I think about this quote often, straight from Data's voice module in another episode:

'The most elementary and valuable statement in science, the beginning of wisdom, is, "I do not know".'

Blue-pilling is a method for malware to hide from the OS by virtualizing it, not an attack on VMs. That's why it's called "blue pilling". I do agree though that VMs are not airtight and VM escapes have been demonstrated.

I’m doing more with a decade old GPU, which was manufactured before “Attention is all you need“, than I could 5 years ago, when quantization techniques were implemented.

I’m holding on to my 32 bit machines.

Most linux distributions dropped support for them (for good reason). But at the end of the day these machines are a fabric of up to ~ 4 billion bytes that can be used in a myriad of ways, and we only covered a fraction of the state space before we had moved on.

In what way? If there’s a delay for the task switching menu to close after alt-tabbing (~500ms) this might be due to a kde animation default (it really tripped me up, I’m a rapid window switcher). I can share the fix once I get on my kde machine.

The people that MS hired to make and break this were top notch, and there is definitely incentive to maintain control over a content platform. This dude has been at this for /years/. I’ve been a fly on the wall on all sides to observe this.

There has been a lot of interest in underground / pirate communities to hack this, but that’s not the only reason why people hack things.

My point is that we settle with what we see for convenience/utility and base our models on that. We build real things on top of these models. Then the result meets reality. If only that transition were so simple.

When an effect jumps unexpectedly between layers of abstraction we call it an abstraction leak. As you mentioned. The correct response is to re-examine these leaks and make other frameworks to cover the edge cases, not to blame the world.

Hackers actively seek these “leaks” by suspending assumptions that arise out of the abstractions that humans tend to rely on.

I’m not surprised that my OP got downvoted. It can be very upsetting when one’s conceptual frameworks are challenged without prescription. No one even mentioned the specific example that I referenced. Well, if they can’t parse it, they don’t deserve it. Keeps me in the market.

> In Sum# > Abstractions. They don’t exist in assembler. Memory is read from registers and the stack and written to registers and the stack.

Abstractions do not exist periodi. They are patterns, but these patterns aren’t isolated from each other. This is how a hacker is born, through this deconstruction.

It’s just like the fact that electrons and protons don’t really exist. but the patterns in energy gradients are consistent enough to give them names and model their relationship. There are still points where these models fail (QM and GR at plank scale, or just the classical-quantum boundaries). It’s gradients all the way down, and even that is an abstraction layer.

Equipped with this understanding you can make an exploit like Rowhammer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer

Occasionally I remote in to help fix something, but the coding agent really takes a load off my back, and he can start learning without knowing where the endpoints are.

The uncomfortable truth is that that people in affluent countries don’t want to change their lifestyle. Affluent countries are less affected by global warming than countries responsible for a fraction of global emissions. All the emissions from manufacturing follow suit.

To defeat bender, Fry pretends to a destructive spell on him.

I couldn’t find the exact scene but…. https://youtube.com/watch?v=chjVoVcVi3A

And that filesystem is CoW with snapshots, of course.

The story won’t end here. It will soon be time to do the same for other programming language environments too.

What happens when you XOR a 0 with a byte in a one time pad? You get the corresponding byte from the pad, right? And the block full of 1s or 0s is exactly a case the scrambler needs to be used.

It's not for compression or anything like that, it is used because the cells are packed so tightly that sharp changes in energy gradients over the space will even themselves out by donating electrons to their neighbors (flipping bits). It's kind of like rowhammer.

Instead of just a ont-time-pad, a more complicated and often proprietary scrambler is used. But it's towards the same end. It's a deterministic, pseudo-random bit sequence.

If you can bypass the controller (read directly from NAND) you will see the true values that it returns, and it will likely be scrambled even if the flash controller reports otherwise. This also allows you to recover the scrambler, since you know that the other side of the XOR operation is 0.

I still don't need to assume what the intent is. Troll or no troll, it works. My comments might inspire someone else to try a CoW fs. I'm also really impressed with wikimedia's technical team.