I was just reminded of an event I inadvertently caused. I found some
screenshots I took of a few websites. The websites all touched on a joke I
made. I wrote it on a subreddit dedicated to finding comedy in programming
topics: /r/ProgrammerHumor.

I was suprised to find that the joke was taken out of context from
/r/ProgrammerHumor and used as a real explanation to a real problem. This
is a story of how misinformation can spread.

background

The video game
Pokémon Sword and Shield
was released in 2019 to a very hyped world. Expectations were not managed.
The game made a lot of money in presales and the world hated the game.

People were having a lot of fun ridiculing the game. That typical maniacal
frenzy was formed. Strangers on the internet were bonding while sharpening
their pitchforks. Of course, the news was there to document the carnage
and make a buck or two.

Then… a wild software bug appeared in the midst of the frenzy.

my headspace

I was very early in my professional software development career at the
time. A lot of the concepts that folks with a computer science degree take
for granted seemed totally magical to me. They still do.

At work, we needed to save some files uploaded by the user of our
websites. All the files went into a big folder. Some errors were occurring
if the user uploaded a file with the same name as a previously uploaded
file. To fix this, we saved the files with a filename as a
random UUID
and kept track of the original filename in our database.

This worked, but it didn’t really fix the problem. It just made
the problem incredibly improbable. The odds of two UUIDs being generated
with the same values on the same system is very low. How low? Well, say
you had a bunch of kindergartners at school. The first thing they do when
they get to school is randomly put their backpacks into a tray in a cubby.