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by iwalton3 2262 days ago
This reminds me of "Hyrum's Law":

"With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody."

People might implement work-arounds for bugs in an API that could break when the underlying bug is fixed. Or software might implement the absolute bare minimum for it to "work" with some specific implementation.

1 comments

This is kind of the opposite of Hyrum's law, actually, in that the protocol promises one behavior but what's actually universally supported in the wild is only a subset of that promise.
I think you're both right.

He's still right because my experience suggests that it is 100% likely that somewhere, some system relies on a bug in the TCP protocol stack of another system causing a segfault to shut down something critical.

https://xkcd.com/1172/

(leave your mouse over the image and read the hover text :-))

I’m on mobile, what does the alt text say again?
https://m.xkcd.com/1172/ <- mobile version has a button for alt text

> There are probably children out there holding down spacebar to stay warm in the winter! YOUR UPDATE MURDERS CHILDREN.