[kstenerud]

It's been like this for a long time already.

I still remember a colleague complaining to me in 2001 about a crash they were having in the data entry app (written in Java) that was wreaking havoc in the bank's check clearing department. The stack trace would go to JNI, into a vendor's .so and then SIGSEGV with an address of 0. The trouble was, nobody knew anything below Java.

I tracked down the issue after examining the crash report over lunch for shits and giggles. It failed in memcpy because it was trying to copy a null pointer. I disassembled the vendor's .so and checked the offsets to see where the code was going, and it turned out that the fingerprint reader code would return a null if it failed to scan properly (and the library had no null check). The vendor refused to fix it, so I patched the .so with a few nops, an xor and a je to work around it.

Everyone looked at me like I was some kind of god who commanded the very chips themselves.

Once the old guard is gone, I wonder what they'll do...

[fxtentacle]

"Once the old guard is gone, I wonder what they'll do..."

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Maybe now's the right time to start the cult of the machine wizards and secretly pass on your wisdom about disassemblers. I'm only half joking because reality already passed the point where regular people pray for the machine to respect their wishes. And make sure you price your Java exorcism correctly. I'd say a little church covered in gold is fair.

[fragmede]

Instead of a church, how about 383k followers on YouTube? Joe Grand is flamboyantly that level of hacker, and that's the currency of today. In the GP's story theres no bitcoin wallet at the end of the rainbow, but that kind of knowledge is out there for those who look. It's even gamified at http://microcorruption.com. It won't be mainstream, but there's always going to be a culture of hackers that know how things actually work. the existence of stack overflow/ChatGPT programmers is the field widening, not the core shrinking.

Joe Grand and $3M of Bitcoin: https://youtu.be/o5IySpAkThg

[no_time]

>Once the old guard is gone, I wonder what they'll do...

The current generation of addy addicted highschoolers posting anticheat bypasses on unknowncheats will grow into the job market and take up the mantle.