Print jobs are both completed successfully and failed until someone checks the queue.

Autonomous vehicles are at times both amazingly advanced and bedshittingly idiotic.

I’ve ridden ~25k miles in them for work, and I trust them more than 95% of the drivers on the road. But I’ve also experienced them acting in ways that are still quite far from the way humans would.

Schrödinger’s fatigue crack. With old enough steel, you don’t know if there is a crack propagating until you see it.

As a bicyclist, I see that we have Schrödinger’s Cyclist: Too poor to be able to afford a car like “normal” people, but also a rich elitist who can afford to commute by bike.

Also, Schrödinger’s Bike Lanes: A conspiracy by car-hating politicians to punish drivers, but also an amenity that only rich elitists get in their neighborhoods.

For work I use a database written in COBOL. Reports are simultaneously running and frozen until I either get the report results or sufficient time has passed that I’m certain the system has crashed.

The container can both stand directly in front of me, and the system can still claim that it’s waiting for loading in Malaysia.

Projects will either be done next month or take at least a year to complete. Also, if you ask my team to calculate how long a project will take, and then ignore the estimate, the project will take infinite time because you are an insufferable moron.

A person that has a lot of certs or a high title is both extremely smart or extremely unintelligent. You don’t know until you start talking with them about things more than surface level.

Relevant SMBCs https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3

And

The contrast is either too little or too much and I won’t know unless I look at the drawing again the next morning

“The Computer never makes a mistake” is true and also probably responsible for people believing LLM-hallucinations uncritically

Code is both great and terrible until it compiles.

Software both works perfectly (on the developers machine and most deployed instances) and fails dramatically (on some significant subset of deployed instances).

This makes the software both a success (since it works, and can generate revenue) and a failure (since it is unreliable, and may alienate paying customers).

I’m not sure I understand the question

If you’re looking for a “something is two opposites at once until met” then that’s anywhere any unsureness exists. Lesson plans are decent and lacking until taught to students. Visual art is pretty and dismal until witnessed by another beholder. Speeches are rousing and dogshit til spoken at the mic.

If you’re looking for a “something that’s explained oversimplifiedly then a lot of people say they get it (and are wrong)” then that’s like a subset of all misconceptions.

• Monads in programming. Lots of people say they “get it” after a simplified explanation, but actually don’t get it (judging by blog posts that recite a simplified explanation, but actually don’t get it).
• Tariffs. Lots of people learn middle school mercantilism (zero sum wealth) then guess that the economy is still import export balance, and that if we make people exporting to us more expensive then we get more of the zero sum pie. (Obviously wrong, and a basic macroeconomic lesson on consumer welfare in a system with a world price is useful)
• A lot of physics terms tbh. “I get momentum, that’s when it’s hard to stop when you’re fast.” Often they mean something closer to inertia. “I get the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. It’s when seeing something changes it!” It’s closer to uncertainty in the measurement of tiny things because of the physical implication of what we measure it using. (e.g. by reading a photon off of something, we know we’re kinda inaccurate cuz the photon was discharged)