What is Hackers' Pub?

Hackers' Pub is a place for software engineers to share their knowledge and experience with each other. It's also an ActivityPub-enabled social network, so you can follow your favorite hackers in the fediverse and get their latest posts in your feed.

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I've seen people claiming - with a straight face - that mechanical refactoring is a good use-case for LLM-based tools. Well, sed was developed in 1974 and - according to Wikipedia - first shipped in UNIX version 7 in 1979. On modern machines it can process files at speeds of several GB/s and will not randomly introduce errors while processing them. It doesn't cost billions, a subscription or internet access. It's there on your machine, fully documented. What are we even talking about?

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man google drive is so shit, i have 3gb "used" but my drive is empty. turns out there are some old shares that are simply not showing up in "my drive" nor in "shared with me". i have no idea how to make them visible so i can backup whatever i might want and delete the rest...

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There's a lot of discourse on Twitter about people using LLMs to solve CTF challenges. I used to write CTF challenges in a past life, so I threw a couple of my hardest ones at it.

We're screwed.

At least with text-file style challenges ("source code provided" etc), Claude Opus solves them quickly. For the "simpler" of the two, it just very quickly ran through the steps to solve it. For the more "ridiculous" challenge, it took a long while, and in fact as I type this it's still burning tokens "verifying" the flag even though it very obviously found the flag and it knows it (it's leetspeak and it identified that and that it's plausible). LLMs are, indeed, still completely unintelligent, because no human would waste time verifying a flag and second-guessing itself when it very obviously is correct. (Also you could just run it...)

But that doesn't matter, because it found it.

The thing is, CTF challenges aren't about inventing the next great invention or having a rare spark of genius. CTF challenges are about learning things by doing. You're supposed to enjoy the process. The whole point of a well-designed CTF challenge is that anyone, given enough time and effort and self-improvement and learning, can solve it. The goal isn't actually to get the flag, otherwise you'd just ask another team for the flag (which is against the rules of course). The goal is to get the flag by yourself. If you ask an LLM to get the flag for you, you aren't doing that.

(Continued)

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Reflecting on all the times in my career as a software engineer I have been told that, yes, things were a bit unfair to me as a woman, but that I was being a trailblazer, I was the one discovering and establishing the path that would enable others to follow.

But you go back to the 70s and you see the same number of women programmers, being fed that exact same line
And in the 80s
and the 90s
and so on to today. The "trailblazer" narrative is a lie told by managers to make themselves feel better

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