7 ms·

Asahi dev found off-by-one bug in M2 MacBook Air bass enhancer

92 points by mesebrec 3y ago

jauntywundrkind 3y ago
There's doing each other (& ourselves) credit, and then there's taking the score. Sometimes it's good to be strategic, but sometimes we also need real accounts of things. Personally an overboiling sadness & frustration that the world is captured inside closed priorietary & ultimately horrendously compromising mediocre application-centric versions of computing is a lamentation I am deeply familiar with. The message isn't happy or here to win popularity contests. It's earnest & frank & hard, reflects on the feeling that the world is trapped & kept away from understanding. This is one manifestion of a long running gnostic battle, one humanity has been losing for a while now, and I see no obligation or cause to pretend like earning popularity-credits helps anyone. Earnesty & catharsis on the other hand reflect the real. They portray the struggle as it is.
mesebrec 3y ago
Interesting how rebuilding the support from the ground up allowed them to find a bug in the existing implementation. It really speaks to the quality of Asahi's work, imo.
- astrange 3y ago
  That's trivially true for audio. You can just subtract one from the other to find differences.
- gigatexal 3y ago
  yup -- they continue to do amazing work and if i had more money i'd give it all to them for this effort. what a team of legends
teruakohatu 3y ago
> They have a stupid off-by-one bug in the middle of their bass enhancer AND NOBODY NOTICED NOR FIXED IT IN OVER A YEAR. The mocking tone of this post is really not necessary. An engineer made probably one of the most common coding errors that nobody noticed because real world impact is minor to non existent. The devs should be trying to build a relationship with Apple, not mocking then each time they find a minor bug.
- agildehaus 3y ago
  These devs didn't even notice it until they tried to rip into the inner workings.
  - aaomidi 3y ago
    > These devs didn't even notice it until they tried to rip into the inner workings. I mean, considering the source isn't open. Yeah, you need to do that.
    - gjsman-1000 3y ago
      The point is more that, yes, it’s technically incorrect. But if literally no human noticed or was affected in any way, who cares? That’s the only reason bugs matter anyway.
    - Turing_Machine 3y ago
      Well, for audio bugs that actually matter, you can just listen to it, or if you want to get all sciencey, throw the output and input onto a scope and compare them, or send the input and output sample values into the analysis software of your choice. Code isn't necessary to judge the quality of an audio system. You can pretty much treat it as a black box if you want. The fact that no one has apparently even noticed this bug before says a lot.
      - MBCook 3y ago
        He posted a video in the thread comparing an M1 machine (they don’t have the bug) with an M2. It’s rather obvious in that simple sine-wave test. This isn’t one of those things like the difference between 128 Kbps MP3 and FLAC, where there is a difference but it can be kind of subtle depending on the listening equipment. It’s clear in that demo.
        Turing_Machine 3y ago
        That's as may be, but the person I was responding to was claiming that you needed the source code to detect it. Clearly you don't.
marcellus23 3y ago
It's hard for me to understand how noticeable this actually is. In the video where he plays samples from an affected and unaffected machine, I can hear there's a difference, but I couldn't tell you which one is correct. It sounds like it could just be normal differences in speakers between the two models. If that's the best example of the bug, then probably no one has caught it because it doesn't really matter. Also, the tone of the post comes off as petty and immature, regardless.
- skavi 3y ago
  The video isn’t great, but the issue should be fairly clear if you can set the volume high enough (and then hopefully manage to lower it before Hector cuts in). The incorrect tone sounds like a train horn. There’s more than a single pure note being produced.
015a 3y ago
This seems like a needlessly aggressive and poor take. Its a cool bug that they discovered; but going into "Apple's audio engineering team is, at least on some level, incompetent (or incompetently run; I'm not blaming the employees here, but rather the organization)" is just unproductively mean. "and obvious in a sine sweep frequency response test, which is the most basic test you can run end-to-end on a completed audio system to ensure it is performing properly. So they didn't even run that." The one conclusion you can draw, outside looking in, is: whatever tests they ran resulted in the creation of the best sounding speakers on any device in its class. That doesn't scream incompetence to me; it screams "We tested this against songs people will actually listen to, not 300hz sine waves." This post is a bad look for Asahi.
