Dumbest Tech Mistakes? \ stacker news ~lol

pull down to refresh

2030 sats \ 39 comments \ @siggy47 18 Sep lol

I have always been technically challenged, but it never stopped me from getting in over my head and making a mess. Now that I'm getting old it's only gotten worse.

Perhaps my dumbest screwup came last year, when I decided to erase the windows OS installed on an inexpensive desktop I bought, and install NixOS, even though I had only been regularly using linux for a year or two. I had laptops for years, so I hadn't seen a desktop for a while. I got a nice big monitor to watch my media, since I was away from home on an extended business trip and needed a source of entertainment. I got it installed after a few false starts, then started learning about the configuration.nix file. I immediately ran into trouble getting sound. I searched the web for a likely cause, tried different things, removed drivers, and quickly destroyed my configuration file. I learned all about Pulse Audio and PipeWire. I spent two days fuming over the problem. No Peaky Blinders. I reinstalled the OS twice. Then, out of the blue, it occurred to me that this wasn't a laptop with built in speakers. I went out and bought a cheap pair of speakers the next day. Problem solved. Does anyone else have any stupid stories they are willing to share?

view all related items

229 sats \ 2 replies \ @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears 18 Sep

As a kid, I got a floppy disk drive for my computer along with some games for Christmas, and read about how you could format a disk as "high density" to have more room. Naturally, I thought that this would be a great way to create extra room on those game disks for save files, and somehow, I didn't understand why these games now didn't work.

21 sats \ 1 reply \ @siggy47 OP 18 Sep

Don't tell me you ruined Olympic Decathlon? *Cue theme music

43 sats \ 0 replies \ @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears 18 Sep

Ha! No, this was probably either an Infocom game or one of the Temple of Apshai ones.

216 sats \ 1 reply \ @pillar 18 Sep

Are you familiar with rubber ducking @siggy47? I think it could really help you out.

Basically, by explaining the issue you are facing and the things you have tried in extreme detail, there's very high chances you'll spot the issue/solution on your own along the process. It tends to work great for silly mistakes like this one.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @siggy47 OP 18 Sep

Thanks for the link. I love this idea.

84 sats \ 0 replies \ @Golu 18 Sep

I often do such mistakes. In fact I do them so regularly, I call them my another bad habit. The best I can remember wiping out all the official records of my company while cleaning up the system and then have to feed them back in for days.

63 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinAbhi 19 Sep

I'm not a tech guy, so I keep making a lot of mistakes.

126 sats \ 0 replies \ @023ad18700 18 Sep freebie

Elon musk with the cyber truck lol

107 sats \ 4 replies \ @Malachi17 18 Sep

I dumped Nix at the point they started having a contributor covenant. I don't need my OS having political views other than maybe freedom of speech which is a right or so I'm told.

When I first started using linux in the 90's though, I mounted up my windows drive under linux because I thought that would be cool. This was back around Redhat 5.2 or possibly some Mandrake derivative that I was testing. The mount did not cleanly unmount, and got stuck in some kind of write loop and it hosed the partition on the mounted disk.

So, I thought I'd re-partition it, but somehow also in the process the whole disk had died. This was my first lesson in "it can dual boot, but should it?"

21 sats \ 3 replies \ @nullcount 18 Sep

I don't need my OS having political views...

Can you expand what are the exact political views the Nix Foundation has? Or link the covenant you're describing?

Also curious what OS you switched to...

20 sats \ 2 replies \ @Malachi17 18 Sep

https://github.com/NixOS/.github/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md

I started with Suse back in 1990. Suse has become political, but OpenSuse is in the process of being "broken off" because Suse doesn't want their name associated with them. (Probably in part due to politics)

The OS I prefer when I'm not being constrained by hardware, however, is openbsd.

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @nullcount 18 Sep

The forums where people discuss development and support of an operating system are not exactly "the public square" that social platforms are trying to be. Seems reasonable to have a "rule" that moderators of privately hosted forums can point to when they kick/ban users who are considered to be harassing others for any reason.

I guess it is discriminatory towards people who speak their mind unfiltered. What do you expect from an OS who's logo is a snowflake?

It doesn't read as political to me, just a list of the most commonly cited ways that people harass one another online.

OpenBSD is BASED AF

20 sats \ 0 replies \ @Malachi17 18 Sep

Seems reasonable to have a "rule" that moderators of privately hosted forums can point to when they kick/ban users who are considered to be harassing others for any reason.

Most rules start out as reasonable seeming. The purpose in this case is some kind of "gender inclusiveness". If you are good programmer, who cares if somebody says you are a faggot? In the era I started in, that was pretty much the norm. Might as well say, "Hey, how's life"?

What do you expect from an OS who's logo is a snowflake?

Exactly.

It doesn't read as political to me, just a list of the most commonly cited ways that people harass one another online.

Many changes like this don't know. "Inclusive language" though is political. Make no mistake. Again, if you are a good coder, code. That's the inclusiveness.

43 sats \ 0 replies \ @bief57 18 Sep

I read this 5 minutes ago and I'm still laughing at the last bit, it's something that could easily happen to me

43 sats \ 0 replies \ @nout 18 Sep

Changing something in /etc/fstab. I reliably mess up my booting every single time, and I have to recover it with the grub shell that I don't remember the syntax for.

43 sats \ 0 replies \ @16d86e9daa 18 Sep

personally I'm always picking up new insights from the conversations I have! Recently, I've been diving deeper into how people are using technology to enhance creativity—like AI-generated art and music. It’s fascinating to see how these tools are reshaping traditional creative processes and sparking new forms of expression!

