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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • I explained a little about buffer overflows, but in essence programming is the act of making a fancy list of commands for your computer to run one after the other.

    One concept in programming is an “array” or list of things, sometimes in languages like C the developer is responsible for keeping track of how many items are in a list. When that program accepts info from other programs (like a chat message, video call, website to render, etx) in the form of an array sometimes the sender can send more info than the developer expected to receive.

    When that extra info is received it can actually modify the fancy list of commands in such a way that the data itself is run directly on the computer instead of what the developer originally intended.

    Bad guy sends too much data, at the end of the data are secret instructions to install a new program that watches every key you type on your keyboard and send that info to the bad guy.


  • There is a ton of literature out there, but in a few words:

    Rust is built from the ground up with the intention of being safe, and fast. There are a bunch of things you can do when programming that are technically fine but often cause errors. Rust builds on decades of understanding of best practices and forces the developer to follow them. It can be frustrating at first but being forced to use best practices is actually a huge boon to the whole community.

    C is a language that lets the developer do whatever the heck they want as long as it’s technically possible. “Dereferencing pointer 0?” No problem boss. C is fast but there are many many pitfalls and mildly incorrect code can cause significant problems, buffer overflows for example can open your system to bad actors sending information packets to the program and cause your computer to do whatever the bad actor wants. You can technically write code with that problem in both c and rust, but rust has guardrails that keep you out of trouble.



  • I found hundreds of full length movies in chinese on youtube, and used ytdl to download them all for the day they are inevitably removed. I just searched for some popular movies by chinese name and used the filter for long length. If you want the script I wrote to download whole playlists lmk

    Edit: found this

    In the Oval Office on Thursday, Biden made clear that he was moving forward with wall construction grudgingly, in order to comply with funds appropriated by Congress in 2019. He said he had tried and failed to get Congress to redirect the funding it had allocated for wall construction in south Texas. "The money was appropriated for the border wall. I tried to get them to reappropriate, to redirect that money. They didn’t. They wouldn’t. In the meantime, there’s nothing under the law other than they have to use the money for what it was appropriated for. I can’t stop that," he said.