Software Folklore
8 comments
·January 12, 2025gopalv
Dealing with a "more magic switch" this week with Claude.
The AI prompting business feels a lot more like the analog circuit where something being "near" something else causes capacitance or inductance without actually being connected.
What is old is again new!
gonzo41
Yeah there's going to be AI version of row hammer attacks where you pollute the training data to get a favourable bias somehow.
We should have skipped this phase of AI development and just created terminators.
TZubiri
"we have a tradition in our family of ice cream for dessert after dinner each night. "
I immediately geolocated this story.
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kristopolous
I've got a project kind of similar but I try to give well referenced historical evidence to try to suss out the true narrative, if any
txtcybr
cool stories to read during my lunch
Long ago I worked on the firmware for a game controller. We started getting reports back of ghost inputs like stuck buttons and false presses after we sent some early hardware to media reviewers. Given the power of game media at the time, this was an immediate code red. We took shifts playtesting various video games for nearly a week straight just to try and replicate the issues. No luck, only the reviewers could manifest it. We were about to put reviewers on a plane to demonstrate the issue in person when I decided to clean my desk. In doing so I tossed a bare PCB running debug to the other side of the desk and my console went wild.
Turns out the PCBs were shock/pressure sensitive, and the debouncing was just a bit off. Reviewers were getting really into their games and mechanically stressing the controllers. Stressed hard enough, the PCB would bend slightly, causing line level fluctuations and eventually ghost inputs. Back in the office we were just doing a job and not getting too emotionally involved in our playtesting.
Some new molds and review units later we shipped the working system. Percussive debugging has solved a number of otherwise intractable bugs over my career.