- d3w4s9 3y ago
  > Because we don't have blatant, in your face off-by-one bugs in our DSP and we actually check the output to make sure it's good This makes me cringe. I consider myself an experienced software engineer, but I don't think I'll ever criticize other's code like that.
  - dzogchen 3y ago
    Apple is nearing 3 billion dollar valuation. This is an inexcusable bug since the most banale Q&A testing would have caught.
    - kakwa_ 3y ago
      Given the bug went unnoticed for a year by millions of customers, I doubt 'the most banale Q&A testing' would have caught it.
    - zimpenfish 3y ago
      > Apple is nearing 3 billion dollar valuation. I think you mean "trillion" there?
- okeuro49 3y ago
  It's not an official Asahi communication. It's a dev enjoying some hyperbole for something cool they fixed on a chat platform.
codemiscreant 3y ago
The tone and attitude of this post is basically the epitome of Jr/beginner dev. If your audience is non-programmers and one wants to be the “big shot”, ply this tact, but tech readers will overwhelmingly find this attitude cringeworthy.
- EPWN3D 3y ago
  Yup. This has big-time "junior engineer wanting to make a splash on a mailing list" energy.
CoolGuySteve 3y ago
At Apple we would see this tone all the time from people on the VLC project. It got so bad that the senior people would refer to them as DCS, Drunken College Student. It got so bad that we mostly ignored them. It wasn't good for either VLC or QuickTime.
- astrange 3y ago
  That's just what all French people are like.
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  Hilariously, this isn’t Apple’s first time with funny acronyms. The “Sagan” project got sued, so it was internally renamed to the “BHA” project. Sagan then sued Apple again once he figured out that meant “Butt-Head Astronomer.” He lost because it wasn’t even a publicly facing name, and even if it was, that’s hardly defamation.
- dagmx 3y ago
  Honestly, there’s the ego if “we did this when the paid elites didn’t” in a lot of open source communities. I contribute to many projects and it always rubs me the wrong way because they don’t consider how many other variables the team has to juggle, and what priorities are like. To be clear, I’m not saying this is everyone, and it’s often the vast minority but it also often goes unchecked and unchallenged when it does come up. Of course part of that is because corporate development is a black box from the outside , but even if it weren’t, there’s no way people would keep up with it anyway.
  - goalieca 3y ago
    If people are still finding bugs in Donald Knuth’s code, then surely any one of us will fare worse when under the microscope.
- diligiant 3y ago
  You made my day with this comment.
EPWN3D 3y ago
If I were the engineer who wrote this bug, this post would not motivate me to fix it. In fact it would do the opposite.
- righthand 3y ago
  [dead]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jasonvorhe 3y ago
  So you'd respond by ego alone, just as the author/engineer did? Why?
righthand 3y ago
[dead]
ofcourseyoudo 3y ago
The hilarious part for me is when the author admits it's not something you would really hear in regular music listening except that it's really obvious in bassoon solos.
- taylodl 3y ago
  Consider that Apple is pushing Apple Classical. Presumably more people are now listening to those bassoon solos.
helf 3y ago
[dead]
diimdeep 3y ago
I guess no one who is paying attention to aliasing uses built-in speakers, how else this could have gone unnoticed
nunez 3y ago
after creating the world's best/most power-efficient mobile DAC and DSPs, one of the world's most popular music streaming platforms, one of the most power-efficient lossy and lossless codecs and the best truly wireless earbuds, I think Apple deserves to let a small bug that affects almost no-one live in production :D
- xvector 3y ago
  I have great respect for Apple's audio team but this isn't a small bug by any stretch.
h4ch1 3y ago
I know this will probably get downvoted but Asahi devs have for a very long time been very antagonizing towards multiple communities. They have the classic nose-turn-up attitude towards anyone that doesn't agree with them It's a shame because the work they have done is great, but humility is a virtue many have lost.

