wwilson

Yes, unfortunately we have not figured out how to rewind time in the real world yet. When we do, there are a lot of choices I'm going to revisit...

The simulation is a completely generic Linux system, so we can run anything (including NodeJS). If your build tool can produce Docker containers, then it will work with us. We don't run this on y…

Good suggestion on leaving LD_PRELOAD unset if it was previously unset. We will fix that. I’m torn on whether MD_PRELOAD or LD_PRELOAF is more obnoxious to other programs. Fun fact: A previous version…

Great point! I'll update the post to mention that.

Biggest advantages I know of for dynamic linking: * You can use the LD_PRELOAD trick to override behavior at runtime. * You can run with entirely different implementations of the dynamically linked li…

Our artist is on vacation, and some fool gave the CEO access to Midjourney.

Post author here. Feel free to ask me any questions about the piece of software that I most regret having had to write.

I'm obviously biased, but if I imagine a world where I had nothing to do with Antithesis, I actually do think an autonomous system playing and beating Zelda is the kind of thing I would enjoy rea…

Our projects have some features in common, but are pretty much unrelated. Hermit is a deterministic userland, whereas we enforce reproducibility at the hypervisor level and with the right device drive…

Thank you. Comments like this are why I love HN.

Hmm... looks like Vimeo is currently having some kind of outage. If anybody at Vimeo is reading this and wants some help with testing backend systems, email is in bio.

We find a ton of glitches in Mario, and even more in other games. See, e.g.: https://vimeo.com/807601164

It is absolutely possible to write a large stateful system from the ground up so that autonomous testing techniques can be applied to it. FoundationDB and Tiger Beetle are both examples of this, I thi…

It's possible you did not make it to the end of the talk where I explain this, but the thing that excites me is that we can now apply fuzzing and related techniques to things which are neither Ni…

We are huge fans of tom7 and that paper was one of our inspirations for using NES as a domain for researching autonomous state space search! I think he does a very good job of explaining why the probl…

This is actually an incredibly deep and difficult question to answer. I would expect no less from cperciva. :-) As I mention in the talk, you get very bad tactical performance from taking a uniform ra…

Thanks for flagging this! The work we're announcing today was completed in 2018, and we have since moved on to much more challenging problems both in the Nintendo domain and elsewhere. Totally no…

There was a LOT of discussion of this in the Q&A after the talk. Currently we have 4 main approaches: (1) There's some stuff that's pretty much a bug for every program. If it segfaults, …

This is Will (I gave the talk linked in the post). Happy to answer any questions about this work, or how it generalizes to testing things that aren't Nintendo games.

If you would like us to repro this bug in Antithesis and help you debug it there, email me and I’ll hook you up: will@antithesis.com

This bug definitely didn’t involve SDK integration, because our SDK didn’t exist yet when we found it! I believe CockroachDB was running our instrumentor over their binaries though. So call it an in-b…

A drawback of our approach is absolutely that it is expensive to test extremely large volumes of data or compute this way. Even before you start running into physical limitations of our current platfo…