are we the baddies
We are always the good guys in our own story. The trick is to look at the situation from someone else's point of view and ask "Are we the baddies?"
If yes, annihilate them.
2021
international developer after 1 year
The path for a foreign worker that came to the US through university is very straightforward if they want to live a life here afterwards. My assumption here is that you're not rich, that you don't have family that is already a permanent citizen (green card) that can pull you over, you're not marrying a US citizen, and you're not eligible for like asylum/diversity visa. Oh and you're not super-talented and wins awards, and got papers, or save the pope's life etc. etc.
First, it's imperative that you get a STEM degree. Why? well you'll find out later. But do well in university because you'll need to get a job right after you graduate. In fact, you have a time limit of 60 days from when you graduate or else after that you're "illegal". The fee to get this post-graduation student-worker status is $400 for 1 year. Oh, you want to improve your chances with internships? make sure it doesn't add up to 12-months of full-time, or else it counts against your 1 year limit.
Second, lol at getting a job as an international fresh grad. All the jobs that need clearance, well that's not for you. Companies without clearance don't want to hire internationals because it's more paperwork for them, if they know the paperwork at all. Or maybe they don't have a HR department. Or maybe they don't want to keep someone that won't be able to stay with the company for more than a year.
This is where STEM comes in. You got a STEM major? You can get an extension for 2 years. If you're unlucky, you'll have to handhold your company's HR to get the correct paperwork on time (thankfully my company's was great). BTW, did I mention that you can't work without this one card sent to you by DHS after they take 3 months to approve your application, tough luck if your start date is earlier than that.
What if I want to stay for more than 3 years? Well, you can switch over to the worker visa, if your company sponsors you. In fact, they have to submit the paperwork, and pay the fee (imagine dangling that over your head at quarterly reviews). The best part though, it's a once-a-year lottery! An entirely luck-based regime. Even if you have STEM, and your employer plays the lottery 3 times for you, you still have a 34% chance overall of not getting a worker visa (70% of not winning ^ 3 years).
Of course, throughout all this, companies can apply for a green card for you. Will they though? They don't have to, cause they know they got you tied to them with your student-worker status, or your worker visa status.
International workers are always hyper-aware of their status. It's like living with a knife over your head, it's a strong rope, but all it takes is a gush of particularly bad wind.
So that's my experience as an international worker after 1 year. Thankfully there wasn't many cases of racism, my workplace is good, I like my boss and my team. But I understand deep in my bones that every day I get to stay in this country is pure luck, and I should be grateful.
What an anxiety-inducing dream.
compiler magic
Magic is here, it is at your fingertips.
Recently, I've come across a not so efficient implementation of a
isEvenfunction ```c++ bool isEven(int number) { int numberCompare = 0; bool even = true;while (number != numberCompare) { even = !even; numberCompare++; } return even;} ``` ... Surprisingly, Clang/LLVM is able to optimize the iterative algorithm down to the constant time algorithm (GCC fails on this one). In Clang 10 with full optimizations, this code compiles down to:
llvm ; Function Attrs: norecurse nounwind readnone ssp uwtable define zeroext i1 @_Z6isEveni(i32 %0) local_unnamed_addr #0 { %2 = and i32 %0, 1 %3 = icmp eq i32 %2, 0 ret i1 %3 }
^ That, is magic
This is the list of optimization passes (the order matters) that LLVM applies with flag -O2. Note that some of them are run multiple times : -targetlibinfo -tti -targetpassconfig -tbaa -scoped-noalias -assumption-cache-tracker -profile-summary-info -forceattrs -inferattrs -ipsccp -called-value-propagation -attributor -globalopt -domtree -mem2reg -deadargelim -domtree -basicaa -aa -loops -lazy-branch-prob -lazy-block-freq -opt-remark-emitter -instcombine -simplifycfg -basiccg -globals-aa -prune-eh -inline -functionattrs -domtree -sroa -basicaa -aa -memoryssa -early-cse-memssa -speculative-execution -aa -lazy-value-info -jump-threading -correlated-propagation -simplifycfg -domtree -basicaa -aa -loops -lazy-branch-prob -lazy-block-freq -opt-remark-emitter -instcombine -libcalls-shrinkwrap -loops -branch-prob -block-freq -lazy-branch-prob -lazy-block-freq -opt-remark-emitter -pgo-memop-opt -basicaa -aa -loops -lazy-branch-prob -lazy-block-freq -opt-remark-emitter -tailcallelim -simplifycfg -reassociate -domtree -loops -loop-simplify -lcssa-verification -lcssa -basicaa -aa -scalar-evolution -loop-rotate -memoryssa -licm -loop-unswitch -simplifycfg -domtree -basicaa -aa -loops -lazy-branch-prob -lazy-block-freq -opt-remark-emitter -instcombine -loop-simplify -lcssa-verification -lcssa -scalar-evolution -indvars -loop-idiom -loop-deletion -loop-unroll -mldst-motion -phi-values -aa -memdep -lazy-branch-prob -lazy-block-freq -opt-remark-emitter -gvn -phi-values -basicaa -aa -memdep -memcpyopt -sccp -demanded-bits -bdce -aa -lazy-branch-prob -lazy-block-freq -opt-remark-emitter -instcombine -lazy-value-info -jump-threading -correlated-propagation -basicaa -aa -phi-values -memdep -dse -aa -memoryssa -loops -loop-simplify -lcssa-verification -lcssa -scalar-evolution -licm -postdomtree -adce -simplifycfg -domtree -basicaa -aa -loops -lazy-branch-prob -lazy-block-freq -opt-remark-emitter -instcombine -barrier -elim-avail-extern -basiccg -rpo-functionattrs -globalopt -globaldce -basiccg -globals-aa -domtree -float2int -lower-constant-intrinsics -domtree -loops -loop-simplify -lcssa-verification -lcssa -basicaa -aa -scalar-evolution -loop-rotate -loop-accesses -lazy-branch-prob -lazy-block-freq -opt-remark-emitter -loop-distribute -branch-prob -block-freq -scalar-evolution -basicaa -aa -loop-accesses -demanded-bits -lazy-branch-prob -lazy-block-freq -opt-remark-emitter -loop-vectorize -loop-simplify -scalar-evolution -aa -loop-accesses -lazy-branch-prob -lazy-block-freq -loop-load-elim -basicaa -aa -lazy-branch-prob -lazy-block-freq -opt-remark-emitter -instcombine -simplifycfg -domtree -loops -scalar-evolution -basicaa -aa -demanded-bits -lazy-branch-prob -lazy-block-freq -opt-remark-emitter -slp-vectorizer -opt-remark-emitter -instcombine -loop-simplify -lcssa-verification -lcssa -scalar-evolution -loop-unroll -lazy-branch-prob -lazy-block-freq -opt-remark-emitter -instcombine -memoryssa -loop-simplify -lcssa-verification -lcssa -scalar-evolution -licm -lazy-branch-prob -lazy-block-freq -opt-remark-emitter -transform-warning -alignment-from-assumptions -strip-dead-prototypes -globaldce -constmerge -domtree -loops -branch-prob -block-freq -loop-simplify -lcssa-verification -lcssa -basicaa -aa -scalar-evolution -block-freq -loop-sink -lazy-branch-prob -lazy-block-freq -opt-remark-emitter -instsimplify -div-rem-pairs -simplifycfg -domtree -basicaa -aa -memoryssa -loops -loop-simplify -lcssa-verification -lcssa -scalar-evolution -licm -verify -print-module ↩
conservative universities
In the Islamic world, universities have, since the 1960s, been a strongly conservative influence. This wasn’t always true - there were thriving leftist, socialist and secular nationalist movements at them for much of the late 19th and early-mid 20th centuries - but beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, conservative religious intellectuals began to dominate. A lot of academic religious figures came to power, and student bodies became much more religiously conservative - customs like gender segregation, strict modest dress codes actually became common in Pakistani and Egyptian universities, among the middle classes, in the 1980s before they did so among many more common urban people. The universities of the Arab world played a key role in the increase in religious conservatism in the region since the siege of Mecca - particularly the most famous Muslim university, Al Azhar, which has been an intellectual center for Sunni Islam for over a thousand years. Similar things occurred in Shia Islam - is it not interesting how so many student revolutionaries in 1979 helped an austere religious conservative overthrow a secular government? Many didn’t know what they were doing, but many did - religious Islam offered many young people unsatisfied with secular nationalism a spiritual philosophy in the waning decades of the 20th century.
Across Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Morocco, Algeria and Syria, many of the most ardent and committed (and radical) Islamist figures were converted or radicalised at university. The common tale of some moderate or secular-ish, kind of hippie son who smokes and flirts with girls who goes to a university and comes out a thawb wearing Islamist is, well, common. As the failure of secular nationalism in the MENA region became clearer, the Islamist intellectuals were waiting in the wings.