92 points by mesebrec 3y ago

There's doing each other (& ourselves) credit, and then there's taking the score. Sometimes it's good to be strategic, but sometimes we also need real accounts of things. Personally an overboiling sadness & frustration that the world is captured inside closed priorietary & ultimately horrendously compromising mediocre application-centric versions of computing is a lamentation I am deeply familiar with. The message isn't happy or here to win popularity contests. It's earnest & frank & hard, reflects on the feeling that the world is trapped & kept away from understanding. This is one manifestion of a long running gnostic battle, one humanity has been losing for a while now, and I see no obligation or cause to pretend like earning popularity-credits helps anyone. Earnesty & catharsis on the other hand reflect the real. They portray the struggle as it is.

mesebrec 3y ago

Interesting how rebuilding the support from the ground up allowed them to find a bug in the existing implementation. It really speaks to the quality of Asahi's work, imo.

astrange 3y ago
That's trivially true for audio. You can just subtract one from the other to find differences.
gigatexal 3y ago
yup -- they continue to do amazing work and if i had more money i'd give it all to them for this effort. what a team of legends

teruakohatu 3y ago

> They have a stupid off-by-one bug in the middle of their bass enhancer AND NOBODY NOTICED NOR FIXED IT IN OVER A YEAR. The mocking tone of this post is really not necessary. An engineer made probably one of the most common coding errors that nobody noticed because real world impact is minor to non existent. The devs should be trying to build a relationship with Apple, not mocking then each time they find a minor bug.

agildehaus 3y ago
These devs didn't even notice it until they tried to rip into the inner workings.
- aaomidi 3y ago
  > These devs didn't even notice it until they tried to rip into the inner workings. I mean, considering the source isn't open. Yeah, you need to do that.
  - gjsman-1000 3y ago
    The point is more that, yes, it’s technically incorrect. But if literally no human noticed or was affected in any way, who cares? That’s the only reason bugs matter anyway.
  - Turing_Machine 3y ago
    Well, for audio bugs that actually matter, you can just listen to it, or if you want to get all sciencey, throw the output and input onto a scope and compare them, or send the input and output sample values into the analysis software of your choice. Code isn't necessary to judge the quality of an audio system. You can pretty much treat it as a black box if you want. The fact that no one has apparently even noticed this bug before says a lot.
    - MBCook 3y ago
      He posted a video in the thread comparing an M1 machine (they don’t have the bug) with an M2. It’s rather obvious in that simple sine-wave test. This isn’t one of those things like the difference between 128 Kbps MP3 and FLAC, where there is a difference but it can be kind of subtle depending on the listening equipment. It’s clear in that demo.
      - Turing_Machine 3y ago
        That's as may be, but the person I was responding to was claiming that you needed the source code to detect it. Clearly you don't.

marcellus23 3y ago

It's hard for me to understand how noticeable this actually is. In the video where he plays samples from an affected and unaffected machine, I can hear there's a difference, but I couldn't tell you which one is correct. It sounds like it could just be normal differences in speakers between the two models. If that's the best example of the bug, then probably no one has caught it because it doesn't really matter. Also, the tone of the post comes off as petty and immature, regardless.

skavi 3y ago
The video isn’t great, but the issue should be fairly clear if you can set the volume high enough (and then hopefully manage to lower it before Hector cuts in). The incorrect tone sounds like a train horn. There’s more than a single pure note being produced.

