Follow-up from “Dumbest Thing you have done distro-hopping?”.
Here’s mine - the laptop from which I’m typing right now has a broken touchpad that keeps jumping and clicking randomly, and does not work. Well, I can’t afford to fix it, but at the moment, I was so pissed off I punched the touchpad really hard, and the machine panicked with all the lights blinking. A few more revival abuses, and the machine was back to life, but since I was running a nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade in the background, I blew off my boot partition. I think I just broke the unbreakable distro.
In the early kernel (think pre 1.0), I “fixed” the CPU scheduler for performance. I gave too much privilege to user processes, who refused to relinquish control back to the OS.
Another time I was working on a multiprocess bootup configuration (before systemd) in a configuration where the main process would orchestrate the workers. Well, the main process would fork a child to do the work, then the child process would fork a child process to do it’s work. It was infinite delegation and I ran out of pids.