I feel like using "Cosmic Rays" as a reason is equivalent to "Aliens". It makes for good clickbait so everyone is fast to point at it as the reason even if there is no reason to actually believe that the bitflip was due to cosmic rays.

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0manrho 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> even if there is no reason to actually believe that the bitflip was due to cosmic rays.

What if there is reason to consider it as it is actually a known, proven, observable phenomenon, especially one with greater likelihood/intensity as you climb in altitude, like planes do, and that likelihood/intensity also scales with solar cycle intensity, which we are currently experiencing the peak of?

Or perhaps you think the Aurora Borealis are because of Aliens too?

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charcircuit 3 days ago | parent [-]

>also scales with solar cycle intensity

The article rebuked that claim, saying that day was average. There other things that can cause bitflips ti be more likely like heat.

	▲	0manrho 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> The article rebuked that claim It did not. The article itself acknowledged that there is certainly reason to consider it a possibility, predicated on the fact that the people that make the thing stated as such and that experts in the field agree it's also a risk in general, but wasn't particularly high that day. Average activity is not no activity. Average risk is not No risk. And even if it wasn't the issue in that instance, it's not hard to reason why it's worth hardening against such a possibility in the absence of any other explanation given just days later "sensors mounted on UK weather balloons at 40,000ft (12km) measured one of the largest radiation events to hit Earth in roughly two decades." Airbus didn't ground these plains because there was "No reason to believe" a known proven and observed phenomenon might have been the culprit and/or that it is on the level with something we as yet have no proof of to be generous in characterizing your comparing it to aliens.

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XorNot 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

When you do Raman spectroscopy in a lab the software literally has an automatic cosmic ray rejection mode because for autonomy you are very likely to get cosmic ray initiated return signals over the course of a couple of hours.

"If the signal looks amazingly strong but unexpected and sharp, it's probably a cosmic ray" was what I was trained for.

	▲	charcircuit 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I should have clarified that I was talking about software bugs.

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on_the_train 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Thank you for bringing reason to this topic where everyone is losing their mind when it comes up. Cosmic rays are sexy, They're sciency, but they're not a good explanation when you actually run the math.

Random but flips are pretty much always bad hardware. That's what the literature says when you actually study it. And that's also what we find at work: we wrote a program that occupied most of the free ram and checked it for bit flips. Deployed on a sizeable fleet of machines. We found exactly that: yes there were bit flips, but they were highly concentrated on specific machines and disappeared after changing hardware.

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ExoticPearTree 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I feel like using "Cosmic Rays" as a reason is equivalent to "Aliens".

This is actually a thing. Cisco had issues with cosmic radiation in some of their equipment a few years back. Same symptoms: random memory corruption, and when they would test the memory everything would check out, but once in a blue moon, the routers would behave erratically.

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financetechbro 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What evidence do you have that this wasn’t due to solar radiation?

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charcircuit 3 days ago | parent [-]

In practice such an event is rare, and I would expect there to be enough shielding to avoid it from interfering with the electronics. The fact that there is no hard evidence is why it's hard to argue against this clickbait claim, since technically they could be right.

	▲	adrian_b 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		The cosmic radiation that reaches Earth's surface consists mainly of particles that cannot be stopped by thin shields (e.g. muons or other particles with very high energies), otherwise they would not have passed through the atmosphere. So shielding is not a solution that can be applied in a vehicle. You need something like an underground bunker to be sure that no cosmic radiation can penetrate it. The only reason that makes rare the events caused by cosmic radiation is that if those particles can pass through shields that means that in most cases they will also pass through the electronic devices without being absorbed and causing malfunction.