So the idea that intellectual culture trends progressive is clearly false. It is possible to have a conservative or reactionary academy, even one much more right wing than the population as a whole. But it probably has to be religious in character.
Can't find the link
5 interview questions: C++, Area 2
Area Number Two: Object-Oriented Programming
We shouldn't hire SDEs (arguably excepting college hires) who aren't at least somewhat proficient with OOP. I'm not claiming that OOP is good or bad; I'm just saying you have to know it, just like you have to know the things you can and can't do at an airport security checkpoint.
Two reasons:
1) OO has been popular/mainstream for more than 20 years. Virtually every programming language supports OOP in some way. You can't work on a big code base without running into it.
2) OO concepts are an important building block for creating good service interfaces. They represent a shared understanding and a common vocabulary that are sometimes useful when talking about architecture.
So you have to ask candidates some OO stuff on the phone.
a) Terminology
The candidate should be able to give satisfactory definitions for a random selection of the following terms:
- class, object (and the difference between the two)
Class, as an analogy, is the blueprint/template for an object, while an object is an instance of the class (like a built house).
In C++, classes are simple:
class cPoint
{
public:
int X;
int Y;
};
There is another holdover from time of C:
typedef struct
{
int X;
int Y;
} sPoint;
or just:
struct sPoint
{
int X;
int Y;
};
instantiation
z`
method (as opposed to, say, a C function)
virtual method, pure virtual method
class/static method
static/class initializer
constructor
destructor/finalizer
superclass or base class
subclass or derived class
inheritance
encapsulation
multiple inheritance (and give an example)
delegation/forwarding
composition/aggregation
abstract class
interface/protocol (and different from abstract class)
method overriding
method overloading (and difference from overriding)
polymorphism (without resorting to examples)
is-a versus has-a relationships (with examples)
method signatures (what's included in one)
method visibility (e.g. public/private/other)
These are just the bare basics of OO. Candidates should know this stuff cold. It's not even a complete list; it's just off the top of my head.
Again, I'm not advocating OOP, or saying anything about it, other than that it's ubiquitious so you have to know it. You can learn this stuff by reading a single book and writing a little code, so no SDE candidate (except maybe a brand-new college hire) can be excused for not knowing this stuff.
I draw a distinction between "knows it" and "is smart enough to learn it." Normally I allow people through for interviews if they've got a gap in their knowledge, as long as I think they're smart enough to make it up on the job.
But for these five areas, I expect candidates to know them. It's not just a matter of being smart enough to learn them. There's a certain amount of common sense involved; I can't imagine coming to interview at Amazon and not having brushed up on OOP, for example. But these areas are also so fundamental that they serve as real indicators of how the person will do on the job here.
b) OO Design
This is where most candidates fail with OO. They can recite the textbook definitions, and then go on to produce certifiably insane class designs for simple problems. For instance:
They may have Person multiple-inherit from Head, Body, Arm, and Leg.
They may have Car and Motorcycle inherit from Garage.
They may produce an elaborate class tree for Animals, and then declare an enum ("Lion = 1, Bear = 2", etc.) to represent the type of each animal.
They may have exactly one static instance of every class in their system.
(All these examples are from real candidates I've interviewed in the past 3 weeks.)
Candidates who've only studied the terminology without ever doing any OOP often don't really get it. When they go to produce classes or code, they don't understand the difference between a static member and an instance member, and they'll use them interchangeably.
Or they won't understand when to use a subclass versus an attribute or property, and they'll assert firmly that a car with a bumper sticker is a subclass of car. (Yep, 2 candidates have told me that in the last 2 weeks.)
Some don't understand that objects are supposed to know how to take care of themselves. They'll create a bunch of classes with nothing but data, getters, and setters (i.e., basically C structs), and some Manager classes that contain all the logic (i.e., basically C functions), and voila, they've implemented procedural programming perfectly using classes.
Or they won't understand the difference between a char*, an object, and an enum. Or they'll think polymorphism is the same as inheritance. Or they'll have any number of other fuzzy, weird conceptual errors, and their designs will be fuzzy and weird as well.
For the OO-design weeder question, have them describe:
What classes they would define.
What methods go in each class (including signatures).
What the class constructors are responsible for.
What data structures the class will have to maintain.
Whether any Design Patterns are applicable to this problem.
Here are some examples:
Design a deck of cards that can be used for different card game applications.
