

The Reddit hug of death is when someone posts a link in a big community and thousands of people visit it, generating so much traffic at once that, while legitimate, ends up having the same effect as an actual attack does of overloading a website and causing it to become unavailable. Has nothing to do with the Reddit app being hot garbage.



Alec in his own video mentions that the issue isn’t that the Americium decays, but that the electronics themselves age and fail, which applies to both the ionization detectors and photoelectric detectors.
This is one of the things you just don’t wanna mess with, as such a failure is completely unpredictable, and from what I know some manufacturers are even beginning to make detector units with non-replaceable batteries, intended to be replaced whole when the battery dies after years of runtime, to make it impossible to keep using a detector after its rated lifetime.