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preommrlast Friday at 8:07 PM3 repliesview on HN

I had no idea this was a real thing - I always thought that xkcd comic[0] was just a random joke.

[0]https://xkcd.com/378/


Replies

nomellast Friday at 8:44 PM

It's literally one of the reasons ECC RAM exists.

aruametellolast Friday at 8:25 PM

To dial up the weirdness, sometimes the solar flare activity has spikes (https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/solar-activity/solar-fla...) and these have a mild relationship with the odds of having "bitflips" in that timeframe.

we had a "historic bad solarweather" a bunch of years ago and i talked with a cyber cafe operator that "you could have more computers bluescreen on this week than usual".

to me it got really weird when he said later he really did, but honestly its 50/50 that could had been just incidental.

in another note there are some "rather intense" discussions when someone speedrunning a game gets a "unreproducible glitch" in their favor, some claim its a flaw from ageing dram hardware, but some always point that it could be a cosmic ray bitfliping the right bit. (https://tildes.net/~games/1eqq/the_biggest_myth_in_speedrunn...)

mikestewlast Friday at 10:04 PM

I had no idea this was a real thing

Oooh, in that case I have another xkcd you might like, involving mint candies and soft drinks…