They are talking about computer things, that’s about how familiar I am with whatever they are talking about.
Yeah, it’s intentionally obscure. Basically, x86 assembly code is a way of telling a processor what to calculate, at a very low level.
So, it’s similar to programming languages, but those actually get translated into x86 assembly code, before it’s told to the processor. (“x86” is a certain processor architecture. Others exist, too, most prominently “ARM”.)But yeah, even with me knowing that much, I’d need to guess what
retandint3might do.Everyone knows
jmpandnop, though, of course. 🙃Of course
That’s the exact same thing. x86 Assembly Code isn’t that hard(to know what it is, understanding it is something different),but I havent heard of the other stuff.
return from subroutine, int3 would be something relating to interrupts off the top of my head.Int3 is a special single-byte (CC, if I recall correctly) form of the INT instruction (which is CD imm8, I think) to raise an interrupt. Interrupt #3 is the debugging interrupt, so by overwriting any instruction with CC, you place a breakpoint there.
NOP is $EA, of course, and… um…
…sorry, I’m just a Commodore 64 scrub, I don’t know nothing about this high and mighty Intel 8086 nonsense.
[looking up]
…it’s 0x90 on IA-32? WHAT? Someone told me every processor used 0xEA because that was commonly agreed and readily apparent. …guess I was wrong
My daughter told me the other day, “I bet I could figure out a Commodore 64 if I had one.”
Good luck figuring out LOAD “*”,8,1 by yourself, kid.
Literally every game manual comes with instructions to do
LOAD "*",8,1. (oh, did I say “manual”? Instruction card. Yeaaaah, the minimal instuction stuff isn’t new, kids.) Everyone and their dog figured it out. If there was any command anyone knew, it was that. …only to be topped bySHIFT+RUN/STOPfor initiating tape load (which you could just do by typing in, you know,LOAD).Know what else we did when we were kids? WE ASKED AROUND. If you don’t tell your kid how this thing works, you’re making things worse, to be frank. I mean, if some random kid came up to me and asked how to load a C64 game, I’d give them a goddamn lecture free of charge.
She meant she could figure it out just playing around with it, not reading a manual or asking around. I told her she’d have to read a manual.
Erm I might be showing my inexperience here.
Is there no equivalent to
man LOADin the commodore world? Or even justhelp?
Someone told me every processor used 0xEA
Not sure if this is a riff on the joke or not.
Back in the day I dabbled in 6510 code, and up until today hadn’t even bothered to look at a chart of opcodes for any of its contemporaries. Today I learned that Z80 uses $00 for NOP.
Loth as I am to admit it, that actually makes sense. Maybe more sense than 65xx which acts more like a divide-by-zero has happened.
The rest of the opcode table was full of alien looking mnemonics though, and no undocumented single byte opcodes? Freaky, man.
But the point is that not even Z80 used $EA. If the someone was real they probably meant every 65xx processor.
*Lolth
What? This is system programming, not web development.
I was making a joke about their spelling error.
And I was making a joke about the D&D spider goddess.
But the word is “loath,” which has an accepted alternate spelling of “loth”. “Lolth” is the Dungeons and Dragons spider goddess, commonly worshiped by Drow.
of course nods along
You’re sixteen, you’re beautiful, I’m under arrest
One of the most useful concepts ever:
the Curse of Knowledge.
Explaining something to someone? Zoom out. Back up. What if that person were an alien, how much more context would you need to explain?
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, who is communicating with others, assumes that others have information that is only available to themselves, assuming they all share a background and understanding. This bias is also called by some authors the curse of expertise.
My friend really needs to learn about this. He works for Intel and does some really involved stuff, I on the other hand am a moronic jackass factory worker.
No friend, I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re trying to tell me you did if you keep using technical terms.
If you said something like “if I were a marketing intern…” or “if I were a college freshman majoring in English, how would you explain it?”
…would he not know how to clearly communicate still? :)
Maybe get him with the “is this a curse of knowledge situation?” (along with a link to Wikipedia) heh
Problem is, even if they are capable of explaining it, it’s basically our job to learn things 8 hours a day. Trying to catch someone up on that, who doesn’t have that same job, that’s nearly impossible. Well, and you still want to rant/tell about your day for social interaction purposes.
Like, my mum would also sometimes ask what my (programmer) workday was like and I’d start telling that we had to deploy onto a really old Linux system. Wait hang on, Linux is an operating system. And an operating system is the software that makes computers go. Do you know what “software” is? Hmm, it’s like…
…And yeah, basically one computer science lecture later, I still haven’t told anything about my workday.Sometimes, I can try to leave out such words, like “we had to roll out our software onto a really old computer”, but then I can practically only say “that was really annoying”. To actually explain how I slayed the beast, I do need to explain the scene.
As a Cybersecurity / Incident Response analyst I feel your pain lol
basically one computer science lecture later, I still haven’t told anything about my workday.
ahaha
I can try to leave out such words, like “we had to roll out our software onto a really old computer”, but then I can practically only say “that was really annoying”.
Tough. Try my best with analogies, tailored if possible, but still tough.
