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Comment by themafia | Hacker News Reader

The comment at the bottom of the article I believe is correct. I believe this because our neighborhood had the same problem. One day my neighbor, frustrated beyond his capacity, and seemingly very high on something, went outside and started ripping infrastructure out by hand and damaging everything else he could find with a hammer.

They came out and replaced a lot of the damaged equipment and did a few upgrades. After that the intermittent 2 minute drop problems disappeared.

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I was merely pretty sure that the comment was AI generated as I read it. After reading it, I became a lot more confident when I noticed the username above the comment: Gemini 3.

Is this a Wordpress plugin the blog author is using?

Amazing that we now live in a world where AI can instantly an accurately diagnose a network infrastructure problem, but you are still forced to talk to CS drones who tell you again and again "have you tried unplugging it and plugging it back in?"

I'm not so sure that's an accurate diagnosis. But I agree it's certainly better than one can get from phoning support.

I can't speak to the accuracy of the diagnosis, but the claims about NTP are bizarre, and to the best of my knowledge, wrong. There's nothing specific about the times the incidents cluster around that would have anything to do with NTP. It doesn't work like that.

Though, if I was the author the speculation about the restart time would have me breaking out a timer.

We're talking about this line, right?

>The precision of outages (at :29 and :44) matches a network-synchronized clock (NTP).

I think this just correctly points out that if the trigger was something unsynchronized like animals chewing on wires or someone digging underground, you wouldn't have 61% of events occurring at these two second markers. Even if the trigger was something digital but on a machine that isn't NTP synchronized, you would eventually have enough clock drift to move the events to other seconds. 61% combined at two markers (exactly 15 seconds apart) strongly suggests synchronized time.

Those are minutes not seconds.

D'oh!

Customer support isn't allowed to tell you to attack the box with a hammer. But if they could be totally honest...

Oops, I accidentally destroyed your infrastructure with my car. Please roll a truck.

"Instantly"

That’s more about enhancing shareholder value than anything else. The MBA’s need to cut those costs and keep them down in order to get their promotions and bonuses. The CEO needs another yacht by the way.

Going off on a tangent now, but man, I wish when you called support you could go through a quick technical competency test, and your results dictated who you got support from.

Nailing dense questions about network infrastructure? You get to the engineering team.

Failing to know what the "G" in 2.4GHz means? You probably just need someone to tell you to restart your router.

Our city fiber support is awesome and I've had luck in the past with telling the frontline tech that I likely needed to talk to one of the senior techs, and getting immediately escalated. I don't remember the exact problem I was having, but it was something slightly tricky that I had done extensive investigation on before calling.

Relevant xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/806/

This is actually a great idea. For the consumer. Not for a monopoly ISP which can ignore every issue and collect checks.

My brother ran the article through gemini and left that comment

Sometimes, the truth can be a letdown. Everyone was hoping it was LLMs all the way down. ;)

I am very fortunate to have two competing ISPs in my area. Verizon Fios, and Optimum Fibre. I have played them against each other. I have had both, over the years. I am currently using Optimum.

Still not especially cheap, but the service is good. The customer service ... not so good (think South Park).

I think it was someone trying to help and being cheeky about it.

you've obviously never used AI much then, because I was able to instantly tell that it's a summarisation typical of claude/gemini/copilot

Damned if you do, more damned if you don't.

I do suggest using high voltage rather than a hammer.

You can put whatever name you want there when you post a comment. You don't need to have a registered account.

>frustrated beyond his capacity, and seemingly very high on something, went outside and started ripping infrastructure out by hand and damaging everything else he could find with a hammer

hmmmm i think i just saw that guy at the motel 6 in palm springs.

So much for the platitude that violence never solves anything.

That's a felony in the US by the way, and most will prosecute if they have enough evidence of who it was.

Thing is, even if the neighbors saw something, they didn't see anything when the cops come knocking because everyone is most likely pissed off as well and happy someone is finally doing something that forces attention.

I find it hard to think of an industry more universally hated than telcos/cable/phone companies so good luck finding a snitch.

For-profit health insurance companies?

I wonder if they would top it actually. The need to interact with health insurance mostly scales with age, where as the shittiness of an consumer-grade telco is constant.

Did the neighbor get in trouble or was this a mom-stealing-baby-food-and-diapers kind of witnessing?

Or was it "the neighbor" in the same way that "my friend" has a weed hookup?

Strongly doubt anyone fessed up to the destruction. "Came out this morning and some hooligans must have done it in the night"

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