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When your hash becomes a string: Hunting Ruby's million-to-one memory bug

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Re: When your hash becomes a string: Hunting Ruby's million-to-one memory bug

#11

Post by scmccarthy »

dpark wrote: post #9
fleshmonad wrote: post #5

LLM slop. Why do people (presumably) take the time to debug something like this, do tests and go to great lengths, but are too lazy to do a little manual writeup? Maybe the hour saved makes up for being associated with publishing AI slop under your own name? Like there is no way the author would have written a text that reads more convoluted than what we have here.

Sorry, why is this LLM slop? I only got about halfway through because I don’t care about this enough to finish the read, but I don’t see the “obvious LLM” signal you do.

It's clearest in the conclusion.

Re: When your hash becomes a string: Hunting Ruby's million-to-one memory bug

#13

Post by philipp-gayret »

Had me in the first half. But from the "The Microsecond Window" chapter and on...;

> 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.

Re: When your hash becomes a string: Hunting Ruby's million-to-one memory bug

#14

Post by dpark »

scmccarthy wrote: post #11
dpark wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, why is this LLM slop? I only got about halfway through because I don’t care about this enough to finish the read, but I don’t see the “obvious LLM” signal you do.

It's clearest in the conclusion.

I still don’t see it.

I feel like the “this is AI” crowd is getting ridiculous. Too perfect? Clearly AI. Too sloppy? That’s clearly AI too.

Rarely is there anything concrete that the person claiming AI can point to. It’s just “I can tell”. Same confident assurance that all the teachers trusting “AI detectors” have.

Re: When your hash becomes a string: Hunting Ruby's million-to-one memory bug

#15

Post by eichin »

mbac32768 wrote: post #8
mwkaufma wrote: post #3

A little strange to write up a bug hunt that was resolved by the ffi upstream already, and not by the hunt itself. OP didn't fix the bug, though identifying that the upgrade was relevant is of some interest. Writing could have been clearer.

The bug that was fixed in upstream manifested differently than what he was experiencing so the journey was to validate it for his case. 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.

15 or so years ago I had a similar journey - a single python interpreter "impossible" segfault in production that turned out to be a bug in glibc realloc, that had already been fixed in an update, we just didn't figure out to even look for one until we'd narrowed it down that far. (We were shipping custom Debian installs on DVD, a fair number of our customer installs weren't internet accessible so casual upgrades were both impossible and unwanted, but it was also a process mistake on my part to not notice the existence of the upgrade sooner.)

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.)

Re: When your hash becomes a string: Hunting Ruby's million-to-one memory bug

#16

Post by fn-mote »

fleshmonad wrote: post #5

LLM slop. Why do people (presumably) take the time to debug something like this, do tests and go to great lengths, but are too lazy to do a little manual writeup? Maybe the hour saved makes up for being associated with publishing AI slop under your own name? Like there is no way the author would have written a text that reads more convoluted than what we have here.

> Why do people […] take the time to debug […] but are too lazy to do a little manual 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.

Re: When your hash becomes a string: Hunting Ruby's million-to-one memory bug

#17

Post by dpark »

skrebbel wrote: post #10
ryandv wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> which is par for Rubyists Pro-tip: re-read your comment before you submit and take out the bits that make you sound like an asshole.

It’s truly weird how some people are just full of hate like this and either cannot see or do not care that they are unpleasant assholes.

Re: When your hash becomes a string: Hunting Ruby's million-to-one memory bug

#18

Post by michaelcampbell »

fleshmonad wrote: post #5

LLM slop. Why do people (presumably) take the time to debug something like this, do tests and go to great lengths, but are too lazy to do a little manual writeup? Maybe the hour saved makes up for being associated with publishing AI slop under your own name? Like there is no way the author would have written a text that reads more convoluted than what we have here.

> LLM slop

Is this the new "looks shopped. I can tell by the pixels."?

Re: When your hash becomes a string: Hunting Ruby's million-to-one memory bug

#19

Post by [deleted] »

dpark wrote: post #17
skrebbel wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which is par for Rubyists Pro-tip: re-read your comment before you submit and take out the bits that make you sound like an asshole.

It’s truly weird how some people are just full of hate like this and either cannot see or do not care that they are unpleasant assholes.

[deleted]
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