The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Unique Testing

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2026-09-29

Nikolai M's team had a flaky CI/CD build. About 0.5% of the time, one of their tests would fail: frequent enough to be annoying, but not so frequent that it motivated management to assign anybody to investigate. Nikolai eventually dug in, taking the initiative.

Microsoft's implementation of UUIDs calls them GUIDs. The GUID is, per the docs, really just a wrapper around UUID algorithms, and supports a variety of different UUID variants. I'm sure at some historical point, this wasnt't true, and Microsoft had some weird internal algorithm. That's not really here nor there, but the test that was failing was failing because of an assertion relating to GUIDs.

11 comments - Last comment @ 17:25

It's All Part 2 of the Process

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2026-09-28

Our submitter Tim C. is back as his bureaucratic nightmare continues. Read Part 1 here.

After I'd thrown the WTF Exchange (WTFX) for a loop, they managed to eventually right the ship. But then I faced another hurdle: I had run out of disk space. The software was not live, we were still developing the customer-specific customisations, but I was a bit stuck without a few more gigabytes.

20 comments - Last comment @ 16:48

Said Different

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2026-09-25

I know it's not nice to mock mistranslations, but would you believe we're laughing with them, not at them? In response to recent criticism of the difficulty of identifying precisely what is at issue, two of our readers have chosen to highlight the offending element. Thanks for saving me the trouble!"

"Bad Dutch translation, or is't?" asketh Mike V. "I visited the Dutch Dell site https://www.dell.com/nl-nl and noticed the bad translation on the "Accept All" cookies button. Then I visited the UK page on https://www.dell.com/en-uk and was not so sure anymore about the bad translation. Funny thing is that the text above the buttons refer to the buttons with a completely different text (which is an Error'd in itself)" If I squint I can almost see how this kind of translation could happen.

13 comments - Last comment @ 2026-09-27

Historical Pads

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-09-24

Tim inherited a fairly antique Visual Basic application some time back. Yes, Visual Basic, not VB .Net. The application is old enough that we might consider it "vintage" or "historical"; it certainly dates from before the millennium. But it has its own unique approach to handling historical dates:

  mnYear% = CInt(Year(vntDate)) 
  If mnYear% < 1000 Then 
       msYear$ = "0" & Trim$(CStr(mnYear%)) 
  Else 
       msYear$ = Trim$(CStr(mnYear%)) 
  End If

23 comments - Last comment @ 2026-09-25

It's all Part 1 of the Process

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2026-09-23

Our submitter Tim C. shares his tale of an especially brutal culture clash:

I had co-founded a software startup doing stock market surveillance. In the early 2000s, the WTF Exchange (WTFX) was a major customer of ours. We were one part of a major project of theirs, a complete overhaul of their trading engine and IT systems.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2026-09-25

The John Cage Variable

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-09-22

David C sends us a true confession.

For my job, I write C++ code as if it was a scripting language (long story) to produce programmatic animations for videos. Given that these are "write-and-run-once-and-never-look-at-it-again" programs, I tend to not try as hard to make my code good. But once I wrote this line of code, I had to take a step back and reevaluate my life choices.

10 comments - Last comment @ 2026-09-23

The Weakest Leg

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2026-09-21

On July 10 2026, a life insurance company called TruStage had a "cybersecurity incident". According to an update posted five days later, when they revealed the incident, they are "continuing to work carefully and urgently to understand the facts, and the company will communicate appropriately as its understanding of the situation evolves."

This work, according to their outage page (last updated on September 11th, at the time of this writing), is continuing. Every major business function is listed as "partially available". They have some text explaining that they can't simply turn the system back on, because safety.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2026-09-25

Ai Dios Mio

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2026-09-18

It seems like only yesterday we were mocking the AIs for their limits, and tomorrow they're going to be mocking ours. In the meantime, here's a look back at some humorous moments from the last year or so.

"Mathing is hard" wrote Timothy W. "I for one welcome our new AI overlords."

14 comments - Last comment @ 2026-09-18