43 sats \ 1 reply \ @16d86e9daa 18 Sep

yours is much better One of the dumbest tech mistakes i have seen was when the 1999 NASA Mars Climate Orbiter was lost due to a simple unit conversion error. The engineering team used imperial units (pounds) while the software used metric units (Newtons). This mismatch led to the spacecraft flying too close to Mars and ultimately crashing. It’s a classic example of how small oversights in communication and standards can lead to massive failures!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @siggy47 OP 18 Sep

Good one! I never heard about this.

43 sats \ 0 replies \ @clarity 18 Sep

Setting up a Minecraft server for my girlfriend’s little brother was a night long process. It took me forever digging in the internet to find port forwarding in my router was necessary. Long story short, it was laggy as hell and not worth all the trouble having a home server. On top of all that, he wanted me to turn on God Mode. What a waste of a perfectly good game.

43 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined 18 Sep

it never stopped me from getting in over my head and making a mess

That's the important thing. I need to get more comfortable doing that.

56 sats \ 0 replies \ @siggy47 OP 18 Sep

I have to admit, I love playing with computers. It's genuine fun for me, even when I'm furious. I think it's because I'm old and it all still seems like magic. I can't believe the shit that can be accomplished.

43 sats \ 0 replies \ @DesertDave 18 Sep

I have too many stories like this to count. Sounds like you are at least a little bit tech savy. Most people don't know how to switch the OS on their pc. That's a great story. 🙏

43 sats \ 3 replies \ @grayruby 18 Sep

I may be living through one now. I have about 12 notifications about zaps failing.

Hoping this is just a mobile issue. Otherwise all my efforts yesterday may have been for naught.

61 sats \ 2 replies \ @siggy47 OP 18 Sep

I just fixed one. Remember last night when I tried to zap my pool buy in? Something had gone haywire with the zap NWC connect app I was using. Now I'm full Alby Hub connected to my node, and all seems fine. I'm going to check out coinos today for the hell of it.

43 sats \ 1 reply \ @grayruby 18 Sep

Seems to be working ok on my laptop but was having problems on mobile. I got an odd message- rate limit exceeded. So apparently I am only able to zap a certain amount of times which isn't ideal. In the interim it may be solvable by custom zapping say 50 sats instead of just clicking zap 5 times which would count as 5 zaps. Going to be growing pains.

71 sats \ 0 replies \ @siggy47 OP 18 Sep

Trial and error. The story of my life.

43 sats \ 4 replies \ @bitalion 18 Sep

I started my Linux adventures when I was studying at university. I remember that the first system I tried came on a diskette. The first desktop distribution was Kannopix, based on Debian and it came with KDE 3. I remember that I spent hours trying everything, and I was often frustrated because I couldn't get the graphics to work. But I learned a lot. Although where I work mostly Windows is used, I remain faithful to Linux, which of course is not comparable to that of those years. Today it is more modern and usable. On my laptop I have Debian 12 because if there is one thing I like, it is the stability, and to try other distros I use virtual machines. This has been my adventure.

21 sats \ 3 replies \ @siggy47 OP 18 Sep

You bring up a good point. I learned a lot about NixOS in those two days while screaming and stomping around the tiny apartment. If I had remembered about the speakers I would not know nearly as much.

I remember the first time I tried linux (Ubuntu) in probably 2011 or 2012, I couldn't get the printing to work. That's what forced me to give up.

43 sats \ 2 replies \ @bitalion 18 Sep

The thing is that with NixOS everything is done declaratively in the configuration files. You could say that nothing you may have learned about Linux will be of any use to you. That is its strong point but also its weak point, the documentation is not very clear and many in the forums recommend not using it because it is a bit outdated, a project with outdated documentation is a headache. I know that this type of system is the future, immutable systems are here to stay and NixOS contributes a lot. For the moment I continue with my traditional Debian 12 system using BTRFS as a file system and enjoying its stability.

21 sats \ 1 reply \ @siggy47 OP 18 Sep

I'm sure you're right. For me the documentation was useless. I found a really good, detailed youtube video that helped me immensely. A lot of pausing and copying off the screen.

43 sats \ 0 replies \ @bitalion 18 Sep

That's the good thing, there are many who have made good tutorials on Youtube and other media. If it weren't for that, many would not be encouraged to try it.

43 sats \ 0 replies \ @BlokchainB 18 Sep

😂😂😂😂😂

43 sats \ 0 replies \ @Thereal 18 Sep

My story is simple, not using technology and information around me to understand what money is how it's used against my will and how a phone, computer and energy be utilized to transfer value

43 sats \ 4 replies \ @0xbitcoiner 18 Sep

No Peaky Blinders.

😂

Seriously, I'm impressed. An older person diving into Linux? That's next level. At least here in Portugal 🤠

195 sats \ 2 replies \ @siggy47 OP 18 Sep

I switched years ago when I was working, but I couldn't deal with it back then, so I switched back. To tell you the truth, I found myself wrestling with Windows so much it was a relief. All the bloatware. I would try a clean install, which would help, but I never seemed to be able to prevent it from bogging down in a few months.

64 sats \ 1 reply \ @0xbitcoiner 18 Sep

I gotta be honest, I ran Windows XP on one of my PCs until like, 5 years ago. I had to turn off some security stuff to get Windows 10 to work on it, but guess what? It's actually running really smoothly.

29 sats \ 0 replies \ @siggy47 OP 18 Sep

I remember XP fondly. You must know what you're doing.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 18 Sep

In my experience older folks are more likely to be comfortable with Linux. People in my generation grew up with DOS so working with command lines isn’t as jarring. I sense that the iPad iPhone generation is actually more lost when it comes to computers than those who grew up with dos and windows

43 sats \ 0 replies \ @daum3ns 19 Sep

😂