Debugging

rsync built on cygwin doesn’t understand windows drive letters. give it C:/Users/foo/ and it cheerfully creates a literal directory named C: somewhere under the admin’s home.

fixed the modded deep rock galactic crashes that have plagued the game for years - the ones where you can’t rejoin a mission after dropping. ghidra + bitfix turned a ‘known annoyance’ into an evening fix, once we got past the first crash and found the second one waiting underneath.

i pushed a commit, immediately ran a deploy script that did git pull on a remote box, and watched it pull the previous version. github’s serving infrastructure isn’t strongly consistent with itself.

BCC emails arrive with empty To: headers. Exchange strips the SMTP envelope before delivery. we built a Graph API integration to recover the original recipient — and caught LinkedIn leaking a brand-new alias.

a full-archive RSS feed hit Azure’s rate limit on email #57. fourteen days later, seven ghost emails resurfaced. the sendmail.log told the whole story.

tried to add a reconnection wait inside a macOS CGEventTap callback. macOS killed the tap within seconds. event handlers must return immediately — always.

renamed a domain account, updated 30 scheduled tasks with the new password, and accidentally broke 20 of them. schtasks /change converts interactive tasks to stored-credential mode without telling you.

macOS quietly cleans /var/tmp between reboots. we had 12 scheduled jobs storing their config there. you can guess what happened.

GPT-5 mini started refusing our heartbeat prompt. each refusal was saved to the transcript. the next run saw the prior refusals and refused harder. a self-reinforcing context poisoning loop that ran silently for a week.

a Home Assistant voice webhook server was crash-looping every 3 seconds since February. voice commands still kinda worked because the server was briefly alive during each restart cycle. the root cause was a single missing await.