And the worst part is when it actually does and you have no fucking idea what went wrong before.
The pc had the hiccups and now it’s fine. Problem solved!
That’s step zero: rule out black magic
Those damn cosmic rays flipping my bits
I wonder if there’s an available OS that parity checks every operation, analogous to what’s planned for Quantum computers.
Unrelated, but the other day I read that the main computer for core calculation in Fukushima’s nuclear plant used to run a very old CPU with 4 cores. All calculations are done in each core, and the result must be exactly the same. If one of them was different, they knew there was a bit flip, and can discard that one calculation for that one core.
Interesting. I wonder why they didn’t just move it to somewhere with less radiation? And clearly, they have another more trustworthy machine doing the checking somehow. A self-correcting OS would have to parity check it’s parity checks somehow, which I’m sure is possible, but would be kind of novel.
In a really ugly environment, you might have to abandon semiconductors entirely, and go back to vacuum as the magical medium, since it’s radiation proof (false vacuum apocalypse aside). You could make a nuvistor integrated “chip” which could do the same stuff; the biggest challenge would be maintaining enough emissions from the tiny and quickly-cooling cathodes.
That feeling when it is, in fact, computer ghosts.
Yeah, but sometimes it works.
Good luck figuring out why it sometimes doesn’t work 🙃
Mmm, race conditions, just like mama used to make.
There was that kind of bug in Linux and a person restarted it idk how much (iirc around 2k times) just to debug it.
Legit happens without a race condition if you’ve improperly linked libraries that need to be built in a specific order. I’ve seen more than one solution that needed to be run multiple times, or built project by project, in order to work.
The first is a surprise; the second is testing.
Just had that happen to me today. Setup logging statements and reran the job, and it ran successfully.
I’ve had that happen, the logging statements stopped a race condition. After I removed them it came back…
Thank you for playing Wing Commander!
i sometimes do that so i can inspect the error messages on a cleared terminal
One of my old programs produces a broken build unless you then compile it again.
If that doesn’t work, sometimes your computer just needs a rest. Take the rest of the day off and try it again tomorrow.
it’s only dumb til it works
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
My way: wrap it in a shell script and put a condition if exit status is not 0 then say “try clear the cache and run it again”
Ever work?
Disturbingly, yes
Every sufficiently complicated system is indistinguishable from being alive, and living beings need some warm-up time.
All the time. Causes include:
- Test depends on an external system (database, package manager)
- Race conditions
- Failing the test cleared bad state (test expects test data not to be in the system and clears it when it exits)
- Failing test set up unknown prerequisite (Build 2 tests depends on changes in Build 1 but build system built them out of order)
- External forces messing with the test runner (test machine going to sleep or running out of resources)
We call those “flaky tests” and only fail a build if a given test cannot pass after 2 retries. (We also flag the test runs for manual review)
Einstein did say…
on xcode i would say it has a 50% chance of working