Comment by hinkley

19 days ago

This reminds me of college, when some of my professors were still sorting out their curriculum and would give us homework assignments with bugs in it.

I complained many times that they were enabling my innate procrastination by proving over and over again that starting the homework early meant you would get screwed. Every time I'd wait until the people in the forum started sounding optimistic before even looking at the problem statement.

I still think I'd like to have a web of trust system where I let my friends try out software updates first before I do, and my relatives let me try them out before they do.

Ah, I remember those days. One that wasn't an error exactly was an assignment that had a word limit of 2000 words or something. I'd written maybe 3000 words and spent quite some time cutting it down, getting it to just under the limit. Then someone else who also wrote too many words asked the professor if that was okay and they sent out an update to everyone saying it's fine to ignore the word limit.

  • So you accidentally learned how to edit a text? Sounds like a win to me…

    • That's a nice positive way to view it. I would even say that was probably intended as a feature of the original assignment brief.

> let my friends try out software updates first before I do

And who do they let try the software before they do? And so on... Where does it ended?

  • There's a few months every year when I'm feeling brave or crazy. We could take turns.

    The thing is that most supply chain attacks are going to hit you when you are least prepared to deal with them, because that's exactly how they get you. When you're distracted.

    Upgrades are deep work, but the commands to start them feel like shallow work.

  • There is always a fresh group of people who haven't learned that lesson yet acting as the guinea pigs.

They should have just gave out extra credit for finding bugs.

  • I had a professor who did this. One letter grade bump *after curve* applied per assignment per bug found (reproduce case and fix required).

    Loved that class.

For windows updates r/sysadmin has people who run updates and post their experience on patch Tuesday.