Edit: for the record, Fuck AI
Midwit doesn’t know about RDSEED, or RNDRRS . Every modern computer has a hardware random number generator built in (aka true random number generator). Since there’s a hwrng bulit in, operations that depend on it aren’t deterministic.
Not a magic elf though. Definitely more goblin.
No, I don’t agree.
Every single problem can be traced to a specific source.
What a lot of people (especially in IT) determine as a glitch, is just some unexpected change that they don’t have the time/energy to deal with and can be solved by just rebooting.
Every single thing has a cause, even if the problem was a single particle of radiation from space that flipped a bit on a hard drive.
I’ve had the pleasure to work with some IT-guru that could solve every problem. They could see where this unexpected change came from and tell how to solve it so it wouldn’t ever happen again. Except maybe those bit flips.
Bitflips are fun.
For a while, I managed a fleet of about 6500 iPod touch devices, and we would have random failures on devices where a simple re-image would solve the problem. I did a back of the napkin calculation, and our rate of those failures was almost exactly the expected cosmic radiation bitflip chance for the total surface area of all the storage chips in our devices.
larger structure sizes can help against spontaneous bit flips, i think. at the cost of consuming more energy for each calculation step.
Indeed, but smaller structures are less likely to get hit in the first place, it’s a bit of a trade off.
Also, error correcting memory and storage are things, but at the end of the day, that is just more/larger structures, which is a roundabout way of saying you’re correct.
I once had a email that crashed the network card on a windows 2000 server. That was not fun to try and find the problem. After the 3rd occurrence the network card got binned
Normally I laugh at these as they have some merit, but fuck this one. The right end of the curve isn’t some Jedi understanding of things, it’s tech bros that think AI is alive and they want to enslave us.
Tech bros tend toward the left side of the curve in my experience.
For the record, Fuck AI and tech bros with a rusty pole.
What I mean is that computers are so complex they end up being very fragile, in a way.
A few years ago, a friend was having random issues with her PC. Random crashes, garbled data. Long story short, it ended up being a couple of faulty bytes on one of her RAM sticks.
That’s a very… unique interpretation honestly. I’ve never seen anyone associate this meme (including all the “we trapped lightning in a rock and taught it to do taxes” variants) with the fragility of complex tech, only the idea that microprocessors are such a ridiculous technology that anyone reaching expert level is back in the state of wonderment.
Yeah. The thing is, the finicky interactions between components, and the obscure bugs that may arise are reminiscent of some moody magical creature living inside, just saying “fuck it, here’s a kernel panic” out of nowhere.
Ah, judging by the upvotes, that’s the more common interpretation too. I guess I’ve just not been subject to enough obscure bugs to have ever made the association.
Why the hell would you equate the expert of the field with a tech bro? You don’t understand the meme.
If you want an explanation, current computer system, especially cloud systems, are so complex that even though yes, it’s all deterministic, when so many things are depending on each other, including external interference (networking issues, data syncing delays…).
At some point you start wishing i was actually elves because I don’t fucking know why lambda’s boto get item got the version of the file half an hour before the last modification, even though the lambda was triggered by the file being updated, Carlos. I don’t fucking know, different AWS endpoints might have different sync states maybe and it’s not as reliably propagated as they tell us it is, what the fuck do I know about that. I’ve spent enough time in estigating this bullshit, relaunch it and pray the elves do the thing correctly this time, leave me alone.
Because I am one of the experts. I’m not going to share exactly who I am, but I’ve been in IT for 30+ years. I’ve worked on everything from development, to infrastructure to hardware design for the Open Compute project and at major cloud companies as an architect. So no, it’s all magic elves if you understand what’s going on and I will never equate it with that.
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is often called “the wizard book.” Not because Abelson et al believed computers were actually magic but rather because there’s a wizard on the cover and they compare the act of programming to spellcasting, giving instructions to the allegorical beings that live in the hardware. It certainly feels like magic.
The take on the left doesn’t understand reality, and the take in the middle doesn’t understand fun. The take on the right is trying to have fun but is spoken by someone who understands the take in the middle is the literal truth. If the person with the take on the right actually believes computers are magic then they’re actually on the left no matter how much they work with computers.
Yes, but also as a programmer, sufficiently complex code bases might as well be magical with all of the interactions between edge cases causing some fucky behavior.
Nah man. I’ve been a programmer and it’s very much doing exactly what you told it to. The issue is you (general you) did not do a good job of telling it what to do. It’s like speaking to a five year old realizing the instructions you give it are going to be literally executed, loopholes and all.
Yeah that’s a bit aspirational to my taste. Sure a script is just a list of instructions but when you start adding complex data and network hops and async work there are definitely “non-deterministic” behaviors that will emerge. Ultimately yes everything is ones and zeroes and there is probably an explanation but it will be something stupid and contrived.
As a developer you lay out a plan for what should generally happen but there’s no way you can anticipate all the micro variations that happen in production. It’s like any kind of real life plan, really.
