Human State Machines

I can well understand that. Social media, in particular, brings out the worst in people. (If, on the Internet, people can be anything they choose to be, why do so many choose to be idiots?)

@pbashton I cannot figure out most people.

@CarolDM Nor can I. (I went into IT instead of psychology because I reckoned programming computers would be easier than programming people. I think the gap's not as wide as I thought it would be, but perhaps still in my favour.)

@pbashton - You are right, sometimes we also have to fight with our machines. I am also using Ubuntu and I still use the old version, as the new version gave plenty of problems. At least we do not lose everything with Ubuntu/Linux, when you reinstall Windows usually you lose everything.

Sometimes, even that's not great. Today, my new laptop threw a wobbly in the morning and refused to communicate with my router, for some reason. (It only started working again about an hour ago. IDK why.) I had to haul out my old laptop and reinstall Ubuntu on it (16.04, because it couldn't handle 20.04 for some reason). It took me most of today to get Apache and NginX Web servers set up on it. However, at least with that, I know that following a consistent process of configuration leads to consistent results/success. With people, however, anything goes ...

@LadyDuck Well, I tried to install VeraCrypt today. It tried to upgrade libc6, which totally munged my 16.04 installation, so I did a clean install of 18.04. (I have yet to check if Z-Enemy will recognise my graphics card, but VeraCrypt is the more important of the two. If not, I might end up resizing partitions and dual-booting.) Fortunately, I hadn't transferred anything important to it yet, since I was still setting it up. At least now the whole drive is encrypted. (The setup script for 16.04 has a bug where it doesn't encrypt the swap partition.) At any rate, I've lost two work days to hardware/software setup issues.

@pbashton Well you stated that what you tell others has not changed. So I am referring to their wish for your position to be different..wishing their lives away.

@RebeccasFarm Ah, I understand now. I thought you meant that I was wishing my life away in trying to understand other people.

I'm really not sure what you're getting at with that comment (or how it's relevant).

@pbashton "As far as you know" may be the problem, then. Honestly, then there's no telling. People on myLot ask the same questions of GoAskAlice even though nothing has changed for years here. It's kind of funny to me, but I'm sure GAA gets really frustrated at the same questions all the time.

The thing is that I didn't change anything (as far as I know, anyway).

@DaddyEvil LoL. I see the mods of one of the faucets I'm on fielding the same questions over and over (even though they're answered in the FAQs and help section docs on the site). Nobody reads anything anymore. RTFM, folks ...

@pbashton With IT, it's only codes. What you input is what you get for the most part.

@ihasaquestion "... for the most part ..." being the key phrase there. Sometimes it's a case of "My code works and I don't know why" or "My code doesn't work and I don't know why".

"Technology is supposed to organize your life better, not disarray it." Ain't that the truth. (I've worked in IT for over a decade and been using it for over two. I can definitely assert that the reality is far different to the promise/ideal. At least when tech goes wonky, it's usually consistently and following a troubleshooting procedure is more likely to fix it than doing so is with people.)