alt.hn

1/12/2025 at 2:27:15 PM

Software Folklore

 http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/index.html

by ColinWright

1/16/2025 at 7:26:51 AM

Long ago I worked on the firmware for a game controller. We started getting reports back of ghost inputs like stuck buttons and false presses after we sent some early hardware to media reviewers. Given the power of game media at the time, this was an immediate code red. We took shifts playtesting various video games for nearly a week straight just to try and replicate the issues. No luck, only the reviewers could manifest it. We were about to put reviewers on a plane to demonstrate the issue in person when I decided to clean my desk. In doing so I tossed a bare PCB running debug to the other side of the desk and my console went wild.

Turns out the PCBs were shock/pressure sensitive, and the debouncing was just a bit off. Reviewers were getting really into their games and mechanically stressing the controllers. Stressed hard enough, the PCB would bend slightly, causing line level fluctuations and eventually ghost inputs. Back in the office we were just doing a job and not getting too emotionally involved in our playtesting.

Some new molds and review units later we shipped the working system. Percussive debugging has solved a number of otherwise intractable bugs over my career.

by AlotOfReading

1/16/2025 at 1:38:22 PM

Had a bug about two years ago that I just could not reproduce. In fact, only the engineer who reported it could reproduce it. Finally, I did "go to gemba" and went into the test lab and watched him use the machine.

He was doing a complex operation and was young and fast enough to overcome the keypress reporting interval. Literally it was just someone doing something we didn't expect and doing it fast enough that the sequence got messed up.

by HeyLaughingBoy

1/16/2025 at 9:06:48 AM

> Percussive debugging

S-tier term. Will need to add that to my repertoire.

by forrestthewoods

1/16/2025 at 9:39:57 AM

Nothing a bit of percussive maintenance cannot solve!

by gsck

1/16/2025 at 10:20:38 PM

As the old cartoon said: the repairman charged $5000 to come fix a machine. When he showed up with a hammer, walked up to the machine and gave it a whallop with a hammer and it immediately started working.

The bossman asked for an invoice which he wrote up on the spot.

It consisted of two lines:

1) tapping the machine $5

2) knowing where to tap: $4995

Grin

by whitten

1/16/2025 at 11:47:45 AM

Arguably, _The Jargon File_:

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/index.html

and _Zen and the Art of the Internet_

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34

should be a part of the school curriculum covering the internet.

While specific to the Mac, one wishes:

https://folklore.org/0-index.html

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/40492.Revolution_in_T...

was more widely read (and that it was updated with stories of turning OPENSTEP into Mac OS X), and if there is a similar site for Windows which collected stories such as:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

by WillAdams

1/16/2025 at 1:20:48 PM

Folklore.org starts off as an engaging and fascinating whistle-stop tour of a bunch of mad geniuses creating a personal computing revolution.

It ends up being a series of cautionary tales about Steve Jobs from a defeated and depressed Woz. Mostly about how he can't understand how someone can act so devoid of empathy.

by piltdownman

1/16/2025 at 6:16:55 PM

I wish the jargon file was still updated, it's such an interesting window into the compsci culture back then

by StableAlkyne

1/16/2025 at 5:40:23 AM

Dealing with a "more magic switch" this week with Claude.

The AI prompting business feels a lot more like the analog circuit where something being "near" something else causes capacitance or inductance without actually being connected.

What is old is again new!

by gopalv

1/16/2025 at 6:18:28 AM

Yeah there's going to be AI version of row hammer attacks where you pollute the training data to get a favourable bias somehow.

We should have skipped this phase of AI development and just created terminators.

by gonzo41

1/16/2025 at 11:31:13 AM

I'm playing a lot with AI but...

To me these tools are pointless unless they're 100% reproducible. If they're not reproducible, they create more problems than they solve.

Thankfully local models are a thing and the proper ones already have a "random" seed and given the same seed an the same prompt shall always give the same picture / answer / etc.

If they can't do that, they're the road to impossible to fix bugs, impossible to diagnose products defects.

Many who rely on non-deterministic models are in for a world of hurt that's going to make these post-modern of insane bugs look like cheap stakes.

by TacticalCoder

1/16/2025 at 9:49:06 PM

I’m trying to track down an old story about the network not working in a firm on Wednesday morning near 7 am.

