← Back to context

Comment by mohsen1

4 days ago

Do you think any programmer really understands how their program works end-to-end? At some abstraction layer, we're all clueless. There are many layers between what you type into the text editor and the actual CPU ticks that make your program work. I bet nobody fully understands the whole stack.

Now that that text editor accepts English, we're all calling each other names, etc.

I didn't say that Real Hackers™ understood every single thing perfectly from editor to electrons. You've made up a strawman and then beaten it.

  • I can’t believe the nerve of that guy to straw man your no true Scotsman like that

    • That is... also a strawman. There are less skilled bad actors. There are more skilled bad actors. The bottom rung is script kiddies, so named because they just run other people's scripts. They are not Scottish.

      1 reply →

Used to be, knowing a ret from a nop (90) meant something. If you can just load up a model and say "hack teh NSA.gov" while not actually knowing anything about even DNS, what are we even doing?

  • LOIC (a DDoS tool) worked that way. Xbox voice chat kids would just agree to open up LOIC, type nsa.gov and all hit start at the same time.

While most don't, there are developers who actually do understand systems from end to end. Most developers are terrible developers, compared to the really good ones.

  • > While most don't, there are developers who actually do understand systems from end to end

    The last time intel made a CPU where the entire thing could fit in one persons head was probably the 8086 or thereabounts.

    There is no one developer or engineer at apple that understands everything going on from key press to bits moving around to print the characters I see when I type in this text box.

    • Correct. There are people who understand more and less and none of it. The latter are called script kiddies.