[hinkley]

The author has discovered a flavor of the Poison Pill. More common in event sourcing systems, it’s a message that kills anything it touches, and then is “eaten” again by the next creature that encounters it which also dies a horrible death. Only in this case it’s live-locked.

Once the data structure gets into the illegal state, every subsequent thread gets trapped in the same logic bomb, instead of erroring on an NPE which is the more likely illegal state.