> First, ECC doesn't protect the full data chain, you can have a bitflip in a hardware flip flop (or latch open a gate that drains a line, etc...) before the value reaches the memory. Logic is known to glitch too.
Of course. DRAM ECC protects against errors in the DRAM cells. That doesn't mean other components don't have other strategies for reducing errors which can form a complete chain.
Latches and arrays and register files often have parity (where data can be reconstructed) or ECC bits, or use low level circuits that themselves are hard or redundant enough to achieve a particular target UBER for the full system.
> Second: ECC is mostly designed to protect long term storage in DRAM. Recognize that a cert like this is a very short-term value, it's computed and then transmitted. The failure happened fast, before copies of the correct value were made. That again argues to a failure location other than a DRAM cell.
Not necessarily. Cells that are sitting idle other than refresh have certain error profiles, but ones under constant access. Particularly "idle" cells that are in fact being disturbed by adjacent accesses certainly have a non-zero error profile and need ECC too.
My completely anecdotal guess would be this error is at least an order of magnitude more likely to have occurred in non-ECC memory (if that's what was being used) rather than any other path to the CPU or cache or logic on the CPU itself.
> As a human, I am allowed to read copyrighted code and learn from it. An AI should be allowed to do the same thing.
This is a non-sequitur. Why should it?
> And nobody cares if my ten-line "how to invert a binary tree" snippet is the same as someone else's.
Are you going to make up a rule for every length and type of code? What about twenty line? If ten lines are fine then surely twenty would be? How about pictures? If some code is then surely a picture or two wouldn't hurt? Let's just tweak the AI slightly so it regurgitates more code verbatim -- or do courts have to examine any change made to the AI and okay them?
> Nobody is really being hurt when a new tool makes it easier to copy little bits of code from the internet.
The Windows source code can be found on the internet. As a human you're allowed to read that if you have it. Try making an AI that copies bits of that into your code and release that on the internet.
I agree. That said,
> First, ECC doesn't protect the full data chain, you can have a bitflip in a hardware flip flop (or latch open a gate that drains a line, etc...) before the value reaches the memory. Logic is known to glitch too.
Of course. DRAM ECC protects against errors in the DRAM cells. That doesn't mean other components don't have other strategies for reducing errors which can form a complete chain.
Latches and arrays and register files often have parity (where data can be reconstructed) or ECC bits, or use low level circuits that themselves are hard or redundant enough to achieve a particular target UBER for the full system.
> Second: ECC is mostly designed to protect long term storage in DRAM. Recognize that a cert like this is a very short-term value, it's computed and then transmitted. The failure happened fast, before copies of the correct value were made. That again argues to a failure location other than a DRAM cell.
Not necessarily. Cells that are sitting idle other than refresh have certain error profiles, but ones under constant access. Particularly "idle" cells that are in fact being disturbed by adjacent accesses certainly have a non-zero error profile and need ECC too.
My completely anecdotal guess would be this error is at least an order of magnitude more likely to have occurred in non-ECC memory (if that's what was being used) rather than any other path to the CPU or cache or logic on the CPU itself.