@Gabriele Svelto
Old school nerd
Knows things about computers that would drive you insane
Hacks on Firefox at Mozilla
Relays (1)
- wss://relay.ditto.pub – read & write
Recent Notes
nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kyqpqumyuhh5r9yhqxyr7y3clqtvmc6ea6rkldmykeqdg0uvu35ajg43swf2y0d Well that is what rust seems to be like. I used a lot of packages incl. browser and sc...
@nprofile1q... yes, but why? Which packages where taking so long? Firefox has almost 4 millions of lines of Rust and it takes only a few minutes to build them.
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I've seen people claiming - with a straight face - that mechanical refactoring is a good use-case for LLM-based tools. Well, sed was developed in 1974 and - according to Wikipedia - first shipped in UNIX version 7 in 1979. On modern machines it can process files at speeds of several GB/s and will not randomly introduce errors while processing them. It doesn't cost billions, a subscription or internet access. It's there on your machine, fully documented. What are we even talking about?
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Pedro Sánchez' refusal to bow to Trump's demands is proof that European politicians don't have to be spineless cowards, most of them simply chose to be
And to reinforce this estimate I've looked at the numbers we got from the users who run the memory tester after having experienced a crash: for every two crashes we think are caused by a bit-flip the ...
And for the record I'm looking at this mostly on computers and phones, but this affects *every* device. Routers, printers, etc... you name it. That fancy ARM-based MacBook with RAM soldered on the CPU package? We've got plenty of crashes from those, good luck replacing that RAM without super-specialized equipment and an extraordinarily talented technician doing the job. 5/5
In other words up to 10% of all the crashes Firefox users see are not software bugs, they're caused by hardware defects! If I subtract crashes that are caused by resource exhaustion (such as out-of-me...
And to reinforce this estimate I've looked at the numbers we got from the users who run the memory tester after having experienced a crash: for every two crashes we think are caused by a bit-flip the memory tester found one genuine hardware issue. Keep in mind that this is not doing an extensive test of all the machine's RAM, it only checks up to 1 GiB of memory and runs for no longer than 3 seconds... and it has found lots of real issues! 4/5
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In the last week we received ~470000 crash reports, these do not represent all crashes because it's an opt-in system, the real number of crashes will be several times larger. Still, out of these ~2500...
In other words up to 10% of all the crashes Firefox users see are not software bugs, they're caused by hardware defects! If I subtract crashes that are caused by resource exhaustion (such as out-of-memory crashes) this number goes up to around 15%. This is a bit skewed because users with flaky hardware will crash more often than users with functioning machines, but even then this dwarfs all the previous estimates I saw regarding this problem. 3/5
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A few years ago I designed a way to detect bit-flips in Firefox crash reports and last year we deployed an actual memory tester that runs on user machines after the browser crashes. Today I was lookin...
In the last week we received ~470000 crash reports, these do not represent all crashes because it's an opt-in system, the real number of crashes will be several times larger. Still, out of these ~25000 crashes have been detected as having a potential bit-flip. That's one crash every twenty potentially caused by bad/flaky memory, it's huge! And because it's a conservative heuristic we're underestimating the real number, it's probably going to be at least twice as much. 2/5
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A few years ago I designed a way to detect bit-flips in Firefox crash reports and last year we deployed an actual memory tester that runs on user machines after the browser crashes. Today I was looking at the data that comes out of these tests and now I'm 100% positive that the heuristic is sound and a lot of the crashes we see are from users with bad memory or similarly flaky hardware. Here's a few numbers to give you an idea of how large the problem is. 🧵 1/5
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According to my feed today computing is basically over and software engineering is basically over and people buying games is basically over so I guess what I'm getting from all this is my life is basi...
@nprofile1q... the reason why the botlickers have become so loud lately is that it's their toy that's about to taken away from them. The AI industry is crumbling under a mountain of debt and gigantic losses. Hardware and now energy too just got a lot more expensive, making those gigantic losses even larger. The collapse will be absolutely spectacular and will hurt us too, but it is coming.
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This was a delightful read, tech is still cool from time to time, if you know where to look and no money is involved.
Which is another way of saying, if you have some spare time you could also spend your evening reading a blog post about decompiling Silicon Graphics' PROMs. This is fedi's bread and butter.
https://mattst88.com/blog/2026/02/08/Reverse_Engineering_the_PROM_for_the_SGI_O2/
#SiliconGraphics #SGI #ReverseEngineering
Which is another way of saying, if you have some spare time you could also spend your evening reading a blog post about decompiling Silicon Graphics' PROMs. This is fedi's bread and butter.
https://mattst88.com/blog/2026/02/08/Reverse_Engineering_the_PROM_for_the_SGI_O2/
#SiliconGraphics #SGI #ReverseEngineering
#OTD 30 years ago the Space Shuttle mission STS-75 launched. It carried the peculiar Tethered Satellite System as its main experiment and was the first space mission where a #Linux based computer was used in space. I remember it well because I saw the launch; my father was part of the ground crew and brought us over to the US with him. It was a memorable experience that filled teenage-me with awe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-75
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-75