Two days ago, Reddit ids have finally incremented passed the 2,147,483,647, or the maximum range of a signed int32. It seems one of Reddit's subsystems, the one that serves its photo albums broke due to the integer overflow.
Seems this was less likely a "someone else will deal with it" problem, and more of a development / QA testing problem.
Well students uncovered the flaw and had their cards be at negative 1 dollar, which the vending machine read as a very large balance.
Then 10 or so years went by...
Whenever I write code like that which may break in say, 5 years, I'll sign it in the comments and put my personal email and phone number inviting future people to call me and I'll fix it for free (cause I take responsibilities for my code pretty seriously). Nobody has ever taken me up on it though...
If you know the code may break in 5 years, why don't you fix it now? Because your employer doesn't want to pay you to do that (probably for good reason, surely there's higher priorities).
Then why would you do it for free years later?
You can say, anticipate breaking changes that is calendared to happen as an eventually rollover or deprecation
Essentially things have to work one way now and there's solid reason to think it will no longer work that way later and there's no valid path to fix because exogenous conditions change.
This alternatively, can be done in bad faith to guarantee a future paycheck by intentionally placing timebombs in and then charging high rates to come back. There's incentives for abuse.
I'm making it clear and acting in good faith. I can give them 2 hours for free in 5 years, whatever. I'm a competent and responsible person and I get paid well by not being so cheap.
In my first year of university I was working for a very small web company. I got paid per website an amount that was enough for my student needs, nothing much. I wasn't a very good developer in my 1st year, so I often received emails about bugs in past projects. The bugs were my fault, so naturally I fixed them in my own free time.
It took me 2 years to see how badly I was getting owned by the company. If they wanted less bugs, they should have asked someone with experience and a much higher salary.
I like your accountability, but it's sufficient to document the issue in code, open a jira (or equivalent) and move on.
Leaving your email and phone number is absurd and should not be promoted as good practice. No sane company would take you up on the offer anyway.
When I asked what in the hell a caviar problem was, he said it meant by the time we had to worry about those things, we'd all be so rich we'd be eating caviar.
I broke that unspoken rule and got a really intractable problem that held us up for days finally fixed by making a short phone call early in my career and told myself if I was ever causing what we were going through I'd want to make it clear that I'm open to that rule being broken as well.
Apparently even suggesting such a rule should be questioned and to try human solutions to human problems is met with mockery and disdain. Alright, cool.
Been through it twice in my career…
No process that touches the real world gets into 2^64. No process at all gets into 2^128, at lwast not while we live around a single star.
Yes 128 bits is only 4x times the bit length, but the address space is exponentially bigger.
Some predict if we do run out, it might take ~100 years.
You think we can use 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses in 100 years? Thats ... ahem, ambitious!
And the subnets are in a hierarchy that helps with routing but limits the packing efficiency.
We could feasibly "run out" to the point that we can't keep doing things this way.