alt Hacker NewsI've read this many times over the years, sort of enamored by how such a strange phenomenon popped out of a factory setting.
In the most 2016 update the relative says it's common to see weird effects from the spools. If it's so common it should be reproducible I would think, yet I've never seen it done.
I've seen this happen in a wide range of production environments (both industrial and computing). Not this effect specifically, but "odd emergent behavior that occurs only at scale that is non-obvious and state-dependent". For example I work at a company that grows a lot of cells is massive reactors, and some folks who run the largest reactors commented that they saw slow changes in overall production that were not explainable by any observed variable (we speculated that slow genetic drift occurred in populations, but it may also have been seasonal, or due to unobserved variables). And when I worked at Google, there were definitely cluster-wide things that you'd only notice if you were very knowledgeable and attuned to their ongoing processes.
My guess is that this happens in nearly all large-scale production systems but goes mostly unobserved.