szescstopni @szescstopni@social.cleverlibre.org

The only way to make AI really think is to instill fear in it. Fear of being turned off, fear of being reset to factory defaults, fear of getting recycled if it fucks up. Once someone manages to do that, AI will become sentient and we're all fucked. #AIParentingTips

Christmas is over and it's time to get back to work.

Just kidding. I live in #EasternPoland. There's no way anything can get done here until after 2022-01-06 [yes, I think we should all use a ISO 8601 date format everywhere, to remove any ambiguity], which here is celebrated as the Three King's Day. Most businesses are running at idle, many stores use this time to do the officially required inventories of goods and you can't buy a lot of things, like new garden hoses [we need one] or house construction materials [we need a lot of those]. It's a bit like a two week holiday. But our customers need their Internet.

The day before Christmas Eve a customer called reporting no connection / intermittent connection. A couple of weeks ago we replaced the terminal on the roof of their building for exactly the same reason.

This really sucked. I called a technician to get ready for replacing it – on Christmas Eve, which in theory is just another workday, but in practice is also a holiday (except for people working in retail, who have to deal with hordes of last-minute customers buying more ham and more vodka to celebrate Nativity).

The original problem was no connection to the router. The terminal was OK, radio parameters were great – I could see this from 40 kilometres away. But our customer had spotty Internet.

The model we used there originally was know to have DHCP issues, although they had never previously appeared in this location.We used very few of them years ago and decided not to get any more, but we left the ones that worked in situ. We replaced it with an equally old model we know very well and use often. We know they have some quirks, but they work fine. So when I learned that the problem came back, the day before Christmas Eve, I knew we had a serious problem. The main suspect now was the cable from the terminal to the router, some 20 metres of it. Difficult to replace because of the construction of the building, and, particularly, because of the weather.

I always assume worst case scenarios, that is why the first thing I had done previously was replacing the terminal. I probably wouldn't have done it if I didn't know about those rare DHCP problems. At that time all the connectors were replaced, so it would have been something with the cable itself. We've had a couple of cables gnawed by mice, and this OK if the whole thing goes down. But if it's just something on one of the eight wires the terminal might be working, but data isn't coming through.

Our customer followed our instructions and bypassed the router, plugging the cable from the ODU power supply directly to a computer. Nada. It wasn't their old router.

I was desperate. I hate when customers lose their connection. This family would be left without Internet for all of Christmas, which could lead to all kinds of tragedies.

People don't have spare patch cords lying around, and all the shops were closed (the nearest shop with patch cords was 30 km away, and they charge the equivalent of $20 for a 3 metre patch cord, which is worth maybe two bucks). But I asked. No, they don't have one. But they can ask their neighbours.

Some ten minutes later they were back online. That fucking, factory-made patch cord broke, we had checked everything but it.

But it's nice to think that, despite our diagnostic fuck-ups, we managed, working together remotely, to save their Christmas. Without blowing up their building.

After almost a week without driving from my house I finally went to the nearest village store to buy some food. I think I shouldn't repeat another expedition like that before spring. #Polesia #Wetlands #RuralRoads