Nobody is both that bored and that motivated. Unless paid.

deleted by creator

Emotionally? No. Linguistically, sure.

It’s seriously insane growing up on star trek and then seeing it come to life.

Still holding out for flying cars.

And warp drive!

I have a feeling there are a lot of busy people trying to answer that question, now. Yikes.

Yeah it sounds pretty wild already with some kind of, like, door knock mechanism using certificates? So you can’t scan for it. And some reverse engineering countermeasures.

Like everyone else, I have to wonder what libraries have been compromised in a way that nobody has noticed yet.

Very annoying - the apparent author of the backdoor was in communication with me over several weeks trying to get xz 5.6.x added to Fedora 40 & 41 because of it’s “great new features”. We even worked with him to fix the valgrind issue (which it turns out now was caused by the backdoor he had added). We had to race last night to fix the problem after an inadvertent break of the embargo.

He has been part of the xz project for 2 years, adding all sorts of binary test files, and to be honest with this level of sophistication I would be suspicious of even older versions of xz until proven otherwise.

Damn. I would love to see a full post mortem on this compromise.

Idk what you’re into buddy

but I like it.

Inflation.

The whole Colorado River water thing is a fucking complicated mess that I can’t begin to understand. All kinds of weird water rights laws between farmers, ranchers and whoever, not to mention the all the use in Arizona, and fuck knows what else. Every time I read an article about disputes and such my brain melts.

Let’s talk about cotton farming in Arizona, too.

Hopefully my sarcasm was obvious.

I swear people are just gladly diving headfirst into total despair. Any hint of good news? Shit all over it with a one liner as the guy above, trying to point out the hypocrisy as if the vacationer should just not fly back from the trip lol. Like jfc, would it kill you take the small W??

People who see the effects of climate change (on the reef or whatever) with their own eyes are going to be a lot more likely to take climate change seriously and maybe take some real action – there’s a massive list of things we could be trying rather than being a doomer on social media. It’s not that hard to find activist groups, write govt representatives, etc. And fuck this idea that millions of people doing something won’t make a change lol. More learned helplessness.

Not that we aren’t fucked… but how fucked we will be depends on what we do. Dooming on social media is guaranteed to not get it done.

All it does is drains you of any motivation (or will to live) you might have had to do something, even if small.

I’m just fucking sick of the constant despair-aganda and kind of want to tell people spreading it to shove it up their asses.

Fucking asshole should’ve swam back.

You probably want to look for books on reverse engineering. And a book on assembly for your CPU.

I learned assembly language for VAX-11 (this was like 30+ years ago) in a CS class. We also learned 6502 assembly in a computer engineering class. Neither book would help you. You want a book specific to whatever CPU you’re using.

Now, I never took it, but friends in college took a CS Compilers course where they learned the basics of writing a compiler. But that’s not what you’re talking about though it might help.

Trying to understand what a program does is reverse engineering. And a tool like IDA Pro would help you understand subroutines, variables, flow, library calls, and so on.

A debugger will be invaluable for seeing a program execute one instruction at a time.

You would need to know the assembly language for your CPU. And it would help to become familiar with certain patterns. I haven’t done much assembly (but I have done assembly on a few different CPUs) nor much reverse engineering so I’m not sure I can lend a whole lot of insight there.

As you learn assembly instructions, you will start to understand how loops, subroutines, if/then/else, and other things are accomplished for your CPU.

For example, if/then/else and loops are often accomplished with conditional branching. The conditions are based on CPU flags (bits in the Status Register) that are set by a comparison instruction. You’ll start to recognize how if/then/else and loops and other things are commonly implemented in assembly (without necessarily having to study the compiler; it will be obvious without knowing anything but assembly).

Another example might be how C structs are implemented. Some CPUs provide convenient memory addressing modes for structs, some don’t. Nearly all I am familiar with provide a convenient way to reference arrays with a simple index.

Subroutines are jumps to a set location and at the end of that code is a return instruction. Usually registers have to be saved when jumping and restored when returning. Arguments to the subroutines are pushed on to the stack either by value or by reference. Return value is provided through some convention (machines with lots of registers might always use one particular one for return).

I guess bottom line, learn assembly for your particular CPU, then take a crack at using a debugger and disassembler / reverse engineering tool.

I’m not entirely sure I follow why that is needed to learn how to do branching in forth but I only vaguely remember that language. Maybe if I did it would be more clear.

Anyway I hope this helps at least a little.

As the other commenter said, you want to learn about programming principles. Like, low coupling or don’t repeat yourself.

How long is your longest program? What would you say is a typical length?

You say your code is “bad” – in what ways? For example:

• Readability (e.g. going back to it months later so you go “oh I remember” or “wtf does this do?!”
• Maintainability (go back to update and you have to totally rework a bunch of stuff for a change that seems like it should be simple)
• Reliability (mistakes, haphazard “testing”, can’t trust output)
• Maybe something else?

I guess if you are unlikely to go back and change it, or understand how it works, then sure. And yeah that happens.

I write scripts and utilities like that. Modularity is overkill although I do toss in a comment or two to give a hint to future me, just in case.

Although tbf, I took plenty of CS classes and some of the instructors beat best practices into our heads… So writing sloppy, arcane, spaghetti code causes me to flinch…

SUPER POWER NINJA

TURBO NEO ULTRA

HYPER MEGA MULTI

ALPHA META EXTRA

UBER PREFIX

DEPRESSION!

https://youtu.be/uMMr8ucvkKw?si=eqWgp4SgK69Z1aOZ

Totally agree.

Ok, folks, one of us needs to do a PR on this app to implement this fella’s feature request!

Maybe in my old age, I have mellowed out and realized, like everyone else, I can be a dummy at times. And so I am a hell of a lot more patient with users who don’t know everything (or much of anything). I also have become more interested in human factors (mostly as a spectator…or victim).

Looking at this I am actually kind of curious what their specific workflows are. While “cut” might do the trick if I had to cut and paste files to a bunch of different directories I would want to bash my head in. (Of course I would be using Linux, btw, and would do it at the shell prompt lol) But seriously, there is a better way to reorganize many files to many directories in a UI than cut/paste.

When I was 25, and an insufferably arrogant IT nerd, I would’ve downvoted you and mocked this hapless individual; I hang my head in shame thinking about who I used to be. :( I’ve come a long way. I’m not as arrogant… I’m just insufferable! \o/

Here. 150,000 transistors. Get to work.