Crash looping
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heidict entry
Crash looping — /kræʃ ˈluː.pɪŋ/ · adjective · sentiment: neutral.
Inflections
| Form | Value | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| verb | to crash-loop | gerund | crash looping |
Definitions
- (informal, playful, clanker-slang) — When someone — or a clanker — can't keep state. Short-term memory not sticking; walks into a room and forgets why; loses the thread mid-sentence and the next word ghosts. Not a clinical-amnesia thing (dementia, Alzheimer's) — those sit outside the joke. More the post-bong-rip register, the pre-coffee register, the ADHD moment where you set the mug down and immediately can't find it. Working memory doesn't persist, so you reboot, and it happens again — hence the loop.
- Bro's crash looping 🥀
- wait what was i saying — im crash looping
- opened the fridge four times without grabbing anything, fully crash looping today
- The clanker forgot the file name it just wrote — crash looping.
- (technical, computing, kubernetes) — (of a container or process) repeatedly starting, failing, and being automatically restarted by its supervisor without ever reaching a healthy state. Named for Kubernetes' CrashLoopBackOff pod state, in which the kubelet restarts a crashing container with exponentially increasing back-off delays.
- The prometheus pod is crash-looping — check the config.
- Set restartPolicy=Never if you don't want it to crash-loop on failure.
Etymology
- crash
- English, "a sudden violent breakdown", 19th c.; computing sense — an unexpected program termination — from the 1970s.
- loop
- English, from Old French loupe, "a closed curve"; computing sense (a repeated block of execution) from the 1960s.
From Kubernetes' CrashLoopBackOff pod state (in common use from roughly 2015). Adopted into clanker-slang along the same path as wedged: first a description of what a process does, then stretched to describe what a person or an AI does when they keep taking the same broken action.
Usage
Not mutually exclusive with wedged. Someone very high who keeps forgetting the conversation is crash looping and wedged af at the same time — memory not persisting (crash looping) and cognition not moving (wedged) compound.
Related
Sources
- Canonical entry: heidict — Crash looping
- Source of truth (YAML):
~/ht/heidict/entries/crash-looping.yaml - Curated by Benedict under heidict editorial doctrine.