I was just thinking of some weird little handheld POS device from the 1990s, 64kb total or something like that and the OS took up most of it. Can't remember if it was Aztec or Lattice C... whichever version we had to use it hadn't quite made it to adopting the ANSI standard yet. Some day maybe I'll code in C again, it's so much easier these days.

@harrysintonen@infosec.exchange at least those are static constant size allocations.. it could be dynamically done with alloca 🤪

@kbal@fedia.io My first system had 128KB (64KB + banking for the rest), but using C there wasn't really an option. When I really started to write C more it was on a 1MB system. But depending on situation the acceptable stack usage can indeed be much smaller.

#C? You mean C#? Is this some fucking AI slop shit?

Yes, I am aware that is libmpdec code really.

Also, I was a bit lazy myself and used the original buffer size. Even neater solution would allocate exactly the required memory space from heap instead.

I feel like I might be older than you, because "a couple of kilobytes" is bigger than the number I expected there. Or maybe it's that I spent time working on tiny embedded systems way back when.

@Zikeji@programming.dev The article was written like the author was talking about a person, wasn't it?

I am once again here to remind that these LLMs are statistical models, the only "meltdown" was said model by chance outputting something negative, then reinforced on that in it's context window.

😉

So what was the bug I was looking for?

We recently switched off_t from 32-bit to 64-bit. Once this change was made, suddenly the "ar" tool would start to generate corrupt archives when objects were deleted from the archive.

It took quite a long time to find out that this snippet in the open function was the root cause:

if (!error && (mode & O_TRUNC))
{
syscall(SYS_ftruncate, fd, 0);

Needless to say, ftruncate was getting a very large length argument passed to it, resulting in the underlying filesystem outright refusing to perform any action -> O_TRUNC would not truncate existing files -> ar generated a corrupt archive when the file shrank.

It's obvious now, but believe me it wasn't easy to find it.

#bugstories

I was trying to politely get you to use logic to understand that AI is not some inherently better tool because it's new and money is being spent on it so I'll be blunt:

I have seen zero evidence that code output by AI justifies the multitude of costs that come at its implementation. You lose the opportunity to train junior devs, it fucks up testing, it hurts the quality of developers, it's unnecessarily verbose, and makes frequent type mistakes. I want you to provide solid evidence AI outputs code at the same quality or better than a traditional developer before I will agree that learning AI skills is a benefit in the corporate environment

@makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world: I suspecting that by now you're trolling me. Millions of software developers use these tools everyday. Some of them are forced to use them; some of them not and in fact quite enjoy using and LEARNING new things with them. But you can't ignore that more and more people are using AI tools. That's just a fact. You may prefer horse carriers instead of motor vehicles because they're safer. But you can't ignore the fact that people love to use cars to move themselves.

I can spend 4 months learning Perl, or I can spend 3 months attempting to get the bullshit machine to learn Perl and then have to learn it myself anyway in order to fix its inevitably fucked-up output. Pick your poison.

I'd argue you're making the fallacy here. You're asserting a change to an established practice. You've yet to give me evidence that your change is an improvement

It's not the defense's job in an argument to prove their assertion. Anything asserted without evidence can be equally dismissed without it

@makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world: Like in all situations and with all new technologies, using AI for intellectual tasks should always imply a calculation of the effort expended in relation to potential gains. To say that AI tools are always unhelpful is for me a blatant lie. People should research how to best leverage new technologies such as LLMs. To simply deny that there are advantages is for me too simplistic.

To justify sunk costs. I work for those companies, they're making us go into offices despite overwhelming proof it's not improving output. I don't really care what mandates they push down, we've all been lying to meet those for decades and we'll continue to do so. I care about what I can do to tangibly improve the output of my teams, and there continues to be little evidence that AI will do so

@makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world: Why are large companies forcing software developers to use AI tools in their jobs?

I'm speaking as a professional in the software development industry. Why would I hire AI technical writers to output code instead of more developers? Why would I have my devs upskill on AI writing rather than refine/expand their existing knowledge? I understand writing code to a deadline

I'm asking you to prove to me that the effort I put into this skillset will have a tangible impact, especially because I know similar effort in other similar skills will have tangible improvements

@SGforce@lemmy.ca That's why companies need Technical Writers AKA Content Curators! :)

This hilariously assumes writing all those LLM instructions and validating it's code takes no time.

@makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world: That's a good approach when you're still a student or you're on a sabbatical. But when it comes to for-profit companies, that is totally unrealistic because projects have strict deadlines, managers impose certain productivity goals, etc., etc. That's not a valid approach when you're earning your life as a software developer.

All I can think here is that all the time and energy poured into writing the instructions and guidelines and context curation could just be put into writing the damn code...

Why would you spend your time developing a new skill (technical writing for AI) which has a unknown return on investment, when you could use your time to develop your existing coding skills or learn a new language which has a known positive return?

And in a few years when the code is a fucking mess and it's got security holes so large you can park a truck in them, they're going to come crawling back to the real devs and toss vibe coders out.

Happened in 2011 when the work went over seas to code farms, and then returned in a few years after shit started breaking on an epic scale. This is just another bubble and short term profit for a CEO who won't be there for the fallout.

It’s retribution for remote work. An absolute temper-tantrum.