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[–] 75 points 2 years ago

I don't get what's supposed to be wrong here, it works on my machine

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  • [–] 51 points 2 years ago

    This is the first time I enjoy a meme of this format / situation.

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  • [–] 38 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I am feeling confused with this meme. I am going to escalate this to my manager, secretly hopong he'll tell me to do something else while he passes this on to the one dude in my team who's worked with multithreading that one time.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago*

    Knock knock

    Race condition!

    Who's there?

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago

    You have NO IDEA how hard my autism hates you!

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  • [+] 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
    [–] 11 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    good one! i have to admit I didn't get it until I was browsing the comments and then it hit me 😀

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I'm actually an expert in multiprocessing, which is just as good

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (4 children)
  • [–] 121 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    In case you are serious: It's probably not.
    When you're not careful with parallel processing / multithreading, you can run into something called a "race condition", where results of parallel computations end up in the wrong order because some were finished faster than others.
    The joke here is that whoever "programmed" this commic is bad at parallel progmming and got the bubbles in the wrong order because of that.
    The image makes perfect sense if you read it in the order 3, 1, 2.

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    Apart from the fact that bubble 1 and 2 point to the wrong person.

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  • [–] 29 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I think that’s part of the joke too. Like the whole comic has been written out of order due to race conditions; rather than just the father represents race conditions.

    It’s one degree of humour too far though, if that’s the case, doesn’t really land.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago

    The image makes perfect sense if you read it in the order 3, 1, 2.

    OH!

    I was assuming the joke was that 1 and 3 got swapped around. Because it doesn't really make sense for 2 to be mixed up, considering it's from a different person entirely...

    Which meant that the joke just made no sense, because swapping 1 and 3 is just as nonsense as the original order.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    🤦🏽‍♀️ Thanks for explaining, my brain must have corrected the race condition.

    Regarding threads: I have had good experience with using thread safe queues everywhere to exchange data between threads, it's the right tool in many cases, but I doubt queues to be useful when coding for performance.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Umm, queueing is standard practice particularly when a task is performance intensive and needs limited resources.

    Basically any programming language using any kind of asynchronous runtime is using queues in their scheduler, as well.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Could be I was not clear when I wrote performance, I am talking about High Performance Computing, where you want to spend all CPU cycles on solving your problem. While taking Amdal's Law into account. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    lol your operating system is using queues and buffers with multiple threads everywhere.

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    You have exactly 10 seconds to get the duck out of programmerhumor

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)
  • [+] -6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Lol at all of the people not getting it. Why comment here at all 😅

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  • [–] 38 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Why comment here at all

    Because we're programmers, and programmers are infamous for being rules-/logic-driven.

    If, as a comment below suggests, the joke is that it's meant to be read in order 3, 1, 2, that violates the rule that race conditions typically don't cause an entirely different program to produce the output. So if the joke is meant to be "lol we have a race condition", bubbles should be mixed up for one person, not mixed between people.

    People don't get the joke because the joke violates its own internal rules.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago

    It doesn't violate any rules.. Imagine both the "speaker" and the "text" are being updated by separate threads. A program that would eventually display the behavior in this meme is simple, and I'm a bit embarrassed to have written it because of this comment:

    #include <pthread.h>
    #include <stdio.h>
    
    char* speakers[] = {
        "Alice",
        "Bob"
    };
    int speaker = 0;
    
    void* change_speaker(void* arg)
    {
        (void)arg;
    
        for (;;) {
            speaker = speaker == 0 ? 1 : 0;
        }
    }
    
    char* texts[] = {
        "Hi Bob",
        "Hi Alice, what's up?",
        "Not much Bob",
    };
    int text = 0;
    
    void* change_text(void* arg)
    {
        (void)arg;
        for (;;) {
            switch (text) {
            case 0:
                text = 1;
                break;
            case 1:
                text = 2;
                break;
            case 2:
                text = 0;
                break;
            }
        }
    }
    
    int main(int argc, char* argv[])
    {
        pthread_t speaker_swapper, text_swapper;
    
        pthread_create(&text_swapper, NULL, change_text, NULL);
        pthread_create(&speaker_swapper, NULL, change_speaker, NULL);
        for (int i = 0; i < 3; ++i) {
            printf("%s: %s\n", speakers[speaker], texts[text]);
        }
    }
    
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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    Oh, I guess that makes sense. One person asks if the other is an expert, they reply they read the for dummies book, cue comically aggressive response.

    There's so much going on in this exchange, including two separate jokes as well as weird multi-person race conditions, that I couldn't reverse engineer it.

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  • [–] -2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I don't see OP explaining it anywhere.

    It's just threads running out of order.

    Why are you all overengineering the joke this much?

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Why are you all overengineering the joke this much?

    Because I'm literally an engineer?

    Honestly, this isn't me artificially coming in and doing something weird. It's just me trying to explain how my brain naturally interpreted it. It never occurred to me to include the left guy's speech bubble in the race condition until I saw someone else's comment explaining it.

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