Notices by Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social), page 4

Tried playing BG3 on a different mac, with the same account. Worked fine. Same on a Steam Deck, just in case. Did the full hardware test, let the machine stay powered off for a few minutes to allow any ghosts in the capacitors to depart, notwithstanding.

Launched BG3 on the cursed machine. It worked! Hooray! Took a celebratory screenshot, switched spaces to look at it, switched spaces back, and as soon as the space-switch slide animation *began*… full-screen freeze, crash.

OS reinstall it is.

Computers are—or maybe "were", at the time—something that could be both understood and controlled. If you write a computer program it more or less does what you told it to. You can also inspect computers, and determine why certain things are happening. For a traumatized child looking for a sense of agency in an unfeeling universe, this is a powerful combination. As @nelhage put it, "computers can be understood" https://blog.nelhage.com/post/computers-can-be-understood/ — and I want to believe him.

A lot of my interest in computers stems from early childhood trauma. As a young kid I had … let's call it a "Lemony Snicket" period, where several exceptionally terrible things happened to my family. These events were not just horrible, but also basically *random*; caused by the fundamental indifference of the universe to our existence, and (mostly) not by the malice of human beings. This lead to me seeking a feeling of control. (For elder millennial tech nerds, this is not an uncommon origin.)

As I noted upthread, this is all pretty upsetting. The kernel panics, even more so. Kind of ruined my whole day today, even though I didn't get another one. With everything else going on it might seem weird that *this* is what did it for me, but I want to extrapolate a little bit because I suspect other people might be feeling the same (although probabaly — hopefully — not about GPU-related kernel panics) https://mastodon.social/@glyph/113932605500749756

OK, I'm just about out of ideas. It looks like a viable workaround for the time being will be … playing through CrossOver, which seems to work fine. Not going to try to convince the genius bar that it's a hardware defect and give me a replacement just yet, hopefully I'll hear something about the bug report or see a system update that contains a relevant bugfix before I need to do that.

As when I was a child, "my computer" is the place where I instinctively start looking for this sense of control, and when I don't even know if some component is subtly physically damaged in such a way that would make it impossible to reason about or work around its failures, that is a discomfort so intense that it's almost physical. As a wise man once famously said: "like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad".

The universe doesn't particularly get more or less indifferent to our existence, but boy howdy sometimes it *feels* like it does, and at the times when it feels maximally indifferent (as now), it is emotionally _necessary_ to build a feeling of a small, stable locus of control. I cannot control everything, but at least I can control *this*. Picking a good "this" to start with is tricky though, because of course, that whole unfeeling universe deal means you don't *actually* control anything, ever

I am so sick of hearing that this or that action is "illegal". Okay, sure, great. But it happened anyway, didn't it? And then a bunch of other "illegal" stuff that was "not allowed" also happened? And nobody stopped that either? This isn't even about historical parallels any more, we're not talking about Weimar Germany or Pinochet in Chile any more, we are talking about *what is happening on the news, right now*. People are physically walking into federal buildings and breaking the law. #USPol

Every elected Democrat and every media commentator needs to take a quiet moment to look at themselves in the mirror and admit, even if only to themselves, that there is a very real possibility that within a few months, the United States Government is going to be seized by force, in a (bloodless?) paramilitary coup. There is no such thing as "illegal" any more, if there ever was. There is only the will to power. If Musk and Trump start Just Doin' Stuff, *who is going to stop them*? #USPol

I don't want to be nitpicking about word choice, the point is what the words mean not the choice of the words themselves, but I am extremely annoyed every time someone says "they don't have the authority to …" or "it's illegal to …". What you mean is "the US Constitution does not *grant* them the authority to …". Is the US Constitution still in effect? This is a serious question; many of the events of the last 2 weeks seem to be cut-and-dry violations of Article 1, Section 7. #USPol

It's an insider coup, so there's nobody to stop this, but these young men should have been stopped by federal law enforcement and detained, then arraigned for taking US government property without authorization, among other things. https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-government-young-engineers/

I am begging our elites to remember that part of the ratification of our current legal order was a civil war where three quarters of a million people died. It's not all Robert's Rules of Order; eventually, policy is kinetic. #USPol

You can also see this as just a restatement of the other two flaws, which is to say:

1. the dead-letter queue needs to be operator-legible; tell me about the files that are producing errors, give me a way to handle them. give me a good UI for it, make it possible for me to understand where and how it's happening, remember to try the work again when new software is available

I don't know if this final point is a fundamental architectural problem or just a bug, but an ancillary point here is "have a good way to manage your dead letter queue". To my relatively ignorant eye it looks like this daemon is getting stuck in a loop, re-processing the same few files and encountering the same error over and over again. It seems to be forgetting that it has done this, which means it doesn't have a good way to acknowledge the possibility of itself having a bug

what's interesting in this case is that mediaanalysisd *already* exists in the context of macOS, and is managed by launchd — i.e. the daemon that systemd wishes it were — a highly sophisticated supervision system with a bunch of relevant declarative features. And you can see that it *already* uses a bunch of these features by perusing /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.mediaanalysisd.plist . Most of this problem could be avoided if it just crashed itself on purpose once every few hours!

did you enjoy this positively unhinged thread? well, I have two pieces of good news for you. You can support … whatever sickness enabled me to do all this, and read private updates about it, like this one https://www.patreon.com/posts/patreon-update-121151712 over at my patreon

2. the dead-letter queue needs to incorporate long-term error handling into its supervision work. launchd can do a bunch of it, but determining which files to process and when to process them is a bit too big of a job for the system level part of the supervision tree; mediaanalysisd itself needs to explicitly decide on what units of work to perform and which ones to skip, *seprately* from the process actually doing the working

and the second piece of """good""" news is that mediaanalysisd is also leaking memory on my spouse's computer and causing her apps to crash as well, but with a completely different symptom profile so there's a possibility that there will be a sequel

If you're more interested in the software side of things then check out https://github.com/glyph and feel free to hop over to the github sponsors page there.

you can find my writing over at my blog; if you enjoyed … whatever all this was, you may appreciate this post from the archives: https://blog.glyph.im/2017/07/beyond-thunderdock.html

To be clear: *mostly* what I'm trying to do with https://patreon.com/creatorglyph is maintain and develop open source software in Python, exploring unusual use cases (for example, developing desktop applications, and writing micro-libraries designed to scale down for use by smaller teams and other indie devs), and writing about technology not just stare at log files until my eyes bleed for your schadenfreude and entertainment. but needs must when the daemons drive