There's an ancient idiom that explains this perfectly:

We have fucked up computers, and phones, and anything tech really, because we are not afraid to experiment. Sometimes experiments are messy.

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.

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.

ew censorship

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.

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 😘
- 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
FUCK
there’s always one of these comments
- Not yet there wasn't, so I felt the need to step up and fucking take care of bidnez. :-P
- And they don't seem to be massively down voted.

thank fuck for the little black line censoring the word fuck

You're just out here doing the work of that one guy who uncensors stuff?
there’s always three
- props to OP for sticking to the bit lol you called it

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.
A lot of the time if I try to make something slightly more convenient and remove a manual step it fails and I've added two extra steps when trying to save one but can't be bothered to put it back to just one for like a month.
I am currently operating a pc where the routers dhcp and dns doesnt work lmao

I do like the hentai style 1px censor bar on this one
- yeah my guess is it was done (not by me of course) intentionally to throw off optical character recognition but still be human readable
  kind of like hentai so yeah the comparison is apt lol
eighth comment like this 🤪 (image was taken from a site that regularly censors based on OCR and i didn’t care to go to elon musks nazi website to get the og sorry; also no hate i just think the pattern is funny) can we get to ten!

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.
- I also used to play d&d (actually, mostly other rpgs) with him back in high school, and he had a natural talent for dismantling any campaign put in front of him. I eventually got fed up and did a sandbox campaign to stop him from derailing all my stories, which he promptly derailed with no effort. He did make me a better GM in general, and we always had fun.

FUCK

Downvoted for self censorship

you’re 9th
- I'm n*nth? ;)

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.

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
I just broke my backup server upgrading to trixie, so I got to see if my backup of my backup server was backed up properly (it wasn't) and if I could bring it back up again (I could).
There's zero reason I should be updating this device. It does two things, offers an NFS share to a server, then creates incremental backups of what that server puts on there.
In the words of Tommy Edison, "I have not failed, I have simply found 1000 ways to make a computer not work."
literally real. windows refresh and sandbox or atomic system components have been huge for me for this reason as it encourages me to mess around.

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.
- And I'm here thinking they're all fancy thrash bags for binary blobs. So Boomer! We should rename them to /woke/lgbtqe (the E stands for elf)

i'm not very computer i'm just ok computer

fuck

You can't say fuck on the internet.
Just look at the meme, even that daren't say fucking!!
Censor your comment at once or I'll cunting cry tears of blood!
there’s always five :P

That is why we need many computers, at least one's gotta work

This was my thought with 3D printers. One I would leave mostly alone so it'd run reliably, and another to tinker and do weird shit on.
Now I have 2 broken 3D printers.
- I have 3 broken ones, plus parts to make 2 more
- Made the mistake of tinkering with my primary one like 6 months ago. I just got it working again last weekend.
Why have few computer when many not work.
is this parallel computing?
- Quantum. In the sense that any computer both will and won't work up until you interact with it, at which point the waveform collapses and it resolves. If you are Very Computer this always resolves to bad, but sometimes(!) you can turn the bad into good.

~~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.~~

seventh comment like this (image was taken from a site that regularly censors based on OCR and i didn’t care to go to elon musks nazi website to get the og sorry)

Fucking

Thank you. Now come help me with this captcha! I'm not a robot. Pinky promise!

yep

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

at this point the Very Computer are essentially artists, creating unique artifacts of computing feats that are reflective of their own passion. mad respect to yall frfr!
What are you playing?
- just installed Atomic Heart, so about to give that a go. Just finished Claire Obscure which was amazing and fucked me up. The Alters is pretty good, almost done with it. Eden Ring Nightreign was kind of a let down. Tried Echo and that was interesting. All these are games I'm just running on the old hardware to prove I can.
  On the side I have long running Skyrim and Cyberpunk projects with the individual goals to make both of those games actually good.
  Also Elden Ring and an emulator with Armored Core 4/5 and Bloodborne which I will never uninstall until I die
  Got anything you'd recommend? I'm obviously a story-RPG slut

This is also very true for somewhat similar reasons with car mechanics.

