[Oxidation]

Ask it details about a little-documented event and it'll happily tell you plausible, but utterly false, lies, however.

Apparently the "early 2011 Bougainville earthquake" was magnitude 6.3, at a depth of 21.7km, on the 20th January and caused "widespread damage to buildings and infrastructure in the region, and triggered landslides that blocked roads and hampered rescue efforts".

It was actually on the 7th Feb, a 6.4 and at a depth of 415km. There were "no immediate reports of damage or injuries".

None of this is remotely surprising, considering it's a turbocharged statistical model and it probably ingested a few words about it at most, out of billions and billions, but somewhere along the line from "famous" to "footnote" subjects, it will segue into complete fiction.

[williamcotton]

Sure, but that is a predictable kind of result, not “rm -rf /“.

[Oxidation]

Some flavour of "git gc" after your reset is far more likely to crop up and ruin your day, that's true.

As long as you stay on the statistical beaten path (i.e. you're asking about Paris), you will probably be fine, indeed. Probably. Stochastic bugs are always the most fun anyway.

[williamcotton]

You definitely go about making “stochastic bugs” more reliable in a manner different from debugging software.

It’s more akin to industrial engineering. There is no such thing as a perfectly machined widget. So we come up with an acceptable range of tolerances and compute a process capability. Six sigma. 3.4 defects per million and then buy an insurance policy.