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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

#51

Post by lifthrasiir »

> Million-to-one bugs are real, not theoretical. They happen during initialization and restart, not runtime. When they trigger, they cascade - 2,500 errors from one root cause. In high-restart environments, rare becomes routine.

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.)

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

#52

Post by dpark »

Jweb_Guru wrote: post #48
dpark wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this parallel construction “not A, not B, not C” and “not A, not B, but C” are extremely common constructions in general. So common in fact that you did it in this exact reply. “This doesn't mean that the entire article was written by an LLM, nor does it mean that there's not useful information in it. Regardless, given the amount of low effort LLM-generated spam that makes it onto HN, I think it is fairly defensibl…

Again, this is why I don't bother explaining why it's very obvious to us. People like you immediately claim that human writing is like this all the time, which it's not. Suffice it to say that if a large number of people are immediately flagging something as AI, it is probably for a reason. My reply wasn't an instance of this syntactic pattern, and the fact that you think it's the same thing shows that you are probab…

> Again, this is why I don't bother explaining why it's very obvious to us.

The thing is, your premise is that you can identify certain patterns as being indicative of AI. However, those exact same patterns are commonly used by humans. So what you’re actually claiming is some additional insight that you can’t share. Because your premise does not hold up on its own. What you were actually claiming is “I know it when I see it”.

Let me give you a related example. If you go to any of the “am I the asshole” subreddits, you will encounter the exact same story format over and over: “Other person engages in obviously unacceptable behavior. I do something reasonable to stop the unacceptable behavior. People who should support me support other person instead. Am I the asshole?” The comments will be filled with people either enraged on behalf of the author or who call it AI.

The problem with claiming that it’s AI is that the sub was full of the exact same garbage before AI showed up. The stores have always been the same bullshit rage bait. So it’s not technically wrong to say it looks like AI, because it certainly could be. But it could also be human generated rage bait because it’s indistinguishable. My guess is that some of the sub is totally AI. And a chunk of it is from human humans engaged in shitty creative writing.

When you look at generic click-bait/blogspam patterns that humans have been using for decades now and call it AI, all you’re doing is calling annoying blog writing AI. Which it could be, but it could also not be. Humans absolutely write blogs like this and have for longer than LLMs have been widely available.

> My reply wasn't an instance of this syntactic pattern, and the fact that you think it's the same thing shows that you are probably not capable of recognizing the particular way in which LLMs write.

It was absolutely an example of the pattern, just more wordy. Spare me the ad hominem.

Your “you couldn’t understand” and “obvious to us” stuff is leaning into conspiracy theory type territory. When you believe you have some special knowledge, but you don’t know how to share it with others, you should question whether that knowledge is actually real.

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

#53

Post by Jweb_Guru »

dpark wrote: post #52
Jweb_Guru wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, this is why I don't bother explaining why it's very obvious to us. People like you immediately claim that human writing is like this all the time, which it's not. Suffice it to say that if a large number of people are immediately flagging something as AI, it is probably for a reason. My reply wasn't an instance of this syntactic pattern, and the fact that you think it's the same thing shows that you are probab…

> Again, this is why I don't bother explaining why it's very obvious to us. The thing is, your premise is that you can identify certain patterns as being indicative of AI. However, those exact same patterns are commonly used by humans. So what you’re actually claiming is some additional insight that you can’t share. Because your premise does not hold up on its own. What you were actually claiming is “I know it when I…

> It was absolutely an example of the pattern, just more wordy. Spare me the ad hominem.

LLMs simply don't generate the syntactic pattern I used consistently, but they do generate the pattern in the article. I'm not really sure what else to tell you.

The rest of your post isn't really that interesting to me. You asked why nobody was giving specific examples of why it was generated. I told you some of the specific reasons we believe this article was generated with the assistance of an LLM (not all--there are many other sentences that are more borderline which only slightly increase the probability of LLM generation in isolation, which aren't worth cataloguing except in a context where people genuinely want to know why humans think a post reads as AI-generated and are not just using this as an excuse to deliver a pre-prepared rant), mentioned that the reason people don't typically bother to bring it up is that we know people who demand this sort of thing tend to claim without evidence that humans write in the exact same way all the time, and you proceeded to do exactly that. Next time you don't get a response when you ask for evidence, consider that it might be because we don't particularly want to waste time responding to someone who isn't interested in the answer.

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

#54

Post by Jweb_Guru »

dpark wrote: post #41
PKop wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's your issue not ours. It's obvious; if you don't have a problem with it, enjoy reading slop; many people can't stand it and we don't have to apologize for recognizing or not liking it.

I don’t believe you can recognize anything. Like everyone else claiming they can clearly identify AI you can’t actually point to why it’s AI or what parts are clearly AI. If you could actually identify AI deterministically you would have a very profitable product.

I would never claim that we can reliably detect all AI generated text. There are many ways to write text with LLM assistance that is indistinguishable from human output. Moreover, models themselves are extremely bad at detecting AI-generated text, and it is relatively easy to edit these tells out if you know what to look for (one can try to prompt them out too, though success is more limited there). I am happy to make a much narrower claim, however: each particular set of models, when not heavily prompted to do otherwise, has a "house style" that's pretty easily identifiable by humans in long-form writing samples, and content written with that house style has a very high chance of being generated by AI. When text is written in this house style, it is often a sign that not only were LLMs used in its generation, but the person doing the generation did not bother to do much editing or use a more sophisticated prompt that wouldn't result in such obvious tells, which is why the style is commonly associated with "slop."

