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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: December 27th, 2023

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  • Nothing I said was critical of anyone, any set of skills, any profession. I’m glad that you have specialist skills, everyone does because no-one can know everything

    I was responding to a particular question about technology, and how non-techies approach it. I explained in another comment that this complexity in technology is fundamentally different from many other fields of everyday experience

    If the industrial fan stops working, they call you, and somewhere between the power point and the air they want to move is the problem you can fix and diagnose

    If someone can’t see their cat photos, it could be anywhere from their device to their network, their ISP to the server, the programs on that server, the other server that holds the photos… Like with the fan they know the power is generally ok because the lights didn’t go out, but from that point you actually need some conceptual model of the complexity to even know who to call




  • Tech people presume that normal people think about how technology works

    They don’t even try to conceptualise how something on their phone gets there from the internet or ‘the cloud’ - when things stop working they don’t think about the fact that their an app on their phone is using a network connection to a router, which distributes an internet service that connects them to a server, that is running a program, on which they have an authenticated account…

    They wouldn’t even know where to begin with troubleshooting, it’s just ‘broken’ and they get frustrated








  • NiMH has been common in consumer batteries for around 15 years (in my experience, although Wikipedia shows the chemistry is way older) but you can still buy the other chemistry (NiCd), and there may be newer lithium rechargables but I haven’t seen them in standard sizes (AA etc)

    Eneloops set the standard for good quality NiMH batteries for a while, but IKEA Ladda batteries are also NiMH, and probably plenty of others now