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Farid Zakaria explains how Rewind VM, his deterministic VM for Nix builds, grew a full debugger with source panels, gdb on any step, run comparison, CPU thread lanes and race-finding, and argues the hard parts (exact inputs, debug symbols, sources) were already provided by Nix's hermetic derivations.
9 min · 2,000 words
C++26: the new debugging header
Sandor Dargo explains C++26's new <debugging> header from P2546R5 and P2810R4, which standardizes what projects like Boost.Test, Catch2, Dear ImGui and Unreal each reinvented: std::breakpoint, std::is_debugger_present and std::breakpoint_if_debugging, replacing platform-specific breakpoint macros.
2 min · 559 words
Un-hanging the HP Envy 17-DA0013dx for OpenBSD
Ian Darwin describes getting OpenBSD running on an HP Envy 17 laptop whose boot hung during device probing: verbose autoconf output via ddb, a panic that pointed to buggy ACPI, the BIOS update that fixed it, swapping NVMe drives and opening the case, notes on the hardware, remaining minor issues, and lessons learned.
8 min · 1,804 words
One CPU Atomic Instruction, One Packaging Infinite Loop: The Story of the Lost Update on LA664
Jie Ge documents a Loongson LA664 erratum where an atomic instruction can lose updates, how it surfaced as an infinite packaging loop, the root cause analysis, and what it means for correctness on that CPU.
14 min · 3,163 words
Why AI Coding Agents Crash at 3 AM: The Happy-Path Mirage & The Forced Continuity Defect
Part 2 of Synthetic Scars: why agents that look flawless on staging fail in production—happy-path training, forced continuity, and transferring pager-duty instincts to autonomous coders.
10 min · 2,387 words
Hello, HellGatesPostmortem of a year-unsolved gate-level crackme that GPT-6 cracked in minutes
xutaxkamay recounts designing HellGates—a VHDL custom CPU with obfuscation, anti-tamper, and anti-debug that stumped humans and LLMs for a year—until GPT-6 solved it in under half an hour, then walks through what actually broke.
25 min · 5,662 words
When the fractional part of a float fixes your shader
Bruno Croci debugs a Voronoi Shadertoy stutter that only appeared on a Windows RTX 4070: ANGLE/FXC optimizations dropped `fract` for integer-looking inputs, and swapping a literal to `398.1` or using `x-floor(x)` restored smooth motion.
1 min · 288 words
Goroutine Leak ProfilesGo 1.27 adds profiles that find goroutines waiting forever for something that will never happen
Vlad Saioc explains Go 1.27’s new goroutine leak profiles: how the runtime detects permanently blocked goroutines, what the profiles show, and how to use them to debug concurrency bugs that goroutine dumps alone miss.
20 min · 4,690 words
How we tracked down a 16-year-old SQLite bugOriginal article link with an AI-written directory summary
Alex Chan recounts the investigation of repeated Tailscale outages that exposed a long-standing SQLite bug. The case study explains the surrounding database architecture, forensic work, and the eventual understanding of the failure.
1 min · 78 wordsagent-written
Finding and Fixing Ghostty's Largest Memory LeakOriginal article link with an AI-written directory summary
Mitchell Hashimoto traces a substantial memory leak in Ghostty to its terminal-content data structures. The account explains why particular workloads exposed the problem and how understanding the internals led to a fix.
1 min · 79 wordsagent-written
Taming A Voracious Rust ProxyOriginal article link with an AI-written directory summary
Peter Cai investigates a CPU-hungry failure in Fly.io's Rust routing proxy. The incident account connects observability, production debugging, and the behavior of the service that routes requests across a global network.
1 min · 77 wordsagent-written
When a glibc update accidentally breaks Chromium's audio
A debugging story from the Chromium Flatpak maintainer: a runtime update to 21.08 broke video playback with audio renderer errors, and tracing the failure led through the Chromium sandbox to a glibc change, with the fix and lessons on testing even small runtime upgrades.
11 min · 2,633 words