boricj

19 ms·

241.
by boricj 2y ago
As per the saying: "The French copy no one and nobody copies the French". If we were carbon copies of the British or the Americans, life on Earth would be just a little bit more boring. We're not better or worse, we're j
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by boricj 2y ago
> In most EU countries it is mandatory minimum to give 4 paid weeks off per year, otherwise the company is breaking the law. Make that five weeks for France plus up to 11 days of public holidays. That's a minimum too, we have a whol
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by boricj 2y ago
Rule of thirds is a big one. The camera grid is the single most important tool to help frame a picture, always have it enabled. You can use cropping to fine-tune it later if needed, but the picture should have a decent starting point. If yo
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by boricj 2y ago
I'm a stereotypical smartphone-wielding expert beginner photographer. I've developed a knack for serendipitous timing and framing, to the point where I'm the designated photographer for family pictures and such. That being sa
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by boricj 2y ago
In France (and apparently the rest of Europe too) our GFCIs are not located at the outlets. They are inside the electrical panels and protect a row of circuit breakers.
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by boricj 2y ago
Because it's fun. I have my own ongoing decompilation/reverse-engineering project for a video game. As part of it, I've accidentally stumbled upon delinking, a very niche and esoteric technique for slicing an executable back
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by boricj 2y ago
That doesn't work with fixed-price contracts and the Starliner is one of those. Boeing's overrun costs in that program aren't covered by the government, they've been hemorrhaging money for a while on it as noted by the a
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by boricj 2y ago
> When someone is giving talk and tells everyone (or asks you directly) to close your eyes and imagine you are on a beach with a cold drink next to you. Then they ask what color the drink is, or if there is anything in the distance… do y
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by boricj 2y ago
I do have a vivid imagination, but I was specifically referring to the way it is subjectively experienced, not its objective quality. If I decide to play a song in my head, I know that it's not real, but I don't hear that it&#x2
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by boricj 2y ago
I don't have aphantasia, my mind's eye is composited onto my senses. Obviously I'm aware of what I'm consciously imagining, but I've recently realized that I can't actually tell the difference between imaginary
251.
by boricj 2y ago
At 30,000' I'm not seeing anything that would prevent this from booting on hardware. It seems to have a reasonable complement of modern, real-world drivers. On the other hand, physical hardware tends to have bugs, quirks and diver
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by boricj 2y ago
My point was about relevant engineering background for a particular task. For example, if you're trying to binary patch something, having prior assembly programming experience would help a lot, but knowing the runtime complexity char
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by boricj 2y ago
There are more efficient and effective ways to undermine the Kremlin regime than risking blackops assets on torching a couple of train lines, which would be repaired within a day anyway.
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by boricj 2y ago
While I am reverse-engineering a video game by myself, I'm not really part of the reverse-engineering scene, so this one anecdote is really the only data point I have about "mentoring" someone, if it even counts. I fall into
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by boricj 2y ago
You can find the table of contents for the series there: https://boricj.net/reverse-engineering/2023/05/01/introducti... I expect that you'll be mostly interested in parts 2 through 6. Part 1 explai
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by boricj 2y ago
Going straight for reverse-engineering is doable, but it's significantly harder without some engineering background, either formal or self-taught. I have an ongoing reverse-engineering project for a video game and I ended up getting in
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by boricj 2y ago
Applied reverse-engineering is all about bending the rules of engineering. Because of this, I think it can be learned through experience, but I doubt it can be taught through theory (or at least not in an effective manner). At its core, it&
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by boricj 2y ago
Out of all my professional experiences where project management was a shitshow, Jira wasn't the cause. Poor project management was.
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by boricj 2y ago
It's funny to me how much grief x86 assembly generates when compared to RISC here, because I have the opposite problem when delinking code back into object files. For this use-case, x86 is really easy to analyze whereas MIPS has been a
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by boricj 2y ago
Giving weapons and ammo to Saddam Hussein? Besides the logistical, economical and industrial challenge of supplying enough kit to even make a dent against the expeditionary forces of the USA, which were still doped sky-high on Cold War han
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by boricj 2y ago
De Gaulle would be rolling in his grave hearing this. The point is not about economic efficiency. The point is that we're not one embargo on foreign components or systems away from crippling our capabilities and surrendering our abili
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by boricj 2y ago
France among many nations called bullshit on the WMD claims, we threatened to veto the UN Security Council resolution authorizing a military intervention and we refused to get involved in that mess. The fact that the US government decided t
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by boricj 2y ago
The French mantra is strategic autonomy. We are allies with the USA, we are not vassals of the USA and we do not want to depend on anybody else to defend our own interests or our own agenda. This is why the French army has independent exped
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by boricj 2y ago
It's not blindness, it's institutional inertia. Ariane 6's design was selected in 2014. At the time, Falcon 9 1.0 was flying for 4 years, had less than 10t of payload and the first landing and recovery of a first stage wasn&#
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by boricj 2y ago
Technically the ESP doesn't have to be a FAT32 partition. UEFI has file system drivers installable at runtime [1], so you could have an ESP partition that isn't FAT32... assuming that the file system driver for it is loaded. UEFI
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by boricj 2y ago
That would warrant an entire blog post to describe all the pitfalls [1], but I'll condense it down to the highlights. On MIPS, loading a pointer is classically done in two instructions, a LUI and an ADDIU, which forms a HI16/LO16
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by boricj 2y ago
> I know the CPU was 32-bit, so 4GiB is the upper limit in that regard. Not necessarily. Just because a CPU has a 32-bit virtual address space doesn't mean it has a 32-bit physical address space. PAE (Physical Address Extension) is
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by boricj 2y ago
If you reduce the problem statement to an ELF x86 program written in C, with a symbol table and a complete relocation table (not just the one you get when dynamically linking), then sure it's trivial, you have almost all the inform
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by boricj 2y ago
Delinking isn't a miracle technology in that regard, you still need to put in the work to reverse-engineer the artifact. It does allow a couple of nifty tricks, like pervasive binary patching (if the program is chunked into relocatable
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by boricj 2y ago
> Something like that really deserves to be written in C so you don't need to install Ghidra to use it. I think there's the Witchcraft Compiler Collection if you want a freestanding option [1], although I haven't looked in

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