Yeah, I remember taking this machine architecture course with a friend who was getting a journalism degree and had never written any code or done anything more

Yeah, I remember taking this machine architecture course with a friend who was getting a journalism degree and had never written any code or done anything more technical than playing StarCraft brood war before college. One of the later assignments they gave us this "bomb" executable and we had to use gdb to pick it apart and modify the instructions or find ROP gadgets or something to make the code not "explode". He was my partner in the assignment and I spent most of the time trying to teach him what I was doing in gdb. And trying to express that, sincerely, he wasn't stupid GDB is just really hard and he didn't have the background knowledge to make learning it easier.