From Segfault to Myfault: admitting the bug was our pointer mishap
Description
Two-panel meme featuring the well-known stock photo of an older man sitting at a bright, minimalist desk, looking at a silver laptop while holding a pink coffee mug. In the first panel, white bold text across the top reads "SEGFAULT"; the man gazes at the screen with a neutral expression. In the second, otherwise identical panel, the caption changes to "MYFAULT", implying personal responsibility for the crash. The humor plays on segmentation faults - runtime violations common in C/C++ and other low-level languages - suggesting the developer finally accepts that the memory access error is self-inflicted. The clean office setting and unchanged posture emphasize how quickly a debugging session can shift from blaming the machine to recognizing developer error
Comments
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Turns out “segfault” is just the kernel spelling “myfault” - the price you pay for treating undefined behavior as a design pattern
After 20 years of blaming cosmic rays, compiler bugs, and hardware failures, you finally run it through valgrind and discover you've been incrementing a pointer instead of dereferencing it since 2019
Segfault at 0x0: the only stack trace where the root cause analysis is just a mirror
The five stages of debugging a segfault: denial ('it compiled fine'), anger ('why doesn't valgrind just tell me the line number?'), bargaining ('maybe if I add more null checks'), depression ('I should have used Rust'), and acceptance ('ah yes, I freed that twice'). Senior engineers skip straight to acceptance because they've learned that 99% of segfaults are indeed MYFAULT, usually involving a pointer they were 'absolutely certain' was valid
Every SIGSEGV is the kernel saying "your memory model is imaginary" - and git blame confirming it’s my 2014 memcpy
Segfault per kernel; “my fault” per RCA - disabling ASan to win a benchmark ships dangling pointers faster too
Harold gets it: segfaults are the universe's polite reminder that your 'battle-tested' pointer arithmetic still trips over the same off-by-one after 20 years