zoom, enhance
Remote
tef
@tef@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06former main character. they/them is fine
0 Followers
0 Following
35 Posts
Joined March 31, 2017
finding myself repeating "fuzzers are stochastic, with enough cpu time you will always find a bug, results are a usually demonstration of resources not algorithms"
like, hacking, along with spam and fraud are the sorts of activities where things only need to work 0.1% of the time to be successful
it isn't a demonstration of clever code or tooling but the uncompromising effectiveness of sheer brute force heh
seeing windows benchmark itself against steamos is a bit "2027 is the year of windows on the desktop"
Replying to
@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems at the same time things could end up more like the spreadsheet, replacing a lot of the need for programmers for mostly "trivial" programs or disposable calculations
but uh yeah i don't think any of us is ready for the tidal wave of programs we wish were still written in excel
folding smaller and smaller cranes at work
Replying to
@jwz@mastodon.social the answer is "you get arrested for posting them" https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-war-uae-tourists-expats-influencers-detained-social-media-posts/
Replying to
@xgranade@wandering.shop it's just yeah "you'll be left behind" is what i've been told about every get rich scam
Boosted by @cstross@wandering.shop
in hindsight, it's a little unfair to characterise all of the pro GenAI people as "wanting to bring about the antichrist"
some are "a few dead teenagers is an inalienable price of technological progress" and some are more "psychotic breaks? magical thinking? sounds like a skill issue, i am smarter than every dead teenager"
it's one thing to have the nftesque fait accomplit "the future is here and it's not going away" but hearing "genai doesn't kill people, prompts kill people" is a bit much
update: smaller crane
code with a bus factor of zero
seeing someone note that 'in theory, quality has gotten cheaper as tools have become more powerful, and yet quality doesn't seem to arrive' and i'm torn between going "the technical is social before it is technical"
or just "that's capitalism for ya, the best quality at the lowest of prices"
Replying to
@misty@digipres.club "We regret that, sadly, unanimity is not possible on this issue and kinder ground eludes us." adding this to my list of ways to tell people where to stick it
anyway, "world standards day", to celebrate international standards, was on october the 14th
unless you're in america, in which case it's next week, the 14th of november
mastodon users are genuinely unrivaled at reading posts as questions
and answering them wrong
i know this is mastodon and most people here haven't renewed their poetic license
but seriously, non technical people will regularly use some part of the system to refer to the whole, and it doesn't make then any less correct
fussing over the details is just being pedantical
Replying to
@joe it's more "this is actually a thing it can do" i feel as fuzzing does produce results
but, well, after the burst of low hanging fruit, i don't expect a regular crop of bugs
Replying to
@mjg59 i feel like "outsourcing the work to the lowest bidder" isn't really a democratic force at work
Replying to
@dotstdy @luna this happened, america forgot how to make a component in nuclear weapons, as it was too secret
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank
Replying to
@mjg59 as i understand it, "endless hacktober" is more apt
endless september was about new people not learning the rules
endless hacktover is about people doing extractive work
Replying to
just watch the first five seconds. if you're hooked, the rest of the video is worth it
Replying to
@pozorvlak @joe
to be clear, if you believe openbsd has a lower defect rather than any other of the bsds, you're absolutely being taken for a ride
Replying to
@eevee it's fair to say chrome replaced IE, rather than firefox
but if i remember correctly, one of the big things was "one tab = one process" so one errant tab wouldn't take out your whole browser
plus pushing for stronger sandboxing of plugins, then throw in the faster release cycle for html5 features
honestly though the moment i opened chrome on a work laptop and saw it had installed a plugin automatically i was like "yeah this is enterprise software now"
Replying to
@whitequark * unless comparing to other fuzzers
like if you only have a list of bugs there's no study on the techniques
Replying to
@whitequark oh, for sure, being a script kiddie has gotten a little bit easier while token prices are low heh
Replying to
@davidgerard@circumstances.run this was like a refreshing cool breeze across my timeline
Replying to
@whitequark was genuinely mulling over adding it but i shrugged as my post was already too wordy heh
Replying to