Comment by letFunny
2 months ago
Author of the article here. I am surprised to see the post was submitted and made it to the front page! Happy to answer any questions
2 months ago
Author of the article here. I am surprised to see the post was submitted and made it to the front page! Happy to answer any questions
You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
I feel like I'm ignorant of some classical fable here.
Is this an allusion?
It's a Blade Runner reference [1].
[1] https://bladerunner.fandom.com/wiki/Voight-Kampff_test
Because that would reverse flipping it over the first time, and our universe's physics are not reversible. Thermodynamics demands the turtle stay flipped.
What’s a tortoise?
You know what a turtle is? Same thing, Leon.
1 reply →
A turtle-like animal that only lives on land.
Thanks for the nice article. The SQLite docs that explain this bug are emphatic about how utterly rare, even irreproducible it is. How, then, was it found, one wonders?
We found it at Tailscale and bought an enterprise support contract from SQLite to debug it for us. Worth every penny.
We should probably blog about it.
What mission critical purpose does sqlite provide at Tailscale exactly? Why use it at all?
3 replies →
My guess is that they noticed something was not quite right when inspecting the code and then tested their hypothesis manually to see if it was actually a real bug.
Something similar happened to me when I was working on some code that should clear the state and, by inspection, I noticed some field was not properly cleared under specific circumstances. Then I tested the hypothesis and indeed found a bug. Sometimes intuition and guessing is what it takes.
"to prevent multiple from" seems to be missing a word.
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