Wait this explains a lot of my Very Car friends! Haha

I spent hours today trying to figure out why my computer wouldn't boot, an update had changed my boot configuration to raid mode.

my stomach churned reading this
Lemme guess: Dell? Thats their default for some reason
- Lol you called it
I was once running out of space and found windows built in file compression. It compressed my boot partition too and was no longer able to boot. I got it working again but 10 years later I forget how.

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.

Plus, you're probably going down a path that nobody else has, and nobody else has encountered the problems you've just created. Google searches will turn up empty for the errors you're getting.
In the early 2000s I had a Pentium III in an FCPGA to PPGA adapter plugged into a PPGA to slot 1 adapter in my Abit BX6 2.0 board. Amazingly it worked for awhile until it suddenly didn't. It didn't crash gracefully either, it started throwing all kind of random errors at random times. I miss the times when you could do ridiculous stiff like that though.
- Back in the late 90s I had my first cable modem, and I wanted to share it with my mom (had moved back in after a 4 year relationship imploded) - I knew nothing about routers, but I was already playing with Linux, and somehow I found a way to share my Internet connection with my mom's computer with only a single NIC in my machine, and a hub. It was not the modem allowing both, that I was sure of early on, the modem would only allow one mac address at a time, power cycle would let it pair with a new one. Somehow my machine was buffering and natting packets from hers. It worked for months until suddenly it didn't, and while researching a fix, everything I could find said what I had been doing couldn't possibly work, that you needed a separate NIC for the internal network.
I once replaced someone's BIOS chip with an identical one I pulled from a white box computer I found on the side of the road a decade prior. That thing was still working when that old man died, and he downgraded it from XP to Windows 98 ME of all things.

I'll keep down voting these stupid fucking image censoring posts until something changes and people stop being fucking stupid. I'll die on this hill.

yours is the sixth comment on this topic. i got the screenshot from a site that regularly censors based on OCR. i wasn’t going to go to the literal nazi website (twitter) to get the original.
- Ok, that's a fair reason.
  Still, fuck whoever censored it for you originally.

“Hmm, I think I want to try KDE plasma”

rm rf gnome

“Oh wait, crap, I probably should have started with setting up the new desktop first…”

rm rf gnome
ooh what package manager is this? /s
- Fast, simple, preinstalled. What more do you need?

I became very computer because my computer's were all so shit and broken in weird ways and I was too poor to pay anyone to fix them, and even if I did they didn't know.

I am Very Computer

I also am very computer.
♫More computer than computer. More computer than computer. ♫
- Zombie computes.
- moaning, for some reason

there’s always
It's not to censor it for us, but to bypass AI/algorithm nonsense like a captcha
- correct. i pulled it from a site where that is a real problem and the OOP is from twitter which is run by electric car hitler lol .

It's true. Source: I am Very Computer.

Ok Very Computer, I’m Very Dad

I am very computer.

I decided I didn't want to deal with it anymore and picked up a used Dell precision system with a pair of Xeon processors and put 64 G of RAM in it, with an 8x SSD raid array.

If anything fails I can completely fucking ignore it and my system continues to fucking work.

Wont it completely stop booting if just one of the RAM sticks dies?
- As others have pointed out, it depends. The most I would need to do is identify the faulty stick and pull it. That's pretty trivial to do and I would be back up and running within the hour.
  The only thing that can't fail (or the system stops working), is the motherboard and the power handling equipment. The power supply is redundant but the power from the power supplies needs to be handled before it gets to the system components, so there's a small PCB that connects to both power supplies and provides power to everything in the system.
  Of course the motherboard connects everything together.
  My GPU is also unique in the system, but I have less powerful spares laying around that I have stopped using, so I can literally just grab a different GPU and be back up and running at nearly the same capacity, minus the gaming graphics performance that's lost....
  On top of all of that, I upgraded to my current Dell precision from a different Dell precision. It's an older model and definitely showing it's age, but it still works. So that's available to me in a pinch.
  Basically, I have backups for my backups when it comes to hardware. I have a handful of spares for my SSD array disks too....
  Worst case, I hook up my framework laptop as a stand in for my desktop until a replacement part ships to me.
  Backups of backups.
- Depends a bit on how it dies and the setup
  I've had a stick die and it just didn't show up
- My experience of a ram stick failing is that my system would crash when ram usage got above the first stick. So I had 2x 8gb sticks and whenever it got above 8gb, the system would crash. Took me a while to figure out what was wrong.

