Post #1802527
2026-03-06 16:07 UTC
Replies (1)
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@xxce2AAb@feddit.dk 2026-03-06 16:20
Fair question. I find it unnerving, because there's very little a software developer can meaningfully do if they cannot rely on the integrity of the hardware upon which their software is running, at least not without *significant* costs, and ultimately if the problem is bad enough even those *would* fail. This finding seems to indicate that a lot of hardware is much, *much* less reliable than I would have thought. I've written software for almost thirty years and across numerous platforms at this point, and the thought that I cannot assume a value stored in RAM to reliably retain it's value fills me with the kind of dread I wouldn't be able to explain to someone uninitiated without a major digression. Almost *everything* you do on any computing device - whether a server or a smart phone relies on the assumption of that kind of trust. And this seems to show that assumption is not merely flawed, but *badly* flawed. Suppose you were a car mechanic confronted with a survey that 10 percent of cars were leaking breaking fluid - or fuel. That might illustrate how this makes me feel.