The most interesting bug in iOS now to me is …

The way it sometimes gets confused about which saved state it should present. This is kind of like dementia: you can’t see which choice to make and you pick the wrong one – or, as you lose touch, you pick none and become progressively silent. It’s interesting to see the stumble: Safari stutters, sometimes generates and then reverses to the correct. This reveals a blunt way computers are changing the world, that we have a model of behavior: the stumbling over saved states reflects the way we stumble over saved states because we built iOS, built Safari. You can see the routines: we pull up the wrong thing because that’s a fast response – who hasn’t done that? – and we correct, which causes stumbling as we try to find the right thing. In one version of this bug, when it was much worse, I could watch Safari come up to the present, like it was stuck in the memories of its past. We’re dealing in code with issues of ready, fire, aim – you go off when there’s something to hit but before you’ve focused on it – of fire, ready, aim – of going off ineffectively, before there’s anything to hit. An r,f,a is meaningful in a bunch of circumstances. Examples include a process that keeps firing because it doesn’t ‘know’ when it will be needed, which absorbs resources and may have other effects – which are equivalent to increasing thermal load as the lack of optimality translates into inefficiency – and a process that goes off when activated but before it is fed the appropriate variables or before the ‘aim’ processes have finished. This occurs all the time: you start a reaction and can’t stop the words from coming out or the actions from completing, even when no longer necessary or when they’re obviously the wrong choice, either because you said or did the wrong thing or because you said or did it at the wrong time.