the.com/flakiness
the art of being thoroughly unreliable while remaining somehow charming about it
means The quality of being unreliable, prone to breaking commitments or behaving inconsistently — or, more literally, the tendency to come apart in thin, brittle layers.
from From 'flake,' which traces back to Old Norse 'flakna,' to flake off or split, and likely a cousin of words across the Germanic family for chipping and peeling. For centuries 'flaky' meant simply 'made of thin layers' — pastry, snow, dry skin. The slangy sense of an unreliable person who 'flakes out' is a 20th-century American development, the idea being that such a person crumbles or peels away when you need them to hold together. Tack on '-ness' and you get the abstract noun for that crumbly, no-show character.
- baking origin
- Pastry flakes form from steam puffing layers of cold butter apart
- snow myth
- No two snowflakes identical, but billions probably are statistically
- software term
- Flaky tests pass and fail without any code changes
- skin biology
- Dry flaking skin sheds millions of dead cells daily
apple's antenna gate — iphone 4 dropped calls due to antenna design flaw in 2010
windows vista crashes — microsoft os notorious for random freezes and blue screens 2007-2009
early tesla autopilot — disengaged unpredictably in real-world driving, multiple documented accidents 2016-2017