015a 3y ago

This seems like a needlessly aggressive and poor take. Its a cool bug that they discovered; but going into "Apple's audio engineering team is, at least on some level, incompetent (or incompetently run; I'm not blaming the employees here, but rather the organization)" is just unproductively mean. "and obvious in a sine sweep frequency response test, which is the most basic test you can run end-to-end on a completed audio system to ensure it is performing properly. So they didn't even run that." The one conclusion you can draw, outside looking in, is: whatever tests they ran resulted in the creation of the best sounding speakers on any device in its class. That doesn't scream incompetence to me; it screams "We tested this against songs people will actually listen to, not 300hz sine waves." This post is a bad look for Asahi.

d3w4s9 3y ago
> Because we don't have blatant, in your face off-by-one bugs in our DSP and we actually check the output to make sure it's good This makes me cringe. I consider myself an experienced software engineer, but I don't think I'll ever criticize other's code like that.
- dzogchen 3y ago
  Apple is nearing 3 billion dollar valuation. This is an inexcusable bug since the most banale Q&A testing would have caught.
  - kakwa_ 3y ago
    Given the bug went unnoticed for a year by millions of customers, I doubt 'the most banale Q&A testing' would have caught it.
  - zimpenfish 3y ago
    > Apple is nearing 3 billion dollar valuation. I think you mean "trillion" there?
okeuro49 3y ago
It's not an official Asahi communication. It's a dev enjoying some hyperbole for something cool they fixed on a chat platform.

codemiscreant 3y ago

The tone and attitude of this post is basically the epitome of Jr/beginner dev. If your audience is non-programmers and one wants to be the “big shot”, ply this tact, but tech readers will overwhelmingly find this attitude cringeworthy.

EPWN3D 3y ago
Yup. This has big-time "junior engineer wanting to make a splash on a mailing list" energy.

CoolGuySteve 3y ago

At Apple we would see this tone all the time from people on the VLC project. It got so bad that the senior people would refer to them as DCS, Drunken College Student. It got so bad that we mostly ignored them. It wasn't good for either VLC or QuickTime.

astrange 3y ago
That's just what all French people are like.
gjsman-1000 3y ago
Hilariously, this isn’t Apple’s first time with funny acronyms. The “Sagan” project got sued, so it was internally renamed to the “BHA” project. Sagan then sued Apple again once he figured out that meant “Butt-Head Astronomer.” He lost because it wasn’t even a publicly facing name, and even if it was, that’s hardly defamation.
dagmx 3y ago
Honestly, there’s the ego if “we did this when the paid elites didn’t” in a lot of open source communities. I contribute to many projects and it always rubs me the wrong way because they don’t consider how many other variables the team has to juggle, and what priorities are like. To be clear, I’m not saying this is everyone, and it’s often the vast minority but it also often goes unchecked and unchallenged when it does come up. Of course part of that is because corporate development is a black box from the outside , but even if it weren’t, there’s no way people would keep up with it anyway.
- goalieca 3y ago
  If people are still finding bugs in Donald Knuth’s code, then surely any one of us will fare worse when under the microscope.
diligiant 3y ago
You made my day with this comment.

EPWN3D 3y ago

If I were the engineer who wrote this bug, this post would not motivate me to fix it. In fact it would do the opposite.

righthand 3y ago
[dead]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jasonvorhe 3y ago
So you'd respond by ego alone, just as the author/engineer did? Why?

righthand 3y ago

[dead]

ofcourseyoudo 3y ago

The hilarious part for me is when the author admits it's not something you would really hear in regular music listening except that it's really obvious in bassoon solos.

taylodl 3y ago
Consider that Apple is pushing Apple Classical. Presumably more people are now listening to those bassoon solos.

helf 3y ago

[dead]

diimdeep 3y ago

I guess no one who is paying attention to aliasing uses built-in speakers, how else this could have gone unnoticed

nunez 3y ago

after creating the world's best/most power-efficient mobile DAC and DSPs, one of the world's most popular music streaming platforms, one of the most power-efficient lossy and lossless codecs and the best truly wireless earbuds, I think Apple deserves to let a small bug that affects almost no-one live in production :D

xvector 3y ago
I have great respect for Apple's audio team but this isn't a small bug by any stretch.

h4ch1 3y ago

I know this will probably get downvoted but Asahi devs have for a very long time been very antagonizing towards multiple communities. They have the classic nose-turn-up attitude towards anyone that doesn't agree with them It's a shame because the work they have done is great, but humility is a virtue many have lost.