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Accidentally created my first fork bomb with Claude Code

droppedasbaby.com

11–20 of 28 posts

Re: Accidentally created my first fork bomb with Claude Code

#11

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

I don't know about the author, but I recently saw an article where the author of Claude code apparently spins up multiple instances at once (note that it could have just been a marketing ploy to get people to use more tokens) https://www.xda-developers.com/set-up-claude-code-like-boris...

Just use Git worktrees and a lightweight VM environment (I like macOS native sandbox-exec) and you can spawn as many sessions as you want. I've run upwards of 30 at once on my M2 Pro with no noticeable resource impact.

Re: Accidentally created my first fork bomb with Claude Code

#12
post #5

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.

Care to clarify? Windows doesn't have fork or a fork equivalent...

Re: Accidentally created my first fork bomb with Claude Code

#18
post #12
post #5

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.

Care to clarify? Windows doesn't have fork or a fork equivalent...

A fork bomb can refer to any process that spawns multiple recursive child processes. You don't need fork to spawn more copies of yourself, that is merely the classic Unix implementation.

Re: Accidentally created my first fork bomb with Claude Code

#19
post #16

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

I'm working on a part 2 with a bit more detail for that skill! It just has to go through a couple more drafts.

I don't use AI for these. My friends edit/give feedback, so the cycle is slow.

Re: Accidentally created my first fork bomb with Claude Code

#20

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.

My first was in college on the lab computers, I was like "can I create a pthreads bomb instead to circumvent the fork bomb protections?"

Luckily the head sysadmin knew me and was in the room at the time, and I sheepishly explained by the time I realized it worked it was too late for me to stop it, he seemed understanding, understood it wasn't malicious, and luckily got that what else is a CS department for than for students to learn about this stuff?

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