Comment by rogierhofboer
5 years ago
Display intermittently blanking, flickering or losing video signal:
https://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/73861...
"Surprisingly, we have also seen this issue connected to gas lift office chairs. When people stand or sit on gas lift chairs, they can generate an EMI spike which is picked up on the video cables, causing a loss of sync. If you have users complaining about displays randomly flickering it could actually be connected to people sitting on gas lift chairs. Again swapping video cables, especially for ones with magnetic ferrite ring on the cable, can eliminate this problem. There is even a white paper about this issue."
Risks Digest was on my daily reading list for years. I've been in computing since the early 70s, the history of computing is fabulous background to inform e.g. debugging, or SRE.
I've seen this one on twitter https://twitter.com/royvanrijn/status/1214162400666103808?la... There's probably some civilizational complexity limit where the unexpected interactions between seemingly isolated pieces of tech become so bad that we cannot introduce anything new without introducing legion of weird bugs.
>There's probably some civilizational complexity limit where the unexpected interactions between seemingly isolated pieces of tech become so bad that we cannot introduce anything new without introducing legion of weird bugs.
Come to think of it, I believe that meme was wondering about on UseNet from before the early days. I think Vernor Vinge alluded to it in one of his novels, (paraphrasing here) some interplanetary civilization crashing because in-transit space traffic was so dense no new launches could occur in a useful time frame due to safety-lock outs, and they didn't want to accept the risk in changing the safety margins...