3 ms·

A real-world program (a product of fallible humans, made for fallible humans, executing on hardware built by fallible humans and operating in unpredictable envi

A real-world program (a product of fallible humans, made for fallible humans, executing on hardware built by fallible humans and operating in unpredictable environment) is never bug-free or 100% reliable. There is always a chance that it will fail to behave sensibly—expecting otherwise is foolish and poor design. That holds with or without easter eggs. Easter eggs is an element of controlled chaos.

ryandrake 2y ago
Yea I don’t want to deal with some joker’s controlled chaos at 10:30PM before launch day trying to isolate a rare-repro bug that turns out was deliberately added. If that makes me a Grumpy Graybeard then I accept that name. I wouldn’t want my home builder to insert an Easter egg that causes my windows to open randomly in the middle of the night on one day of the year because he found it “joyful.”
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- idunnoman1222 2y ago
  eggs in the manual buddy. It’s like a joke while you’re reading really dry documentation.
- strogonoff 2y ago
  If output of man invoked without any arguments causes a critical bug right before the launch day, or the equivalent of your windows opening randomly in the middle of the night, you have much bigger things to worry about than that easter egg. (I doubt a true Graybeard would ever find oneself in such a circumstance.) If bit flips become more common as transistors get smaller, that’s certainly going to throw a much less controlled wrench in the works.
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    It might not be critical bug. But it certainly could be failed build job. Which you then have to rerun wasting time or manually hunt down and waste time tracking where it comes from. And something like this printing out in error could indicate that you have been compromised and you should lock down everything. Verify that you full system is clean and go through all of the logs.
    - strogonoff 2y ago
      This ad-hoc approach looks very suboptimal as a threat detection heuristic. Judging about your system’s security by whether there are binaries that behave in upredictable ways means a game of whack-a-mole against buggy programs (which is 100% of them, remember?), while letting real threats go by. A way of making sure your binaries are trusted is supply chain security, which starts with not obtaining them through unvetted sources. If in that situation a known-trusted man says a funny joke at midnight, your spidey senses would not be triggered. In other words, if there is a way for suspect binaries to get into your system, you have a bigger problem. If there is no such way, you can be sure it’s benign behaviour, a bug in the program, an Easter egg, or even a bit flip or some unlikely interaction of factors. If you are not sure whether you have eliminated all such ways, sure, it might seem like a cause for worry—however, I don’t think attackers you should really worry about would try to make themselves noticed through jokes with Western cultural references (or through any jokes for that matter, or in any way at all).
  - keybored 2y ago
    Read the submission. It also would print that Easter Egg with `man -w`—give me the man path (after midnight).
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      What makes you think they didn't read the submission? Occurring with -w was a bug that happened to be located in the easter egg code. It wasn't the actual easter egg. If you hit it as intended, you do have bigger things to worry about. So you could argue that it's bad to have extra lines of code because that's 0.01% more space for bugs to hide in, but 0.01% extra code is hardly something to launch objections over. Nothing about that is easter egg specific.
- mistercheph 2y ago
  Yeah I’m sure that launch was going to go super great, grinch and co launching profit seeking clickable trash hole gets disrupted by man command bug and their feelings are really hurt because somebody did a whoopie cushion? Woops, saddest story i ever read, what a bunch of poor sobs
- ElFitz 2y ago
  The analogy starts breaking down when you start paying your home builder. I would suggest not relying on some joker’s code and write your own instead. Open source is open source. That’s all that’s promised, and we aren’t entitled to anything more.

ryandrake 2y ago

Yea I don’t want to deal with some joker’s controlled chaos at 10:30PM before launch day trying to isolate a rare-repro bug that turns out was deliberately added. If that makes me a Grumpy Graybeard then I accept that name. I wouldn’t want my home builder to insert an Easter egg that causes my windows to open randomly in the middle of the night on one day of the year because he found it “joyful.”

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
idunnoman1222 2y ago
eggs in the manual buddy. It’s like a joke while you’re reading really dry documentation.
strogonoff 2y ago
If output of man invoked without any arguments causes a critical bug right before the launch day, or the equivalent of your windows opening randomly in the middle of the night, you have much bigger things to worry about than that easter egg. (I doubt a true Graybeard would ever find oneself in such a circumstance.) If bit flips become more common as transistors get smaller, that’s certainly going to throw a much less controlled wrench in the works.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  It might not be critical bug. But it certainly could be failed build job. Which you then have to rerun wasting time or manually hunt down and waste time tracking where it comes from. And something like this printing out in error could indicate that you have been compromised and you should lock down everything. Verify that you full system is clean and go through all of the logs.
  - strogonoff 2y ago
    This ad-hoc approach looks very suboptimal as a threat detection heuristic. Judging about your system’s security by whether there are binaries that behave in upredictable ways means a game of whack-a-mole against buggy programs (which is 100% of them, remember?), while letting real threats go by. A way of making sure your binaries are trusted is supply chain security, which starts with not obtaining them through unvetted sources. If in that situation a known-trusted man says a funny joke at midnight, your spidey senses would not be triggered. In other words, if there is a way for suspect binaries to get into your system, you have a bigger problem. If there is no such way, you can be sure it’s benign behaviour, a bug in the program, an Easter egg, or even a bit flip or some unlikely interaction of factors. If you are not sure whether you have eliminated all such ways, sure, it might seem like a cause for worry—however, I don’t think attackers you should really worry about would try to make themselves noticed through jokes with Western cultural references (or through any jokes for that matter, or in any way at all).
- keybored 2y ago
  Read the submission. It also would print that Easter Egg with `man -w`—give me the man path (after midnight).
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    What makes you think they didn't read the submission? Occurring with -w was a bug that happened to be located in the easter egg code. It wasn't the actual easter egg. If you hit it as intended, you do have bigger things to worry about. So you could argue that it's bad to have extra lines of code because that's 0.01% more space for bugs to hide in, but 0.01% extra code is hardly something to launch objections over. Nothing about that is easter egg specific.
mistercheph 2y ago
Yeah I’m sure that launch was going to go super great, grinch and co launching profit seeking clickable trash hole gets disrupted by man command bug and their feelings are really hurt because somebody did a whoopie cushion? Woops, saddest story i ever read, what a bunch of poor sobs
ElFitz 2y ago
The analogy starts breaking down when you start paying your home builder. I would suggest not relying on some joker’s code and write your own instead. Open source is open source. That’s all that’s promised, and we aren’t entitled to anything more.