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0 pointsmncharity1mo ago0 comments

> write trivial to avoid memory corruption bugs because they were thinking about [something else] [...] defects [...] written by people that know better, but the bug introduced was orthogonal to [their focus]

For whatever reason, hadn't associated the inattentional blindness of bug writing with the invisible gorilla experiment and car crashes - selective attention fails. People looking right at the gorilla strolling into production while chest thumping, but not seeing it, for a focus on passing basketballs. That's quite an image. Tnx.

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3 comments · 3 top-level

meowface1mo ago

I've noticed even people who do offensive security for a living frequently leave gaping holes in their own code. If you're not actively primed to scan the landscape for the gorilla, you will often miss it even if you're a gorilla inquisitor.

Dilettante_1mo ago

Thank you in turn for making the issue much more salient to me by explicitly connecting it to the gorilla/basketball experiment. This is definitely going into my "clippings".

cratermoon1mo ago

And it so happens that the flood of code coming out of tools like Claude is almost certain to bring a whole zoo invisible gorillas along for the bananas. The kinds of bugs that people already struggle to catch because of inattentional blindness flow like a torrent in code generated by these tools.

Did you notice the missing word in the previous paragraph?

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