I find it interesting that you believe this claim is wildly conspirational, or that you think the difficulty of reliably detecting AI generated text at scale is evidence that humans can't do pretty well at this much more limited task. Do you also find claims that AIs are frequently sycophantic in ways that humans are not, or that they will use phrases like "you're absolutely right!" far more than a human would unless prompted otherwise (which are the exact same type of narrow claim) similarly conspirational? i.e., is your assertion that people would have difficulty differentiating between a real human's response to a prompt and Claude's response to a prompt when there was no specific pre-prompt trying to control the writing style of the response?

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

#55

Post by dpark »

Jweb_Guru wrote: post #54
dpark wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t believe you can recognize anything. Like everyone else claiming they can clearly identify AI you can’t actually point to why it’s AI or what parts are clearly AI. If you could actually identify AI deterministically you would have a very profitable product.

I would never claim that we can reliably detect all AI generated text. There are many ways to write text with LLM assistance that is indistinguishable from human output. Moreover, models themselves are extremely bad at detecting AI-generated text, and it is relatively easy to edit these tells out if you know what to look for (one can try to prompt them out too, though success is more limited there). I am happy to mak…

On the other fork where I responded to your claims with a direct and detailed response, you insisted that my comment “isn't really that interesting” and just disengaged. I’m not going to write another detailed explanation of why your “slop === AI” premise is flawed. Go reread the other fork if you’ve decided you’re interested.

> I find it interesting that you believe this claim is wildly conspirational

I don’t believe it’s wildly conspiratorial. I believe it’s foolishly conspiratorial. There’s some weird hubris in believing that you (and whatever group you identify as “us”) are able to deterministically identify AI text when experts can’t do it. If you could actually do it you’d probably sell it as a product.

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

#56

Post by inopinatus »

dpark wrote: post #46
Jweb_Guru wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can point to individual sentences that were clearly generated by AI (for example, numerous instances of this parallel construction, "No warning. No error. Just different methods that make no sense.", "Not corrupted. Not misaligned. Not reading wrong offsets.", "Not a segfault. Not the T_NONE error from #1079. There it is, the exact error from production"). The style is list-heavy, including lists used for condition…

> this parallel construction “not A, not B, not C” and “not A, not B, but C” are extremely common constructions in general. So common in fact that you did it in this exact reply. “This doesn't mean that the entire article was written by an LLM, nor does it mean that there's not useful information in it. Regardless, given the amount of low effort LLM-generated spam that makes it onto HN, I think it is fairly defensibl…

Blog spam doesn’t intersperse the drivel with literary narrative beats and subsection titles that sound like sci-fi novels. The greasy mixture of superficially polished but substantively vacuous is much more pronounced in LLM output than even the most egregious human-generated content marketing, in part because the cognitive entity in the latter case is either too smart, or too stupid, to leave such a starkly evident gap.

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

#57

Post by xerxes901 »

Animats wrote: post #34

So they turned on GC after every allocate ("GC stress"), and "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 pro…

That’s exactly what it was. He discovered the customer was using a version of ffi that had this “use-after-free” (ish) bug, but the question “is this actually what my customer was seeing or is there _another_ bug lurking” still needed to be answered.

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

#58

Post by xerxes901 »

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.

I have no idea whether the text was generated from an LLM, but “slop” it absolutely is not - it’s clearly a very logically ordered walkthrough about a very thorough debugging process.

If you call anything that comes out of a model “slop” the term uses all meaning.

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

#59

Post by MobiusHorizons »

dpark wrote: post #55
Jweb_Guru wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never claim that we can reliably detect all AI generated text. There are many ways to write text with LLM assistance that is indistinguishable from human output. Moreover, models themselves are extremely bad at detecting AI-generated text, and it is relatively easy to edit these tells out if you know what to look for (one can try to prompt them out too, though success is more limited there). I am happy to mak…

On the other fork where I responded to your claims with a direct and detailed response, you insisted that my comment “isn't really that interesting” and just disengaged. I’m not going to write another detailed explanation of why your “slop === AI” premise is flawed. Go reread the other fork if you’ve decided you’re interested. > I find it interesting that you believe this claim is wildly conspirational I don’t believ…

> believing that you (and whatever group you identify as “us”) are able to deterministically identify AI text

I think you will find the OP said no such thing. They instead said they identified a mixture of writing styles consistent with a human author and an LLM. The OP says nothing about deterministically identifying LLMs, only that the style of specific sections is consistent with LLMs leading to the conclusion.

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

#60

Post by hansvm »

davebranton wrote: post #44

If I see another AI-written trash article I am going to scream. Overlong, overwritten garbage. People used to write, and there was personality in that writing. Now people believe it's acceptable to generate reams of utter formless shite and post it on the internet. If you cannot be bothered to write something, why on God's good earth would you expect anyone to be bothered to read it?

I'd normally agree, but this is a case I don't see often -- despite the form being terrible the content is good. I certainly would strongly prefer the same post with better writing, but if the entire 2019 internet were replaced with articles like this (on orthogonal topics/micro-topics) I think it'd be a better place.
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