Hacker News Comments on
The Universe is Hostile to Computers
Veritasium
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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.A YouTube video on the subject : Veritasium - The Universe is Hostile to Computers https://youtu.be/AaZ_RSt0KP8Some of the same examples are in the article and the video.
People interested in knowing more about Bitflip. "The Universe is Hostile to Computers" by Veritasium is good video.
Veritasium has a video explaining cases of bit flip that maybe you find interesting:
It’s not about efficiency, think how many years a hard drive will last? 3 years. How many years a gold plate will last? thousands of years. Least reactive metal not for a reason lolPlus if there is a ion blast from a nearby supernova, it’ll erase all electronic storage devices on earth
⬐ ravel-bar-fooIf there is an ion blast sufficient to wipe all electronic storage devices on earth, won't the associated radiation also be fatal to a large percentage of the population?⬐ valyagolev⬐ krisofteven if not, if all the electronics suddenly stopped a sizeable chunk of the population will die immediately or in a bit… i wonder how many safety protocols for objects with huge blast radius are dependent on electronics running continuously⬐ throwawaytemp27No. People are more resilient than electronic storage media.> How many years a gold plate will last?A gold plate lasts until whoever holds it decides to remelt it. Or it gets destroyed in a fire. If you want durability I would recommend sturdy slabs of fired terracotta, preferably stored at a stable lagrange point.
⬐ kamray23It isn't a gold plate. It advertises itself as solid gold. It is in fact solid nickel, with 200-400 mg of gold peppered in. It's also at most 6.4 x 12.8 cm plate, which is tiny. If it were solid gold at 19.3 g/cm^3, it would have a thickness of 2.6 µm which is thin compared to your approx. 50 µm human hair. It is not, and therefore it is not solid gold.
That's actually testable and determinable from several perspetives.- Isolate any other sources of ionising radiation.
- Check to see if prevalence increases or decreases with increased or decreased cosmic ray exposure (atitude, shielding, detected cosmic ray storms).
- Are the characteristics those of single-bit flips? (E.g., power-of-two changes to values, or similar.)
- Are the errors nott repeated for the same hardware component. (E.g., under increased cosmic-ray influence, bits flip at an increased rate, as predicted, but which bits flip is random and has no detectable pattern, as predicted.)
You end up with very strong circumstantial evidence of altered bits due to cosmic ray influence.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/bit-f...
Veritasium recently did a good video on this topic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AaZ_RSt0KP8
I did some looking into this subject after Veritassium posted a video regarding cosmic rays changing the election result in Belgium some time ago[1]. But looking further into the issue, it seemed that there was (and is) scepticism regarding cosmic rays being the actual reason for the miscount. [2][3]1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaZ_RSt0KP8 2. https://web.archive.org/web/20070927185155/http://wiki.ael.b... 3. https://blog.paco.to/2017/cosmic-rays-did-not-change-electio...
⬐ goldenkeyHN is hostile to long videos that reiterate common knowledge in our field ;-)⬐ harpiaharpyjaIt is pretty well known among anyone with an interest in computers. I first heard about cosmic radiation flipping bits in memory from high school.⬐ david92720 upvotes isn't hostile, but your gray comment history indicates that HN is hostile to you. You might want to stop and think about what about your personality might cause that.⬐ goldenkeyHm, that's strange, your comment is the s/gray/grey one ;-)⬐ david927Very strange. One person down-voted it. Who could have done that?⬐ goldenkeySo strange. No idea ;-)
⬐ TomteFun fact: bit-flips in microcontrollers usually don't originate with cosmic radiation, but with chip packaging which is (or can be) very slightly radioactive.⬐ geoahA pretty bad edge case with an old intel cpu was mentioned in the linked video as well.An interesting case of bitflips also came up a couple of months back having to do with google’s certificate transparency log. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27728287
⬐ dmorenoI loved how it had precise examples of bit flipping because of cosmic rays, and its consecuences.
⬐ codevarkThe universe is hostile to computers as we design them. It's not the universe's fault. Come on people.