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Yes, it’s a shell builtin that makes the shell execute a chdir() syscall. Therefore it isn’t subject to argument length limits imposed by the kernel when executing processes. But it is still subject to path length limits imposed by the kernel’s implementation of chdir() itself. While the shell may be a GNU project (bash), the kernel generally is not (unless you are running Hurd), so this isn’t GNU’s fault per se.

However, the shell could theoretically chunk long cd arguments into multiple calls to chdir(), splitting on slashes. I believe this would be fully semantically correct: you are not losing any atomicity guarantees because the kernel doesn’t provide such guarantees in the first place for lookups involving multiple path components. I’m not surprised that bash doesn’t bother implementing this, and I don’t know if I’d call that an “arbitrary limitation” on bash’s part (as opposed to a lack of workaround for another component’s arbitrary limitation). But it would be possible.


They are not perfectly fine. If a task panics then you will get the right stack trace, but there is no way to get a stack trace for a task that’s currently waiting. (At least not without intrusive hacks.)


> This functionality is experimental, and comes with a number of requirements and limitations.

I assume that answers your question.


So once it's out of the experimental stage it won't be an intrusive hack anymore?

Just because LLMs overuse it doesn't mean it doesn't have its place.

The way the OP used the 'not X, but Y' pattern, the 'X' and 'Y' are two clear, specific, and (most importantly) distinct things, as opposed to stereotypical LLM usage where they're vague characterizations or metaphors. And there's a reason to emphasize that it's not X, because the Slop Cop website implicitly suggests that it is X.


They probably aren’t affected because the buggy code was only added in macOS 26:

https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/blame/f6217f8...


Ouch - "every Mac" from the original post is a hallucination then.

I can live with the writing style when the topic is interesting (here it was for me) but complete untruths are much worse.


The bug was introduced only last year in macOS 26:

https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/blame/f6217f8...


> Apple Community #250867747: macOS Catalina — "New TCP connections can not establish." New connections enter SYN_SENT then immediately close. Existing connections unaffected. Only a reboot fixes it.

This is a weird thing to cite if it's a macOS 26 bug. I quite regularly go over 50 days of uptime without issues so it makes sense for it to be a new bug, and maybe they had different bugs in the past with similar symptoms.


Interesting. The article mentions complaints on the forums running Catalina, so that must be something else.


As someone who also operates fleets of Macs, for years now, there is no possible way this bug predates macOS 26. If the bug description is correct, it must be a new one.


The article is written using AI, so unless you verified the complaints, the safe default assumption is that they don't exist.


It definitely exists, but it could be a completely unrelated issue.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250867747


It definitely would be unwelcome for EU authorities in cases like the recent US sanctions against ICC officials.


Not to mention the German debanking and account closing of a few middle eastern journalists living in Germany, their spouses and in one case their children.


Fair... they should think about this then


From some skimming of the code, it seems like a nightmare quality-wise. But if it works, it works. I wonder what makes it faster.


Primarily that it doesn't work


Well, it sounds like a real issue, but the diagnosis is AI slop. You can see, for example, how it takes the paragraph quoted from waydabber (attributing the issue to dynamic resource allocation) and expands it into a whole section without really understanding it. The section is in fact self-contradictory: it first claims that the DCP firmware implements framebuffer allocation, then almost immediately goes on to say it's actually the GPU driver and "the DCP itself is not the bottleneck". Similar confusion throughout the rest of the post.


Agree. I started reading the article until I realized it wasn’t even self-coherent. Then I got to the classic two-column table setup and realized I was just reading straight LLM output.

There might be a problem but it’s hard to know what to trust with these LLM generated reports.

I might be jaded from reading one too many Claude-generated GitHub issues that look exactly like this that turned out to be something else.


Parts of it were pasted from my Claude Code Logs, Parts were written by me - and the table - that was me!


I think you are probably right--it's a real problem.

As an article, it is not 100% coherent, but there is a valid data and a real problem that is clear.


It does in Rust: assert is always enabled, whereas the debug-only version is called debug_assert.

But yes, “assert” in most languages is debug-only.


He said

> some people would expect it to enforce that the pointer is non-null, then proceed

No language magically makes the pointer non-null and then continues. I don't even know what that would mean.


If you don't even know what that would mean then it's premature to declare that nothing works that way. Understanding the meaning is a prerequisite for that.

In this case, it may help to understand that e.g. border control enforces a traveler's permission to cross the border, then lets them proceed.


Some of what you said is true, but you definitely can’t call close multiple times on the same file descriptor. close always immediately drops the file descriptor and isn’t like non-blocking socket operations that you have to try repeatedly until they succeed. You could, however, create multiple file descriptors pointing to the same socket with dup or other methods, in which case you’d need to close all of them to disconnect the socket.


Bah, I was thinking of shutdown


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