Likely classes: a Deck, a Card, a Hand, a Board, and possibly Rank and Suit. Drill down on who's responsible for creating new Decks, where they get shuffled, how you deal cards, etc. Do you need a different instance for every card in a casino in Vegas?
Model the Animal kingdom as a class system, for use in a Virtual Zoo program.
Possible sub-issues: do they know the animal kingdom at all? (I.e. common sense.) What properties and methods do they immediately think are the most important? Do they use abstract classes and/or interfaces to represent shared stuff? How do they handle the multiple-inheritance problem posed by, say, a tomato (fruit or veggie?), a sponge (animal or plant?), or a mule (donkey or horse?)
Create a class design to represent a filesystem.
Do they even know what a filesystem is, and what services it provides? Likely classes: Filesystem, Directory, File, Permission. What's their relationship? How do you differentiate between text and binary files, or do you need to? What about executable files? How do they model a Directory containing many files? Do they use a data structure for it? Which one, and what performance tradeoffs does it have?
Design an OO representation to model HTML.
How do they represent tags and content? What about containment relationships? Bonus points if they know that this has already been done a bunch of times, e.g. with DOM. But they still have to describe it.
The following commonly-asked OO design interview questions are probably too involved to be good phone-screen weeders:
Design a parking garage.
Design a bank of elevators in a skyscraper.
Model the monorail system at Disney World.
Design a restaurant-reservation system.
Design a hotel room-reservation system.
A good OO design question can test coding, design, domain knowledge, OO principles, and so on. A good weeder question should probably just target whether they know when to use subtypes, attributes, and containment.
vietnam POWs
How were South Vietnamese, in general, treated by North Vietnam ?
They were treated so terribly that to this very day many pre-75 South Vietnamese (those who had moved to South Vietnam before 1975 to flee the North Vietnamese with some working for the government) hate North Vietnamese with a passion and for good reason: they were treated very harshly.
You have to understand one thing about the Communist Vietnamese (and communist group in general): they had been guerillas who suffered terribly. Most, if not all leaders of the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP), had been jailed, locked up, tortured. Ho was locked up in Hong Kong, Giap was locked up and his wife was executed by the French, the list went on. It was during those time they learned this lesson:
"Death before dishonor"
When a man believed in something, he would gladly die for that something. You can kill him but you only create a martyr which will inspire many many more to take up his battle cry. But a broken man is more useful: nothing dissuades people more than the sight of a revolutionary broken and humbled.
But how do you break a man ? You can torture him, but do it too hard and you kill him. Do it too gently and he will grow accustom to the pain.
But what if you torture their family ?
Nothing breaks a man faster than seeing his children suffer for his sins. The worse the suffering, the more prolonged the suffering, the faster a man break. You can pull every teeth from a man's mouth and do live appendicitis operation on him and he will spit in your face. But you beat his children and he will give up everything you want.
And the VCP applies this lesson to heart.
After the war was over, the North Vietnamese government initiated "re-education" plan starting June 11th 1975. The re-education was supposed to only last "a few months". For most, it lasted many years. For many, twenty.
It should be noted there was no institutionalize torture because the Vietnamese Communist knows one thing: they have to keep a facade of being the "nice guys" and having people returning from the camp in casket or as a cripple is not a good idea. There was torture, don't get me wrong, but it was more spontaneous and not institutionalized. They used other methods such as letting disease ran amok in the camp or using starvation and hard labor. The aim is not to break the man, however. The aim is to make life so terrible for them they would yearn for their old lives. The more they yearned, the better.
And then came the gut punch
During the whole time the man was there, his family would suffer. His children would be denied access to higher education and would be subjected to intense bullying from his peers and the Party organ in the school (which is to say everyone). If his children were of age, they would be "persuaded" to join the army or the Young pioneers and would be used as cannon fodders in war or used to clear landmines with their hands in New Economic Region. But most importantly, they would be taught to denounce their own parents. The wives and relatives and everyone who is associated with him would be punished by having their ration cards withheld or demoted to the lowest rank and denied access to healthcare or government job (which meant every jobs since private sector was non-existent). This system, called "3 đời 3 họ" (three generations, three family (your family/your father's family/Your mother's family)) is still in use up to this day.
