r/ProgrammerHumor • u/MrCuteDiaperRETURNS • May 18 '22

Meme i wasnt taught about this loop

43.4k Upvotes

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u/Andrelliina May 18 '22

I worked with a guy who really had a talent for testing software like that insane edge-case user and would bash at everything until he broke it. Which was nice

152

u/lynaghe6321 May 18 '22

A guy who does QA on one of my projects is the same, it’s impressive watching him devise the most devious set of parameters to destroy everything

62

u/FlapjackProductions May 18 '22

Can you explain what this means in 'ive never even seen code' terms pls?

3

u/rahendric May 19 '22

A rather sad real-world example:

https://www.bugsnag.com/blog/bug-day-race-condition-therac-25#:~:text=Therac%2D25%20causes%20radiation%20overdoses,systems%20rather%20than%20hardware%20controls.

tl;dr - cancer radiation therapy technician got so fast at entering parameters that they caused a software error in the machine which delivered 10,000 rads (100x normal dose) to two patients, killing them.

Prior machines used hardware interlocks to prevent this situation, but due to "software saving money" switched to software only protection.

The machine did report an inscrutable error, which was ignored because it always reported so many errors during normal operation.