On Windows I really only do this to get the popup that lets me force close the app
41Real story.
I was in my late teens. My parents were dragging me to a tiny, kinda culty church every fuckin' weekend. Didn't really have much choice. (Hell, I hadn't even told anyone yet that I thought Christianity was 100% bullshit.)
I had a reputation for knowing my stuff about computers. (Because normies -- particularly boomer normies like Pastor Dipshit -- don't know the difference between programmers and PC support.)
So, one Sunday after the service, Pastor Dipshit asks me to look at his computer. His Outlook was giving an error dialog. Something about not being able to find an email on disk. Clicking the "ok" button just resulted immediately in another dialog, and while the error dialog was present you couldn't interact with the main window, so this rendered Outlook unusable.
Turns out he'd gone and deleted a bunch of files from the filesystem. Like by navigating from "My Computer" down to the directory where Outlook stored its files. Rather than deleting emails through the Outlook GUI the way one is meant to.
So, I mused "hmm, I wonder if it's just giving one error message per email that was affected." I could see in the window behind the error dialog that the total count of emails in his inbox was only a couple hundred or something.
So I commenced to clicking as rapidly as I could. Probably about a minute of clicking later, no more error dialogs and Outlook was usable again.
And everyone marveled at my "genius."
I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't learn his lesson and continued to delete random files from the filesystem, but he kindof lost what was left of his connection to consensus reality and scared even my culty family away and we quit attending that church not terribly long after that, so I couldn't say for sure.
22I wish I lived in this world...
13You know, 95% of people stop clicking just a few clicks from the solution...
38
wasn't there a Microsoft error with a frozen screen that could be resolved by moving the mouse continuously?
6There were several instances where you could bypass a locked screen that way!
8
Being frustrated and taking your frustration out like this is far more prevalent even outside our species. Primates do it, canines also.
There smth about the way our brain work (across species) that doing these actions soothes us. There is same logic behind cursing, it relieves us in a strange way. Maybe thats why AI don't get frustrated like this
5I wonder if it was just me but I heard that clicking a dead spot could help when a computer was freezing or lagging
3With love and respect,
Maybe with some specific use case related to gpu rendering or something, but even then it would be more like forcing it to repaint part of the screen not clicking in the right place.
As a developer, I can say with confidence that generally there’s just no way that clicking a random spot will help the code suddenly execute correctly or faster or help a resource free up so execution can continue or whatever.
There’s just way too many kinds of freezes and lagging that this advice is all but useless and akin to a placebo at best.
5it's an interrupt of sorts, isn't it? if the OS has frozen all other threads but the mouse is still operable, sending repeated clicks/IRQs could saturate the CPU's limited interrupt buffer and force it to pause or kill the hanging process
1
Prettyuch sums up why I switched to Linux, no more oopsie popups, more actual info on what went wrong
1I was shocked when I first started working in the tech industry how many people will still click a 'request' or 'send' button multiple times if it doesn't IMMEDIATELY go through or grey out the button.
Then they wonder why it gives them 14 copies of the same error.
"Well, how many times did you hit 'request'? 15? Hmm. What could it be? We'll never know."
1Eh, what do you expect from buggy software?
1
