Accidentally created my first fork bomb with Claude Code (droppedasbaby.com)

Congratulations! Mine was intentional, back in college, where all PCs had open telnet in order to facilitate cooperation. We discovered it was easy to seize someone's computer for a while, and then watch them look around for the culprit, which we thought was hilarious. Boy were we annoying.

The realization that even badly running code is still faster than the average human is rather terrifying. Lucky you that it hogs so much RAM.

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My first ever fork bomb was in the 90s, running Microsoft own example code for OLE (or was it COM?).

That was a great early lesson to never trust code you read online. Even if it is from Microsoft’s own developer portal.

What was the purpose of having Claude Code spin up two more instances of Claude Code though? What was the intended outcome there?

I appreciate the growth mentality in the use of the word "first" there.

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In my days nearest thing to a fork bomb used to be call autoexec.bat from autoexec.bat

I want to know what's going on under the hood of the /adhd skill. Sounds immensely useful for me.

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My first was when I was arguing with the IT guy about local shells on their big iron at Uni.

I told him it was a risk to let dumbasses like us have a shell on his server. He said we couldn't do anything, that they were unprivileged accounts.

"Watch this", says I, as his machine froze.

I got in so much trouble for that. I hope you can't do that kind of thing any more.

Wasn't my first, but my first unintentional one was writing multiprocessing code with Python on Windows many years ago. Not sure if this is still true now, but if you didn't wrap your main entrypoint in a if __name__ == "__main__" block, and your code spun up a worker pool, Python would reload your module for every child since Windows doesn't have a fork() for it to use, and they'd all happily rerun the code to create children, and so on.

And they say you can't learn anything about computers from these bots... I had to learn this lesson from giving a shell account to one of my compatriots. I worked with him on group projects so I trusted him. He installed a fork bomb in his user's cron tab that went off at 3:00 a.m. everyday and I had to wonder why my hand compiled DRI driven screensaver went to a crawl. I did learn the lesson and I did forgive him. But it didn't cost me a couple Grand in API fees.