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Jernej Simončič �

@jernej__s@infosec.exchange

249 Followers

146 Following

21K Posts

…

Website

https://eternallybored.org/

Jernej Simončič �44m ago

I've been hearing from recruiters and hiring managers that now, basically every cover letter and resumé is "perfect". Good grammar, spelling, everything about the job posting is mentioned, etc. etc. Because you can just use an AI tool to spit out a perfect looking page.

Which of course means that then it's all a test of how good can they straight up lie their way through the interview process.

So if you want to know why hiring has gone even more to shit unless you directly know someone who is hiring, blame AI.

Jernej Simončič �4h ago

Our flag.

Illustration: Aida Amer/Axios

Jernej Simončič �13h ago

Jason Lefkowitz 13h ago

ChatGPT is great if what you've always dreamed of is a computer which will tell you that you are smart and attractive

Jernej Simončič �13h ago

Kevin Beaumont 13h ago

PSA: Don't install Call of Duty WWII on PC. There's apparently an RCE exploit via game chat people are using to hack each other's PCs.

https://cyberinsider.com/call-of-duty-wwii-game-pass-launch-stained-by-reports-of-rce-attacks/

Call of Duty: WWII Game Pass Launch Stained by Reports of RCE Attacks

Call of Duty: WWII players report being hacked mid-game via an RCE exploit, days after the title was added to Microsoft’s Game Pass lineup.

CyberInsider

Jernej Simončič �13h ago

Jess👾15h ago

Today I remembered an old boss who would do the rounds after lunch before a long weekend and say something to the effect of "Okay, I have established that all of you are here for the day. None of the managers will be coming around the floor to check if you are here for the rest of the day. Do what you will with this information."

Jernej Simončič �13h ago

@nina_kali_nina At least GTK+ on Linux had support for low-colour modes. Windows port never bothered with that.

Jernej Simončič �14h ago

@nina_kali_nina Oh, I don't think GTK+ ever supported 256 (or lower) colours on Windows. IIRC I added a check for high-colour mode in the installer, but it was probably just a warning (even the 486 my father bought in '95 always ran in 24 or 16-bit mode [24-bit worked until DirectX was installed on Windows 95, afterwards only 16-bit colour was supported]).

Jernej Simončič �14h ago

@nina_kali_nina I used PSP 4.10 for a long long time, since it just had a nag screen; IIRC 4.11 was the first one that stopped working after 30 days.

Jernej Simončič �15h ago

Spotted this on Hacker News, and most interesting thing to me (aside from the guy thinking he invented shared source) is the way he talks about open source communities. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44425545

It's pretty clear the only value this guy ever saw from having an open source community was free labour. Now he's got AI agents, he sees it as being basically the same thing but 100% under his control. Why would he need to let outside humans contribute?

Future of post-open-source? Considering a "source-visible, non-runnable" license | Hacker News

Jernej Simončič �15h ago

Eleanor Saitta 16h ago

One of the most reliable things I learned, early on in my years of watching politics and working with organizations, is that when someone tells you that they believe, what they want to do, or who they are, it saves a ton of time if you just believe them and assume they're completely serious until proven otherwise.

×

Aura/Moom 1d ago

What? They programmed it by doing what???

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bally_Astrocade

A cool crab wearing shades 1d ago

@MOOMANiBE I USED TO HAVE ONE OF THOSE AS A KID AND MY PARENTS TOSSED IT BECAUSE IT WAS BROKEN AND I'M SALTY ABOUT IT TO THIS DAY

A cool crab wearing shades 1d ago

@MOOMANiBE the cartridges are still pretty cheap but the console's fuckin expensive now 😔

RegressionToTheMeme 1d ago

@MOOMANiBE 🤯

Irenes (many)1d ago

@MOOMANiBE oh neat!

icymi some programming under tight constraints wizardry via the demoscene

http://www.reenigne.org/blog/1k-colours-on-cga-how-its-done/
&
http://www.reenigne.org/blog/8088-pc-speaker-mod-player-how-its-done/

1K colours on CGA: How it's done « Reenigne blog

@MOOMANiBE
a video of it running is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y
the music wizardry starts at ~6:39 (it's just normal pc speaker before)

8088 MPH by Hornet + CRTC + DESiRE

YouTube

Paul Cantrell 1d ago

@MOOMANiBE @dduan

This is a shitpost embedded ina Wikipedia article, right? Right?????

Erwan 🚄1d ago

@inthehands @MOOMANiBE @dduan Having worked in smartcard development, I find it plausible. When you put a bunch of engineers with very strict ressource limits, they can become VERY creative

F4GRX SÃ©bastien 1d ago

@R1Rail @inthehands @MOOMANiBE @dduan oh yeah. Still doing that in 2025. My work platform has 16k of RAM.

jonny (good kind)1d ago

@MOOMANiBE this is some encoding that evolution would come up with for a recently evolved sense organ

jonny (good kind)1d ago

@MOOMANiBE fuck... the body evolved radiation sensation. i guess we can put that in... anxiety? if we route it through proprioception we can do coincidence detection so how much you feel like your limbs have been inverted while feeling calm about it is what radiation feels like

Allan Chow 1d ago

@MOOMANiBE spare bit injection! (i just made that up)

Donald Hobern 1d ago

What did they implement in these 1760 bytes? It reads like they implemented the _interpreter_ in that. Or was this a window into which they loaded the BASIC program they wanted to run?

The description seems incomplete.