“We had to try to translate our app into a language this ancient computer could understand. It was as easy as suddenly switching to Shakespearean English halfway through this conversation. Or like if you drove your car to a mechanic who’d been cryogenically frozen for the last hundred years. He doth protest much, methinks.
Overall, it was like putting together a thousand-piece puzzle, except the box came with a million pieces and most of them were useless!”
Good thing your mom was surely impressed with you all the same 😉
But then you’re Mansplaining.
Even if we have the Patriarchy app4oved mind scanning kits out instructions are to not use them so…I’d hate to accidentally not Mansplain something.
Frustrating!!
Since there’s no way to fix the incorrect assumptions (a t-shirt proclaiming “I explain granularly to men too!!”?), best bet is probably to get ahead of the assumption with a disclaimer & offer to be receptive to feedback.
Someone could still be upset I guess but can’t please everyone!
Discussed a bit below.
what’s it called when you try to be aware of this and inadvertently say stuff that comes off as condescending, umm, asking for a friend
ooooof
I know for men who are equal opportunity overexplainers it can still be seen as “mansplaining” when overexplaining to women.
But in general, if your tone of voice is right and it’s still happening, perhaps communicating your intention and a safeguard would work, at least sometimes?
May I try to explain this? If I start too basic, and overexplain so it feels condescending, please stop me so I can dig into it more technically.
I’m always worried about inadvertently doing this, so I’ve been trying to make a conscious effort to ask people if they need more context rather than assuming they do or don’t. It’s actually a good approach I think. Although it does depend on whether the person you’re talking to is likely to just say “oh yeah, I know what that is” when they really don’t
I’ve had to train literally hundreds of people over the various jobs I’ve had and it causes me to over explain in almost every conversation.
I got two tricks to figure out how much someone knows about a topic and encourage them to ask questions rather than lie just to avoid being a little uncomfortable.
First, I look for them to use vocabulary that I haven’t already mentioned or if they seem to understand something just by using a couple words.
Second, I ask them to explain something early in the conversation to make it easier to ask if they don’t understand something later. It’s usually really simple, but it really does work to lower communication barriers.
I like to think it makes us feel more like equals trading expertise, rather than like I’m some authority talking down to them.
I hope this helps anyone
That’s the ticket, IMO. I start off assuming they know, then pause to ask “are you familiar with x concept?”
If they say yes and they really mean no, there’s really not a lot I can do. But it seems to make people feel at ease when talking to me - I don’t get called out for over explaining or infantalizing people this way.
Yeah that’s good stuff!
Seems like you have your best shot if you make it seem like a lack of knowledge on a given topic is really safe. “Is this something you’ve nerded out on before, or not yet? Oh you have - cool, it’s pretty esoteric. Do you know enough to summarize it in a sentence or a few? If not I like to try to give my own high level before diving in.”
Something open ended in there gives you a chance to validate whether the ‘I know what that is’ was ego or truth.
If there’s any chance they’ve heard about a concept, I’ll ask if they’ve heard of it and take them at their word (without comment either way).
And if they’re kinda nodding impatiently, I’ll wrap up the explanation and move on to the deeper level
At first, people will sometimes be defensive or lie about knowing a topic, but after you establish there’s no judgement either way with you I’ve found people become less hesitant about admitting ignorance and will even want to hear your explanation of something to check their knowledge
I also do the flip side - I pride myself on admitting when I don’t know something, so that might play in too
One of the things I look for in employees is the ability to distill complex topics into the important elements and explain it to someone unfamiliar. Some people are just naturally good at it, and it’s a really important skill for moving up a leadership chain.
Me talking to my dad (who last held the position of professional programmer 30 years ago) about the programming problem I’m working on and vastly overestimating how much he knows about modern software development parlance
Is there any situation where you’d want to remember the opcodes? Disassemblers should give you user-friendly assembly code, without any need to look at the raw numbers. Maybe it’s useful to remember which instructions are pseudo instructions (so you know stuff like
jz(jump if zero) being the same asje(jump if equal) making it easier to understand the disassembly), but I don’t think you need to remember the opcode numbers for that.The important thing is to be important. Engineering has to deal with teammates that don’t have these problems, so they equalize.
NOP sled gang rise up
0x900x900x900x900x900x900x900x900x900x90
IDS will catch that. You need a logical sled that does effectively nothing but isn’t actually composed of NOPs.
I’m missing the joke… would anyone be so kind to help me understand?
The people in the picture are so used to working with assembly language, that even though they know the average person doesn’t know much about assembly, they assume the average person knows a little, which is already way more than the average person actually knows.
I speak fluent x86, I’ve been writing
xor eax, eaxbeforeraxwas a thing and you had to wonder whether you shouldn’t be usingxor rax, rax(you shouldn’t), I figured out how to write linux binaries in pure assembly before arch was a thing, just don’t throw sse or something arcane likeaaaat me. But damned if I know a single opcode.Reverse engineers are a whole different kind of breed. And apparently they hate rust.
That’s a great website that I didn’t know existed, thanks for sharing!
NOPe
Blue collar fucking aircraft worker and I get it.
There’s an old joke about two mathematicians in a cafe. They’re arguing about whether ordinary people understand basic mathematics. The first mathematician says yes, of course they do! And the second disagrees.