Okay so there's a better one but this xkcd fits well enough.

I have not bought a new computer in so long, i keep them together with literal duct tape and blocks of wood and poorly hacked together software workarounds.

I'm doing things you wouldnt even think of. But implementation was imperfect. Some things like "playing audio" and "sending emails" are slightly complicated, require adjusting some stuff in systemctl (then back when im done)

Yeah, when people see some of my computers and they're like, wait a second, so you're telling me you hacked in four additional sata ports through the fucking Wi-Fi NVMe port.
And I'm like, yeah, it was twelve dollars off of AliExpress, and all I had to do was tape down the extension with some fucking scotch tape.
Do not fucking jostle that computer, I swear to God, I do not want you taking down my entire homelab
- When youre really bad at going outside, you can drown in a puddle, die on a suburban lawn.
  When you're fit and perfectly okay at going outside, you're reasonably safe as long as you don't live someplace too car dominant, free climb too high, etc. Guard rails are everywhere.
  When in amazing shape abd you're really really good at going outside, you can get into all sorts of trouble someone less competent simply wouldn't be able to. And anyone you can call for help would be a peer, with the same tools you failed with.
  We are in the computer equivalent of 'okay, we can ski down here, but stay very quiet or everyone dies and the first people who find out will be usgs, if that still exists. And keep up speed before the jump-it's a pretty long drop.'.
- Pedantic, but its an m.2 slot, not NVME slot. SATA m.2 drives existed before NVMEs, and there are m.2 slots that are only capable of SATA speeds.
  I spent FAR too long figuring that out the hard way, and documentation on the internet was very much not helpful. I had a motherboard with one SATA only m.2 and one that could handle NVME.

I am so comfy cosy in my 'somewhat computer' area of the curve. Ubuntu or Mint just work in a way that neither windows nor, like, arch ever could and I'm so comfy sticking with them. I love not fiddling with them too much. It's nice here. :3

it’s okay to be in the middle of a normal distribution that’s why it’s called “normal” ! :)

cries in NixOS

once it works, it works forever, but it's really hard getting it to work.

Is it though? I think the first steps are rather easy and then the learning curve goes up dramatically. But it's not really harder than a manual Arch installation.
- i think it depends on what you're doing, maybe. like I set up sops-nix to manage my secrets, but I wanted to use a Yubikey to protect the master key, so I had to use age-plugin-yubikey... only to discover that sops-nix ignores environment.SOPS_AGE_KEY_CMD for some reason, so I had to point at a random PR on sops-nix to enable experimental plugin support, or dig in and override the sops pkg. then I ran into issues where (I think?) wireguard was coming up before the sops secrets trigger, and failing because it couldn't read the private key.. and then on my WSL2 environment I have to do even more since I cross-compile age-plugin-yubikey to Windows x64 from inside my NixOS build, but then I had to pin a bunch of cargo packages because the repo didn't ship with anything pinned... and for SWI-Prolog I had to roll my own system for adding modules to it, since the nixpkgs support for that is hilariously broken and fully recompiles SWI-Prolog from scratch every time... and now I'm thinking of setting up a microvm with Wayland forwarding for tor-browser but I can't imagine how much harder that will be...
  ...but also like, I can't imagine doing all of this by hand ever again. once I get my janky-ass nix config working, it'll keep working for as long as fetch urls stay green (which is a big issue unfortunately.)

Also, a willingness / knowledge to ‘work around’ the problem

me and my cpu heating spacebar
- Hey I think we have the same macro setup
I'm willing to work around problems, but it really makes me hate upgrading to new major versions. It breaks a lot of workarounds and often breaks things that used to work.