sharkbot

Don't forget to include:

- Link: The Faces of Evil

- Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon

- Link's Crossbow Training

- the various Hyrule Warriors games

Good luck! :)

According to the linked article, that’s exactly what they did. It was a legitimate bug, but the security consequences were lower than low. It’s a code quality issue, not a security issue, but both are worth fixing.

Agree. Purely opining, but I assume that it's because of the emotional connection that artistic media has on people, despite the flaws.

People remember the emotions the artwork engendered, and thus the whole work is associated with the feelings, flaws and all. If the work is particularly widely known, the flaws can become a stand-in for the work itself.

I see this in video games - I'm fond of the NES-era "flaws" and limitations (palette limits, sprite limits, sound channel limits), but less connected to the Atari 2600 or SNES/PS1/NDS/etc flaws. Shovel Knight is charming; A Short Hike, while great, doesn't resonate on a style level.

There are parallels to the “rapid application development” push of the 90’s. Visual Basic, Tcl/Tk, Python with Tkinter, HyperCard; all of them promised shortening the development cycle and democratizing computing. Code was interpreted rather than compiled, dynamically typed rather than statically, and a lot of batteries were included.

It sorta worked, and sorta didn’t. I’m seeing no evidence that this round is different. LLMs allow coding via natural language and assuming a lot of context that is typical to human conversation, but a lot of coding is delving into nuance, which is going to be work, no matter the tool.

There is no formal “next in line”. The closest potential successor would have been the deputy prime minister; Chrystia Freeland held that role until a few weeks ago when she dramatically resigned and sparked this chain of events.

Currently, this is “Working as Intended” in Canada’s political system.

Now for the most important question: can you run DOOM on it? :)

I’ve been thinking about this topic thru the lens of moral philosophy lately.

A lot of the “big lists of controls” security approaches correspond to duty ethics: following and upholding rules is the path to ethical behaviour. IT applies this control, manages exceptions, tracks compliance, and enforces adherence. Why? It’s the rule.

Contrast with consequentialism (the outcome is key) or virtue ethics (exercising and aligning with virtuous characteristics), where rule following isn’t the main focus. I’ve been part of (heck, I’ve started) lots of debates about the value of some arbitrary control that seemed out of touch with reality, but framed my perspective on virtues (efficiency, convenience) or outcomes (faster launch, lower overhead). That disconnect in ethical perspectives made most of those discussions a waste of time.

A lot of security debates are specific instances of general ethical situations; threat models instead of trolley problems.

I’m thinking of the metaphor between Newtonian and general relativity. At low energies, masses and velocities the two theories correspond in predictions with little discrepancy. If the velocity/mass/energies increase dramatically, then Newtonian physics will fail to give accurate predictions.

Same with “hire smart people and let them work”. When salaries are relatively low, consequences are limited and incentives are well aligned, that approach works. As soon as any of those things change, then the “manager mode” fails dramatically.

As someone who ascribes to “manager mode” most of the time, I’m going to start looking more at places where the assumptions break and (carefully) try out “founder mode”.

It's also a complex number, a Unicode character, an ASCII character, an Extended ASCII character, a glyph, the multiplicative identity element, a raster image, ...

The GP point is correct; we implicitly convert between all these representations naturally and quickly, but there are interesting branches of mathematics that consider those conversions explicitly and find nuances (eg, category theory).

This might be No True Scotsman, but it doesn't sound like you are a "finger gunner" after all.

After (fairly) long time in the industry, it seems to come down to:

- understanding what one's clients need (not what they ask for)

- understanding what's in the realm of the possible (technically, politically, organizationally)

- understanding what are the possible futures (good, great, and abject disaster)

If, after answering all those questions, one still advocating for a rewrite, you've shown the maturity needed to undertake the effort.

"Finger-gunning" is usually related to skipping those steps, not the ultimate decision.

(edit for formatting)

I feel like there are parallels to computer security. A lot of my experience in this domain is looking at systems that were designed in a thoughtful way, but the designer didn’t fully appreciate being surrounded by a universe (especially one full of people of varying mixes of deviousness and cleverness).

The “real world engineer” job exists, it’s a security engineer. And it’s equal parts awesome and draining.