I’ve been a profession Dev for 20+ years. I generally agree with you, but I have experienced what appears to be non-deterministic behavior. One room me it was a multi threaded algorithm and would return slightly different results each time. My theory for mult threaded apps is an environment effects each thread differently. What other tasks the user is doing effected the thread execution order and would give different results based on which thread finished.
While I still think the orocess is deterministic, but with enough factors it becomes indistinguishable from non-deterministic.
I don’t want to be pedantic, as I understand what you’re saying, but they way I interpret that is it’s still deterministic, we just don’t know all of the factors that are currently contributing to the outcome. It’s not magical, it’s just lack of full understanding of all variables.
I get how it can be thought of as non-deterministic, but I think the reason why that bothers me is I’ve seen it used as slippery slope territory into “see, so god must exist!”. I think I was just triggered more by the eventuality and not your specific statement.
Sometimes we purposefully make computers do nondeterministic things on purpose. Hardware random number generators, for instance.
But not counting those situations, speedrunners often call some of the “other factors that just absolutely cannot be accounted for” kind of stuff that rethnor is talking about “RNG”.
But even aside from that, there are some even less deterministic cases. Also from speedrunning, there’s the famous SM64 upwarp that my have been, but probably wasn’t a cosmic ray, but very likely was some kind of hardware failure that wouldn’t be accounted for by only considering how the N64 is supposed to work (given processor architecture and such).
But an example I find even more interesting. There was a Defcon presentation where someone registered domain names that were one bit different from very frequently used domain names, kindof like typosquatting, but these were for domain names that no human was typing. These were domain names that computer programs were hitting, and the domain names weren’t derived from user input. But his one-bit-off domain names got a significant amount of traffic. Just from random memory corruptions and such due to some variety of weird hardware failures.
I’d be skeptical of anyone I know claiming that they’d actually personally encountered something they knew to be truly non-deterministic in hardware that wasn’t in some way temporarily or permanently faulty or damaged in some way, but I think it is a thing that can happen in computers. And some of that nondeterminism comes from sources that actually do act at quantum scales were true nondeterminism isn’t unlikely to have sway.
I interpreted it as about like, microprocessor design and nanometer scale electronics and shit. Electrons are basically elves in my book.
Is your name Kenn Amdahl?
Computers have daemons inside.
Only Linux!
I think all Unix variants as well. It was even the inspiration for FreeBSD’s logo.
Ok, but what with the magnetic flux?
i think it just means that once you optimize the hardware close to what physics allows, you have to consider all kinds of strange phenomena appearing. like, quantum physics, electrons tunneling around, the internal resistance value of the wire antenna, etc.
it’s not just “logic gates”, by far not. e.g. consider the magnetic flux in magnetic storage disks.
We have 1.7 nm processes now. That’s like 10 atoms of Si. Foundries are increasingly magic crystal forges
But what if we don’t do that but instead optimize hardware and software for the tasks? Hackers run 3D games on microcontrollers…
Yep, that’s exactly what we should do (alongside finding a way to cool better our stuff and make drives faster which is usually the biggest bottleneck)
But it seems that the industry does not agree for some idiotic reason
It appears they’re discussing electron flow, which causes a magnetic field
It would be better with a charge-carrier diffusion diagram, but your computer is also full of very strong magnetic fluxes, changing all the time and interacting with each other.
No, but the wifi chips do. Even radio engineers who designed them will tell you they just tamed the elves, they don’t really understand how radio engineering works.
Hah, I do radio engineering and no shit wrote this in a project report back in undergrad. “Radio engineering is often as much art as science” and I got five points off for that commentary.
I still remember the time a bug was fixed by adding a comment on a previously empty line
Computers are fucking weird.
Back in the dark ages of late 90s/early 00s computing, I figured out that I could reliably crash a computer with a c++ script that printed char 7 (system bell) in a while loop, but if I added a semicolon in the next line the system would be fine.
It was fun putting the first exe as the shortcut on lab computers, as people would be sooooooo confused when their computer spazzed out and beeped at them at an ever slowing cadence when they tried to open a normal application. Never bothered how to do it on dual core systems, because I couldn’t be forked.
Otherwise known as “programmers.”
Seriously though we tricked metal into thinking with runes and lightning. That is magic.
well actually silicon is a semi-conductor. not entirely a metal.
Ok, we tricked stone into actually-not-thinking.
“Actually-not-thinking” is still overselling it. Computers don’t think. They compute, which is really just doing calculations, and that is not as complex as it sounds. I’ve seen people make water do calculations. The number of calculations and the speed they can be performed makes it seem like magic.
It’s called the Machine Spirit.
Praise the Omnissiah!
Reminds me of https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html
(I can’t get that link to work right now. Maybe it’s down. So here is the same story on the Wayback Machine.)
The ‘more magic switch’ is one of my favorite stories like that, right up there with the 500 mile email.
Computers have voodoo goblins inside them with the personalities of extremely malevolent genies.
👾WAGA LAKA BOODONGI NI CROPO NALINGKI👾
Sometimes the pipelines hicup, but that just means you run it again.
Don’t forget about “race conditions”!
Youch!
I thought they had angry pixies inside?
Be sure to leave bags of Kuai Kuai out for the magic elves.
