Crater cake" lol I had the exact same disaster with banana bread here

Yeah, that "accuracy numbers looked too good" part hit hard. I had the same kind of bug where my training script was accidentally reading from the test set for validation. It took me like a week to figure out because the loss curves looked perfect but then the model flopped in production. The fix I use now is to print out the first few file paths from each dataloader at the start of every run. Just a simple check that takes five seconds but saves you from that embarrassing realization later. Also, hardcoding a small validation set that never changes is a solid backup plan for catching these mixups early.

The thermal paste tax finally came due lol.

EXACTLY this happened to me with a water pump on my old Silverado. Paid top dollar for a "Genuine GM" part that was dead in 6 months. The cheapo Duralast one I swapped in has been ticking along for 3 years now WITHOUT a single problem. It's like the OEM stuff is made by the lowest bidder just to get past the warranty period or something. I've started buying the mid-range brands instead and honestly my repair bills have gone way down.

Loose lid gang for sure. Air locks are overkill for peppers.