I remember the details being that only on Wednesday did they use the freight elevator to deliver donuts to an all-staff meeting and when they did, the network would fritz.

It turned out that if you move a very large electromagnet (on the elevator) along the network cable, it makes the network go crazy.

Combine that with cable-pullers that rather than putting holes in multiple ceilings and floors in the cable closet, saw that the elevator shaft was a pre-existing hole between floors anyway, simply took the path of least resistance and hilarity (and a real hard network debugging problem) ensues.

Does anyone know when or where this anecdote occurred ?

by whitten

1/16/2025 at 10:12:40 AM

You can find a it of Unix history here, docs, pics, and videos. All from an old geek. http://crn.hopto.org/unix/

by mitch-crn

1/16/2025 at 5:13:24 AM

I've got a project kind of similar but I try to give well referenced historical evidence to try to suss out the true narrative, if any

by kristopolous

1/17/2025 at 1:38:09 AM

I’ll need to read up on those. Only recognized two from title (more magic and 500 mile)

by Havoc

1/16/2025 at 6:57:45 AM

"we have a tradition in our family of ice cream for dessert after dinner each night. "

I immediately geolocated this story.

by TZubiri

1/16/2025 at 1:26:57 PM

Care to elaborate? IME this is fairly common. Do you just mean that you guessed that it was in America?

by ElevenLathe

1/17/2025 at 4:12:18 AM

Correct. The abundancy of ice cream for dessert everynight just sets the mental imagery for a big american family.

by TZubiri

1/16/2025 at 2:40:13 PM

They're probably guessing italy.

by NikkiA

1/16/2025 at 2:58:59 PM

I assumed Detroit (or possibly...Pontiac) from the Pontiac reference. I think this is right, as I can't find any reference to a Pontiac engineering division in Italy before the late 70s (which AIUI is when electronic fuel injection become a standard feature, and the described vapor lock issue couldn't really happen). Is ice cream after dinner really a peculiarly American/Italian habit?

by ElevenLathe

1/16/2025 at 6:27:21 PM

If all I saw was "we eat ice cream for dessert", I'm not sure I'd be able to get a geolocation any more precise than "Earth".

The Pontiac in question was the car brand. Someone, somewhere, who drove a Pontiac and ate ice cream for dinner wrote the letter to GM.

by Gormo

1/16/2025 at 7:00:14 PM

Yeah I understood it was about the make of GM car, hence the thought that its likely in Southeast Michigan (aka Metro Detroit) somewhere. At one time Pontiac Division (of GM) had their own engineering which AIUI was actually headquartered in Pontiac, MI (aka in Metro Detroit). IMO it only makes sense to send an engineer out at supper time for a week or more if the engineer is in the same metro as the letter writer, hence the assumption. I doubt they would have sent the engineer to Italy for that long, but maybe I'm wrong -- midcentury America was a land of lavish expense accounts!

Anyway we can speculate all we want (either about the location of the original story or about TZubiri's cryptic reply) with any satisfaction unless somebody has some new source of information, so have a good day.

by ElevenLathe

1/16/2025 at 5:11:11 PM

its the 'every night' that is unusual

by NikkiA

1/17/2025 at 4:14:28 AM

It might not be the original intent of the story, it's just a tool to establish the daily routine that lends to experimentation.

But it ends up giving a very American feeling.

As with most Myth, folklore and urban legends, there is a part that is exxagerated and a part that might be based on a real case. This story is much more likely to propagate in the US as that very daily detail doesn't immediately give away that it's an urban legend.

by TZubiri

1/16/2025 at 9:02:30 AM

I didn't!

by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF

1/16/2025 at 5:21:55 AM

cool stories to read during my lunch

by txtcybr

1/16/2025 at 9:14:04 AM

The number of computer-related problems that I solved by putting a heavy object on my keyboard and taking a break is mind-boggling.

by anal_reactor

1/16/2025 at 10:47:24 PM

I have definitely found software bugs by wiring up solenoids to act as programmable button-pressers. Unlike junior testers, scripts and solenoids will work 24-hour shifts and never ask for pizza and coke.

by glonq