The second mathematician goes to the toilet, and the first calls over their blonde waitress. He says to her, "in a minute my friend is going to come back from the toilet, and I’m going to ask you a question. I want you to reply, “one third x cubed.'”
“One ther desque,” she repeats.
“One third x cubed,” the mathematician tries again.
“One thir dek scubed.”
“That’ll do,” he says, and she heads off. The second mathematician returns from the toilet and the first lays him a challenge. “I’ll prove it. I’ll call over that blonde waitress and ask her a simple integration question, and see if she can answer.” The second mathematician agrees, and they call her over.
“My friend and I have a question,” the first mathematician asks the waitress. “Do you know what is the integral of x squared?”
“One thir dek scubed,” she answers and the second mathematician is impressed and concedes the point.
And as she walks away, the waitress calls over her shoulder,
“Plus a constant.”
I would not consider integration to be basic maths, honestly. Basic maths is addition and multiplication, and maybe vector geometry.
You probably wouldn’t consider x86 opcodes to be basic computer literacy either ;-)
there is an additional layer to this joke for those who understand turing completeness. And it elevates it to a whole other level of snark.
Alright this is my cue that I don’t belong here
Are you implying that an assembly language consisting of just ret, int3 and jmp (and nop, of course) is turing-complete? …are you sure about that?
Bookmarking your comment so I can come back to it in a couple hours, if I hopefully remember to.
But yes, almost. I don’t think the interrupt is necessary and the return isn’t under certain architectures. I have a doc on my computer somewhere where I was investigating what the absolute minimum was to make a turning complete machine and, to my recollection, there was only 4-6 instructions that were absolutely necessary. The ones I remember off the top of my head are NAND, MOV, JUMPIF, and then I believe I included NOP in accordance with some principle. RET and INT were convenience features in this design.
Fun fact: apparently on x86 just MOV all by itself is Turing-complete, without even using it to produce self-modifying code (paper, C compiler).
The key here I think is the NAND. I know you can do practically anything with only NAND gates. But without it, and with just control structures, I don’t think there’s a way to perform computation unless there is some theoretical voodoo withcraft possible, something like nop-padded cellular automata given the infinite memory. But I don’t have any qualification to talk about this, I’m just some random dude who flunked out of the university but finished all Zachtronics games.
Isn’t there a version about mineralogy?
“So this here is a rock”
“Uhh, in english please?”“Oy! Guv! This here’s a rock, innit?”
Oh, OP got me fooled, I thought this is original xkcd, well done on photoshop.
Alt text: “How could anyone consider themselves a well-rounded adult without a basic understanding of silicate geochemistry? Silicates are everywhere! It’s hard to throw a rock without throwing one!”
Silicates are everywhere! It’s hard to throw a rock without throwing one!
If that’s all that’s needed to consider yourself having a basic understanding, then I already had it by the time I passed HS.
Unfortunately, the Alt text doesn’t tell us the bar, so we can’t know how round we are.
Here’s the source:
And the alt text:
How could anyone consider themselves a well-rounded adult without a basic understanding of silicate geochemistry? Silicates are everywhere! It’s hard to throw a rock without throwing one!
It still confuses what basic computer skills the average person lacks. Like, how are you even supposed to troubleshoot your computer, if you don’t know the basics about your computer?
you don’t you just call the most technical person you know and ask them to do it
You got a point there. I also regularly forget that you don’t have to know shit about PCs do use windows/Mac.
Everyone has a limited time on this earth. Some of us don’t mind or actively enjoy spending that time learning about the technology we use. Others, not so much. I think this comic is really spot on because it’s hard to understand as a tech literate person just how little other people may know. “What browser are you using?” “What’s a browser?”
The foundational knowledge is not that tough, but when you’re just interested in getting the damn thing to work so you can get on with your life, it’s easy to get frustrated by having to take a crash course on what the hell a BIOS is before you can try to fix it. And when you learn all that just for it to still be broken, patience quickly runs out.
As long as people have the general understanding that power cycling will solve a good 75% of issues, I’m happy. I hope people give me the same grace when I pay a someone to fix my car or replace my phone screen (I love building computers, but god I hate working on phones).
For the phone bit, I started off with really old smartphones like a Galaxy S1, but basically any old old phones are really built like mini laptops and are usually pretty modular as they weren’t often water resistant or actively anti-repair
However I fully get your point and fall into the same boat with cars
Dude I’m the same with my car.
I mean, cars can be demystified the same way computers can: By building and maintaining it yourself. Everyone is afraid to build their first computer, because it seems way too complicated and delicate. Then you actually build your first one, and go “oh hey this actually isn’t so bad after all.”
Yes, cars (especially modern cars) have a lot more difficult-to-build parts. But modern cars are also a lot like computers in the sense that you don’t need to know every single component on an GPU to be able to install one. You don’t need to be able to build a car part from scratch. The same way you can slot a GPU into a motherboard, you can just buy the entire car part preassembled and bolt it into place. The important part is learning what the different components do, so you can troubleshoot them.
Problem is I have zero interest in cars. If I could I’d live car free.
