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In ye olden times I used to stop bosses from throwing away the slowest machine we had, and try to get at least one faster machine.

It’s still somewhat the case, but at the time the world was rotten with concurrent code that only worked because an implicit invariant (almost) always held. One that was enforced by the relative time or latency involved with two competing tasks. Get new motherboards or storage or memory and that invariant goes from failing only when the exact right packet loss happens, to failing every day, or hour, or minute.

Yes, it’s a bug, but it wasn’t on your radar and the system was trucking along yesterday and now everything is on fire.

The people who know this think the parent is a very interesting question. The people who don’t, tend to think it’s a non sequitur.




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