from Hacker News

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

by mesebrec on 10/1/23, 5:51 PM with 54 comments

• by 015a on 10/1/23, 7:02 PM

  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.

• by teruakohatu on 10/1/23, 7:00 PM

  > 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.

• by codemiscreant on 10/1/23, 7:13 PM

  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.

• by CoolGuySteve on 10/1/23, 7:28 PM

  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.

• by marcellus23 on 10/1/23, 7:02 PM

  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.

• by mesebrec on 10/1/23, 5:55 PM

  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.

• by h4ch1 on 10/1/23, 9:25 PM

  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.

• by EPWN3D on 10/1/23, 7:26 PM

  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.

• by ofcourseyoudo on 10/1/23, 7:42 PM

  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.

• by nunez on 10/1/23, 8:55 PM

  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

• by jauntywundrkind on 10/2/23, 7:00 PM

  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.

• by diimdeep on 10/1/23, 8:43 PM

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