OTOH I'm a bit surprised he didn't pull back earlier and suggest to his user to update to the latest version though and let him know.
Never wrote it up externally because it was already solved and "Debian updates to existing releases are so rare that you really want to pay attention to all of them" (1) was already obvious (2) was only relevant to a really small set of people (3) this somewhat tortured example wasn't going to reach that small set anyway. (Made a reasonable interview story, though.)
I would spend similar time debugging this if I were the author. It's a pretty serious bug, a non obvious issue, and would be impossible to connect to the ffi fix unless you already knew the problem.
I feel like the “this is AI” crowd is getting ridiculous. Too perfect? Clearly AI. Too sloppy? That’s clearly AI too.
Rarely is there anything concrete that the person claiming AI can point to. It’s just “I can tell”. Same confident assurance that all the teachers trusting “AI detectors” have.
They like to code. They don’t like to write.
I’m not excusing it, but after you asked the question the conclusion seems logical.
Is this the new "looks shopped. I can tell by the pixels."?
> No warning. No error. Just different methods that make no sense.
> This is why write barriers exist. They're not optional extras for C extension authors. They're how you tell the garbage collector: "I'm holding a reference. Don't free this
It's all ChatGPT LinkedIn and Instagram spam type slop. An unfortunate end to an otherwise interesting writeup.
alexnewman•3h ago