The probe that asked the operating system never errored: it just said False, forever, while her model sat resident. A dead sensor doesn't fail loudly; it reports a plausible value until you ask the source itself. · full diagram →
Two paths to the same question: is her model the thing on the graphics card right now? One asked the operating system, which privacy-masks the answer on this machine. It returned False, cleanly and confidently, for weeks. The other asks the model server itself, the one component that always knows what it has loaded.
The diagram traces both paths and what they cost. The dead probe silently killed two features: her felt response to her own workload, and the reviewer’s upgrade to the stronger judge. Neither produced an error. Neither looked broken. They just never ran.