But the sickest one was their allocation of "prison visit". They deliberately kept information about the inmates whereabout hidden from their family, forcing relatives to go on a wild goose chase that took them across the length of Vietnam. These harrowing journeys took months if not years and all the while the wardens let the inmates knew that if they "got re-educated", the wardens would arrange a meeting and help their family reuniting without having to go on such a harrowing trips. Some wardens took things even further, forcing the mothers and wives and daughters of the inmates to have sex with them in exchange for a visit that would never come and then told the inmates as a way to break them. Just imagine being stuck in jail and listen to a warden who told you, to your face gleefully, that he is fucking your daughters every night. I don't know about you but I will break
The list goes on and on. The deaths and physical humiliation of the camp is not the worst part. The psychological is the most effective and the worst. So many men were scarred by this experience that they became avid communists because of Stockholm syndrome while some never spoke of their experience out of fear of reliving such experience again. But that was only one half of the journey.
When these men re-entered society, they found a world unwilling to accept them in. Their own families suffered, their children grew up to hate them. They had little way to make a living in life. And nobody wanted to associate with them since such association would invite the watchful eyes of the dreaded Public Security. Many were forced into suicide. Some became so broken they went mad or died a homeless beggar. The few who managed to keep their minds intact opt to leave the country, but only after they managed to get enough gold and foreign currency to pay the government to let them leave. The sum was mostly so large they had to sell every belongings of them only to venture out as a boat person into the high sea where they would be robbed or killed by pirates.
In all, about 800,000 Vietnamese left Vietnam from 1975 to 1995. Anywhere from 200,000-400,000 of them would die, a mortality rate from 25% to 50%
The policy was flawless. Unlike the Chinese or the Russian, the Vietnamese broke people without leaving any physical trace behind and did so thoroughly those who suffered became unwilling to testify. Therefore they could easily deny that such mistreatment every happen and whoever testified against them would be impugned as "spreading falsehood". They managed to eradicate any threats to them without firing a shot while at the same time hoarded vast amount of wealth.
But most importantly, the program was so great it left a psychological mark on the people. They managed to cow everyone into submission, even the young and hot-headed youth. To this day, people are still afraid to speak out because they know that if they ever ever displease the government, it will not be them who suffers.
It will be everyone they love.
And the government will make sure they get the front seat and watch all those suffering.
People freaked out when they read 1984. Big brothers ain't nothing compared to the VCP
Source
"The winning side" by Huy Đức
"Vietnam's Forgotten Army: Heroism and Betrayal in the ARVN" by Andrew Wiest
Edit: In the spirit of fairness (something that the Northerners never give to us Southerner, nor will they ever bother to learn) there were people who actively working towards reconciliation. Former Prime Minister Võ Văn Kiệt, or "Sáu Dân", was actually sympathetic and tried his best to heal the divide. This was because he was a progressive who had family members fighting and dying on both sides. And since no good deeds went unpunished, he would be subjected to numerous purges. But he managed to survive and he can be considered to be modern Vietnam's second greatest statement after Hồ Chí Minh (and surely the most progressive)
And the other side
French, South Vietnamese, and American forces were absolutely brutal in how they treated suspected and actual Communists.
Con Dao prison should give a pretty good example of a possibility for a guerilla, POW, or suspect.
A prisoner on Con Dao would be given a sentence of several years and shipped to the island and placed inside a prison similar to a blockhouse prison you see on old colonial possessions in the Caribbean. Very little in the way of human dignity. Concrete or rough hewn stone everywhere, basic iron shackles, really basic and primeval toilets, water sources, and cooking. Prisoners were kept in airless oven-like rooms about 40x40m2 chained to a single metal rod which made sleeping difficult, laying in their own excrement and piss throughout the night. Rooms could contain hundreds of prisoners.
Most prisons contained an element of labor. On Con Dao prisoners waded into the shallow bay to collect coral, diving down to get it, many hardly able to swim, cutting their feet and legs, contracting gangrene and other diseases. The coral was then processed into lime and used to build structures around the prison.
Disease was rampant with most prisoners dying of malaria, typhoid, and infections related to untreated wounds. When the camps were liberated at the end of the war, prisoners looked akin to concentration camp survivors.
The prison housed many of the Communist leadership's highest level members before their executions in the 1940s-50's and remained a very large prison camp until the end of the war. It's where the idea of the barb wire rimmed "Tiger cages" come from as well as the use of "solariums" were prisoners would be left exposed to elements without water for days.
