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by jmts 2413 days ago
As an embedded software engineer, my only response to this is that sometimes I'm surprised anything works at all. Bugs in silicon do exist. Often there's nothing a supplier can do about it. Either you find a different part or find a workaround at a higher level.
3 comments
vvanders 2413 days ago
Oh yeah, or metastability[1] when crossing different clock domains. The fact that it works by raw statistics(just add more flops until the chance is under some threshold) was definitely one of those surprising moments.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability_(electronics)

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avip 2413 days ago
In the grand scheme of things, things that work (s.a life) are an unexplainable outlier.
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candiodari 2413 days ago
Even for life one wonders. If you look at life's history. Life gets created, gets to the point where we pretty much have modern bacteria, single celled organisms. That took somewhere between 100 and 300 million years. They conquered the planet and ...

And then nothing. There was variation in the cells, sure, but not really all that much (also we can't really tell). As far as we can tell no multicellular life, no great advances, nothing, other than continued existence. No spreading further. No evolution towards more complexity. Muddling along at best. Total pause at worst.

900 million years of it. Maybe more.

Why ?

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phkahler 2413 days ago
The next major step in evolution was sexual reproduction. That allows different advantageous mutations to be combined into a single organism. In other words, it allows features to evolve in parallel rather than relying on a single lineage to get everything right.
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avip 2413 days ago
Agreed. For a ~2.5 billion years project, the deliverable is not that impressive.
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HeWhoLurksLate 2413 days ago
But the fact that you're here, conversing on something worldwide is insane.
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phreenet 2413 days ago
> Bugs in silicon do exist. Often there's nothing a supplier can do about it.

I learned this the hard way with my 1U Intel Atom C2000 series server. Completely bricked due to a bug in the CPU.

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duskwuff 2412 days ago
Oof. That was an interesting one, too -- as best as I can tell, something was wrong with the pin driver for the LPC bus clock, and it would degrade over time as it was used.
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