[NooneAtAll3]

what's the deal with empty half-a-page-of-text posts lately?

is this like the ultimate form of "headline is all you need"?

I came here wanting to see after-action-report of someone actually using Ai or wtvr for reverse-engineering. Instead I got "I heard it was so. The end"

[simonw]

I call this type of post on my blog a "note" - they're effectively self-hosted tweets: https://simonwillison.net/notes/

They're not really intended to be widely discussed outside of my site, it's more of a way of dropping small thoughts into my blog rather than keeping them exclusive to Twitter or Bluesky or Mastodon.

[xtiansimon]

Ha. It does read like that. And Mr Willison could be forgiven since it is his blog.

Maybe he had a particular audience in mind when he wrote it. An audience for whom the mere realization would rock the foundations of their stolid and boring lives.

On the other hand, I’ve watched the movie Paycheck (2003), so my imagination has a high bar before it’s rocked by mere suggestion. Therefore, I wonder why the OP user @edward thought it was worthy of our attention.

I expected to read their excited engagement with others here, but alas no. It’s a mystery.

[techjamie]

I've used it to help me clean up and reverse malware samples to give the person running it problems. It's very good at taking the obfuscation apart and translating it into something easier to read. I can often get it to completely vibecode string decryption functions for me so I can get what exfils they're using and the like.

Doing the same by hand can be really time consuming and difficult depending on how many obfuscation measures are layered on top.

[alun]

I disagree. It's a high signal article that can create great discussions on what people on HN have reverse-engineered with AI.

For example, just yesterday I reverse engineered the internal API of a SAAS tool we use and it allowed me to gain programmatic access to data that was only available in their slow clunky UI.

[NooneAtAll3]

it's a high signal headline

the article itself is worthless, and nobody in the comments seem to even interact with its content, you included

[staticshock]

I suspect this article got upvoted partly for the headline & content, and partly because of who said it. Lots of people already have a good feel for the AI/journalism niche Simon Willison occupies, and can use that background knowledge to read into his words more productively.