--
CID has been implicated any many extrajudicial killings. Guerillas were not considered to be under the protection of the Geneva convention and therefore were seen as someone you could mistreat, torture or otherwise summarily execute. There are reports of American interrogators leaving the room when electric shock was being administered to prisoners by ARVN interrogators only to return so as not to be implicated in torture. These come from second hand comments of CIA officers, other soldiers, and a few vets I've met over the years, so I have not academically sourced them. That being said I wholeheartedly believe they happened and believe someone could pop up with a source easily enough.
--
Many POWs switched sides. Sometimes multiple times. "Kit Carson" scouts were often reported to be ex VC. This might mean that they had fought with the Nationalist Vietminh forces earlier in the revolution or it could mean they literally flipped sides to work for the American/ARVN forces. These men were often considered highly useful but also unreliable. They would slip back to their villages and try to melt back into the regular population sometimes, or losing heart after a terrible battle might flip to the winning side. The Viet Cong was often partially made up of former ARVN soldiers who defected to join the other side. So this is to say that POW's might join the other side after a soft touch commander convinced them it was better than the prison camp or forced labor.
--
In summary. North Vietnamese POWs were often treated very harshly during the war and could expect little sympathy from the other side. Conditions inside of the POW camps were nightmarish and could be more deadly than some of the combat zones the Viet Cong and NVA operated in throughout the theatre. Intelligence gathering in the South was known to have involved torture and there is some evidence of extrajudicial killings, but also formal executions. Both the North and South allowed prisoners to switch sides and join their forces rather than rot in a POW camp. After the war some of these sites have yielded mass graves in the 10s of 1000s with the dead going back over 50 years. Guards, Wardens, and officers were often executed after the war for the harsh conditions that the North Vietnamese suffered in the camps.
Sources: I have visited the Prison on Con Dao island and read several primary accounts and journals of former prisoners there. The island is course riddled with propaganda by the Vietnamese state, but photographs and the site itself also very telling in making it objectively clear what a horrible place it was. I live in Vietnam and have had the good fortune to meet a few old vets over my years here that have been kind enough to tell me a little bit about their experiences as soldiers here during the war. Some of those stories pertained to the dark and often troubling capture of prisoners. I wish I had better access to a nice research library to give you all a proper works cited, but as of now I can only dig into my brain and tiny bookshelf. Thank you for reading.
warrior society
The problem with all this is China's reversal of fortune was not "sudden" at all: the country had been in a perpetual civil war for three decades before World War 2, and, though under-equipped, its armies had exceptional infantry and officers who consistently surprised the Japanese. It would not be an exaggeration to call interwar China the period's only "warrior society". As Jonathan Fenby points out, most of the men had been levied to fight for this or that warlord, usually several times in their lives, and often starting as child soldiers. This gave all Chinese warlords - Mao included - a massive reserve of military talent to tap into. Contra popular belief, the Chinese army that entered Korea received no extensive Communist training before entering the country and was made up mostly of new volunteers and Kuomintang defectors. "PLA tactics" were nothing unique, but simply standard operating procedure for Chinese armies, developed over decades of fighting and familiar to tens of millions of veterans. It is telling that once this "warrior generation" aged out of military eligibility, the PLA completely floundered in Vietnam. - /u/Commodify
Reminds me of the Taliban
why translate?
Just consider the huge amount of online and offline knowledge that's simply unavailable to you for the silly reason that it's written in a language you don't understand. Should we encourage this status quo by promoting the learning of more languages so that people can generate more knowledge in more languages? Should we keep translating from the most common languages into a myriad of other languages?
How about instead we focus on one language, and better knowledge, for instance by making it as easy as possible to learn that language, and by translating knowledge into it? - Dan Dascalescu
Definitely will translate this at some point.
reading reddit netsec
I browsed the top of /r/netsec yesterday night. I am in awe really. There is...
....the work of Sam Curry hacking Apple for 3 months with his team and submitted 55 vulnerabilities to get a total of over 280k in bounty payout.
...and this Quora answer on Stuxnet as the most sophisticated software ever written by John Byrd (of Sega Dreamcast fame)
...or this junior high schooler breaking GitHub private pages in the spare time of Covid and got some nice pocket money.
...or even the write up by Troy Hunt on another data breach being included in the pwnd database.
This world is amazing. This could be the closest I'll be to a ninja spy. lol.
a glimpse of the future
A participant in OpenAI's Codex invitational recently posted on HackerNews an unlisted video of how the DOM is manipulated by Codex with natural language text.
I'm reminded of this quote:
" Once technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road. " – Stewart Brand
I don't think people realize just how much the future is already here (psssst, the guy in the bottom is not real as well).