Comment on 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 3 days agoThere’s a jump instruction by an address read from RAM, a bit flip occurred so a condition “if friend greet else kill” worked as “if friend rape else kill”. Absolutely anything can happen, that wasn’t determined by program design flaws and errors. A digital computer is a deterministic system (sometimes there are intentional non-deterministic elements like analog-based RNGs), this is non-deterministic random changes of the state.
In concrete terms - things break without reason. A perfect program with no bugs, if such exists, will do random wrong things if bit flips occur. Clear enough?
Retail4068@lemmy.world 2 days ago
[deleted]vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 2 days ago
I don’t want to use the M-word or the T-word, but those “made up use cases” constitute every computer program in existence.
Retail4068@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Sorry let me correct. Use cases that normal people give two fucks about.
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 2 days ago
Each and every one of them, moron. Everything you do on a computer every moment.
BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world 2 days ago
In practice preftct programs do exist, they just have to be small enough to do formal verification
SpacetimeMachine@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Very ironic typo there