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by sureglymop 4 days ago
What makes someone a script kiddie or not a script kiddie?

Imo this differentiation is totally pointless now. It gives everyone with access to AI the ability to use it as intended but also otherwise.

But that is true for the defensive side also.

5 comments

I'm pretty sure the difference is, by definition, whether they're just using tools other people built or they actually understand things and can do it themselves. The script kiddie can be incredibly dangerous if the tool they grabbed off the shelf works.
a script kiddie of the vibe coding present could very well start modifying code without ever reading it when that wasnt true in the past
Yes. Script kiddy capabilities have increased, but the classification still works.
Then might as well put them in the vibe coder definition. I believe he has a point though: a script kiddy needed the tools someone else built. The person who built that was someone anywhere in the range of "knows enough to reason about attack vectors and can program something to help him/others" to "people deep in the industry with knowledge and skills very few people have, creating a harness dedicated to cybersec, for better or worse".

Now that script kiddy has access to the second kind, on demand, at perhaps, a very accessible cost. Things are about to get really wild, assuming uncensored k3 models that allow this sort of prompting exists.

any open weights model can be stripped off of guardrails with seemingly pretty simple techniques and there's several already made libraries or tools to do so.

Running K3 on your own infra is still not "cheap" tho, but we'll get there maybe.

but yeah to my point, we're making "intelligence" a commodity, with all the ramifications that entails.

Do you think any programmer really understands how their program works end-to-end? At some abstraction layer, we're all clueless. There are many layers between what you type into the text editor and the actual CPU ticks that make your program work. I bet nobody fully understands the whole stack.

Now that that text editor accepts English, we're all calling each other names, etc.

I didn't say that Real Hackers™ understood every single thing perfectly from editor to electrons. You've made up a strawman and then beaten it.
I can’t believe the nerve of that guy to straw man your no true Scotsman like that
That is... also a strawman. There are less skilled bad actors. There are more skilled bad actors. The bottom rung is script kiddies, so named because they just run other people's scripts. They are not Scottish.
Reddit tier garbage thread ngl.
Used to be, knowing a ret from a nop (90) meant something. If you can just load up a model and say "hack teh NSA.gov" while not actually knowing anything about even DNS, what are we even doing?
LOIC (a DDoS tool) worked that way. Xbox voice chat kids would just agree to open up LOIC, type nsa.gov and all hit start at the same time.
While most don't, there are developers who actually do understand systems from end to end. Most developers are terrible developers, compared to the really good ones.
> While most don't, there are developers who actually do understand systems from end to end

The last time intel made a CPU where the entire thing could fit in one persons head was probably the 8086 or thereabounts.

There is no one developer or engineer at apple that understands everything going on from key press to bits moving around to print the characters I see when I type in this text box.

Correct. There are people who understand more and less and none of it. The latter are called script kiddies.
> What makes someone a script kiddie or not a script kiddie?

The way I see it, a script kiddie is someone who buy weapons with the intention to cause harm. They don't know or care how the weapon works, as it's just a tool for their malicious plan.

A non-script kiddie would be someone who build weapons.

If you assume weapons have recreational purposes, the builder/non script-kiddie is less likely to be malicious as they love the craft of building weapons. For example recreating historical weapons, or just being nerdy about machinery of a gun works.

A builder with malicious intent as first priority can exist, they are more likely to just be interested in building.

So basically, nerds are perceived to be more ethical than non nerds.

This is exact same difference as between junior and senior engineer.

The premise now is that everyone and your mom can vibe code next unicorn during a lunch break using the latest llms, but the difference between a rookie and a seasoned programmer is that the later can navigate the model in much more efficient way, understand the code that has been written, and notice hallucinations on the spot.

Completely agree. This is how I feel towards the OpenAI hacking of hugging face. Even if it was script kiddie stuff now anyone can automate that with ease. It certainly cuts both ways and people who are still ai skeptics need to wake up to that. You’re going to need these systems to defend yourself
Scraipt kiddie, script kiddlmie.

Needs some work!

Script kiddai