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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

Oh how I do hate the word "glitch". It tells you nothing and makes the whole thing sound like a happy little accident. A glitch to me is "Hey every time we order 200 of these fuses, we also get five lug nuts". That's a glitch. It's weird, but production moves forward. This is an incident.

No, it either a software bug, misconfiguration, network issue, hardware failure in Toyotas part ordering system or something to that nature.

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Glitch just sits on two sides of the extreme. It's either too early in the investigation to call it anything else or it's after the investigation and there's not enough knowledge of the stack consisting of people, software, hardware (electrical, mechanical), and physics to figure it out.

Reminds me of my old college lecturer.

> There is no such thing as a bug or a glitch. Computers will only do exactly what someone tells them to do.

> You either have a mistake, or a lack of understanding.

Unless of course a random solar flare comes and flips a bit. ;)

Or something more simple like a browser update.

Or any other error source like that. Thermal noise, background radioactivity, etc. As chip density increases the chance of bit flips also increases, and ECC RAM becomes more important.

I’ve heard this thinking described as a fallacy somewhere - in economics I think - nobody has total knowledge of any complex system. So it is not valid to say any kind of complex computer system only does what manifests in its commands is the result of the interactions of many people, analogous to thermal noise jiggling a grain of sand in suspension.

Parkinsons law of triviality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

I think you are referring to “bikeshedding” which isn’t quite what I had in mind.

I think what I’m describing is more closely related to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

See also “Complete Information” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_information

The idea that all agents in a system should be aware of the consequences of all actions is itself fallacious in this thinking.

As such, the “glitch” can legitimately arise from the interaction of agents who do not have complete information.

I don't think bug means the computer is at fault.

I was once able to make a very solid case that a crash was due to a bit flip turning a two-byte cpu instruction into a one-byte “inc r8” and a garbage second instruction

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