Anyways, i probably have an AI data center's worth of tech lying around my house because of one project or another. Some broken, some old, some saved from the trash, some held together with load bearing thermal paste... You know, a perfectly normal setup.
i'm not very computer i'm just ok computer
Being Very Computer means I can operate a computer that doesn't work.
Last time I had Arch on my laptop I had a problem, where pipewire would crash if I didnt had an audio output for like 2s. So every time I wanted audio for something I had to restart it through the console.
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I am of the opinion that it takes intelligence to be stupid. I had a friend in high school who had some undiagnosed cognitive difficulty that made him a bit slow overall. He struggled in school and was always failing one of his classes because he just couldn't learn fast enough. However, his common sense was better than anyone else's that I've ever met, and he was my most reliable friend. Sure, he didnt make many smart decisions, but he’s never made a really boneheaded decision as far as I know. I got in the habit of running my ideas past him:
Me: "I'm thinking of doing [insert absolutely insane idea]. It should be cool."
Him: "That doesn’t seem safe, and it's also illegal."
Me: "Huh. You're right. I won't do that, then."
I can credit my survival to adulthood to this guy. He may not able able to tell you what day of the week it is while standing in front of a calendar, but he was the least stupid man I have ever met.
aww oddly wholesome i hope ur friend is doing okay
Last time i spoke with him almost a decade ago. He was working in the Walmart stockroom and may have single-handedly changed their dress code policy. At the time, Walmart required all employees to either wear khaki pants or a skirt. Since he was in the stockroom khaki pants would cause his enchanted forest to become unpleasantly swampy. So, he started wearing a skirt to address the problem. This worked, and he got the other guys to follow his lead since it was an obvious and effective solution to their problem.
Management was pissed, but couldn't penalize them for not following the dress code. This was about a year or so before Walmart began allowing their employees to wear shorts.
He judo'd the system strength against itself
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Regular people would consider me Extremely Computer, but compared to many of the people here I feel Barely Computer for not knowing the difference between /bin and /sbin.
The distinction is kind of pedantic. It's "superuser binaries" (sbin) and "binaries" (bin). Since both are usually on your executable path (see $PATH) anyway, the distinction is kinda/sorta moot these days. If you need root (or run sudo) to make a binary do anything useful, it's probably sitting in /sbin. I know not of what brought about that original distinction, or what actual utility it serves/served.
You can type man hier into a terminal to get a description of what's what.
You fool! /bin and /sbin have already been replaced by /usr/bin and /usr/sbin! What an buffonish mistake!
Truly the solution is NixOS, we must all embrace the loving embrace of /nix/store.
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It's a good thing that little black line protected me from seeing the word "fucking" on the internet.
Wait a minute... FUCK! 🤪
You had a swear word on the image. Don't worry, I censored it for you 😘
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but not in that format ☝️☝️☝️ let’s take down some of those hilights, bring up the gamma, give it a nice re-hue. ah. much better
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I may have found ways to make computers not work but in the process I usually find ways to make them work again. Its a cycle
Computer works -> I get bored -> I mess around -> it no longer works -> I fix it -> repeat
i'm not sure it's even possible to learn computer without make computer not work, even memorizing the entire arch wiki isn't going to help that much unless you've actually had experience with the things it talks about
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~~I don't want to offend anybody with the badly wordings so please do not read this. And I will strike through so it's completely unreadable in case you get any ideas.~~
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This is also very true for somewhat similar reasons with car mechanics.
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People who are "very computer" tend to combine stuff that doesn't have a guarantee to work.
Like a desktop Frankensteined together from multiple different computers into one working monster.
Those things have whole new problems of their own.
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it's true, 100% of the stuff I learn is in service of making a 10-year-old GeForce 980 run increasingly unstable, modded, and unholy builds of games. it's not a matter of will it BSOD, just a matter of when do I not want it to BSOD
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