"With GC.stress = true, the GC runs after every possible allocation. That causes immediate segfaults because objects get freed before Ruby can even allocate new objects in their memory slots."
That would seem to indicate a situation so broken that you can't expect anything to work reliably. The wrong-value situation would seem to be a subset of a bigger problem. It's like finding C code that depends on use-after-free working and which fails when you turn on buffer scrubbing at free.
Million-to-one bugs are not only real but high enough to matter, depending on which million. Many years ago I had a rare bug that corrupted timestamps in the logs, with an emperical probability of about one to 3--5 million (IIRC). Turned out that that seemingly benign bug was connected to a critical data corruption issue with real consumer complaints. (I have described this bug in detail in the past, see my past comment for details.)
OTOH I'm a bit surprised he didn't pull back earlier and suggest to his user to update to the latest version though and let him know.
Never wrote it up externally because it was already solved and "Debian updates to existing releases are so rare that you really want to pay attention to all of them" (1) was already obvious (2) was only relevant to a really small set of people (3) this somewhat tortured example wasn't going to reach that small set anyway. (Made a reasonable interview story, though.)
> No warning. No error. Just different methods that make no sense.
> This is why write barriers exist. They're not optional extras for C extension authors. They're how you tell the garbage collector: "I'm holding a reference. Don't free this
It's all ChatGPT LinkedIn and Instagram spam type slop. An unfortunate end to an otherwise interesting writeup.
They like to code. They don’t like to write.
I’m not excusing it, but after you asked the question the conclusion seems logical.
People like reading LLM slop less than either of those. So it should become a common understanding not to waste your (or our) time to "write" this. It's frustrating to give it a chance then get rug-pulled with nonsense and there's really no reason to excuse it.
I would spend similar time debugging this if I were the author. It's a pretty serious bug, a non obvious issue, and would be impossible to connect to the ffi fix unless you already knew the problem.
If you call anything that comes out of a model “slop” the term uses all meaning.
Is this the new "looks shopped. I can tell by the pixels."?
From what I've seen doesn't it take a particularly strong reason for the entire article to get dismissed
If you cannot be bothered to write something, why on God's good earth would you expect anyone to be bothered to read it?