Jean-Baptiste "JBQ" Quéru 1d ago

@dhobern @MOOMANiBE My understanding is that it was the BASIC program, while the interpreter was in the ROM cartridge. Same as the TI 99/4A which also has the interpreter in ROM and stores the BASIC program in video RAM, but can use free bytes in VRAM and doesn't need to interleave bits.

Donald Hobern 1d ago

@jbqueru @MOOMANiBE

That makes sense. And were the BASIC keywords themselves just 1 byte each (part of the character set)?

Jean-Baptiste "JBQ" Quéru 1d ago

@dhobern @MOOMANiBE (Edit: this is about the TI) I found a page that says that it was tokenized. Now, I don't know if it was typed as tokens directly (like on the original ZX Spectrum) or tokenized from text (like on the Amstrad CPC).

Other info finds interesting memory structures, with more indirection than many BASIC interpreters would have (e.g. line numbers are stored separately from tokenized code, so that GOTO is probably much faster).

https://www.unige.ch/medecine/nouspikel/ti99/basic.htm

PheebeUK 1d ago

@jbqueru @dhobern @MOOMANiBE based on the wiki page saying you have to use key combinations to enter the program via the calculator keypad, it sounds like it was entered tokenised like the ZX Spectrum.

Jean-Baptiste "JBQ" Quéru 1d ago

@Pheebe @dhobern @MOOMANiBE oh, slight misunderstanding, I should have clarified: what I was saying about BASIC being tokenized was about TI BASIC, not Astrocade, sorry about that, I wasn't clear enough.

(I only have minimal experience about the Astrocade, mostly about its graphics accelerator derived from that in the arcade Space Invaders).

some random kevin 1d ago

i love this approach. will recommend it in my next scrum

Luke Miller 1d ago

@MOOMANiBE That's so cool

Alexander Knochel 1d ago

@MOOMANiBE Well thanks for the cliffhanger, HOW WAS IT RENDERED INVISIBLE

Kernel Bob 1d ago

@Quantensalat @MOOMANiBE I'm guessing they set up a color map where all the identical-in-the-visible-bits entries mapped to the same color. That'd give 16 distinct colors with 8 bits/pixel.

xmanmonk 1d ago

@MOOMANiBE Memory was very tight back then. I learned BASIC on a machine with 3.5k. It was incentive for me to learn 6502 assembly.

Marcin Wichary 1d ago

@MOOMANiBE @inthehands What in the actual hell! Is this… steganography?

Jack William Bell 1d ago

@mwichary @MOOMANiBE @inthehands

Nope. It's what happens when the team lead and his two best engineers are meeting with the boss so the team lead can explain why they can't do some stupid ass impossible thing the boss wants done and one of the engineers didn't get the memo and says, "You know … there might actually be a way. This'll sound kinda crazy, but…"

@MOOMANiBE now that is clever

resipiscent 1d ago

@MOOMANiBE Why, when you can use static electricity to adhere graphics on plastic sheets to the screen? Duh.

Ship with a green shag carpet though to make sure there's plenty of ambient stick.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnavox_Odyssey

Magnavox Odyssey - Wikipedia

Steve's Place 1d ago

@MOOMANiBE We did crazier things than that to make stuff go.

F4GRX SÃ©bastien 1d ago

@MOOMANiBE people knew how to code in that time. Now they cry to get more ram while doing everything in nodejs.

Sigismund Ninja 1d ago

@MOOMANiBE OpenXLA and how it's used with libraries like JAX, are actually quite similar recent hacks. Until we see more powerful unified CPU/GPU + RAM/VRAM hardware.

Eniko Fox 1d ago

@MOOMANiBE there was an 8 bit 3d racing game that kept part of its code in the sky

Pavel Machek 1d ago

@MOOMANiBE Ok, let's say that was an "interesting" hardware. And they probably had 'unlimited' ROM, so... yep, nice trick, but not even too crazy.

@MOOMANiBE @beccadax In my home built computer in the 1970s I would hand load the cassette tape reader software into the video RAM so that it could load the Basic interpreter into the main RAM. You could tell when the tape was finished because the interference patterns on the video display would change. Note - to load the Basic interpreter the first time I had to hand key the binary machine code from a printed listing in a magazine. I was sure glad that saving to the cassette tape worked the first time!

Richard Carlsson 1d ago

CubeRootOfTrue 1d ago

@MOOMANiBE The original IBM PC had a video mode that was a bit undocumented. It allowed you to trade off resolution for color depth. Unfortunately nobody knew about it except the chip designers (it was in the white sheet) and it went away (it wasn't very good compared to what we have now but they tried)

Amber (transsexual tech catgirl)1d ago

@MOOMANiBE wiiiiild

That’s ingenious and absolute madness. I love it.

J. Peterson 15h ago

@MOOMANiBE Yeah, I remember scarce RAM days. In college we worked on one of the original Lisp interpreters for the original 128K Mac.

The only way we could get it to fit was to let the copying garbage collector use the screen RAM as a temporary destination. So you knew when GC's happened because you'd see the heap bits flash on the screen for a moment.

https://archive.org/details/MacPSLManual1985

Macintosh Portable Standard Lisp Manual 1985 : Utah Portable Artificial Intelligence Support Systems Project, Computer Science Department, University of Utah : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Macintosh PSL (Portable Standard Lisp) was a Lisp interpreter produced for the Macintosh. It was one of the first interactive programming tools available for...

Internet Archive

@MOOMANiBE Jamie Fenton, absolute legend responsible for one of my favorite arcade games, GORF.

Christian Berger DECT 9314 7h ago

@MOOMANiBE Well makes sense given that odd graphics setup.