Back when I was in college I took a computer engineering class around 2010 I think with a professor who had done CPU design at one of the big chip manufacturers. He had a story about how no human knows how they work anymore because they’ll do the designs, then feed them through some optimization algorithm thing before the fabrication. Then when they would evaluate the chip they’d find that it was behaving in completely unexpected ways due to the optimization finding crazy efficient but unintuitive (to a human) ways of performing different operations.

I wish I could remember the details of what he talked about better, but that was a long time ago.

Your comment made me curious, so I tracked it down. The “comic” was used with an article on differential privacy written by a publication called “ad exchanger” and the ad symbol on the outfit is their logo.

Doesn’t have my favorite classic, I’ll have to add it later.

There are a couple that come to mind.

Definitely the worst, a C# .net mvc application with multiple controllers that were 10s of thousands of lines long. I ran sonarqube on this at one point and it reported over 70% code duplication.

This code base actively ignored features in the framework that would have made things easier and instead opted to do things in ways that were both worse, and harder to do. For example, all SQL queries were done using antiquated methods that, as an added benefit, also made them all injectable.

Reading the code itself was like looking at old school PHP, but c#. I know that statement probably doesn’t make sense, but neither did the code.

Lastly, there was no auth on any of the endpoints. None. There was a login, but you could supply whatever data you wanted on any call and the system would just accept it.

At the time I was running an internal penetration test team and this app was from a recent acquisition. After two weeks I had to tell my team to stop testing so we could just write up what we had already and schedule another test a couple months down the line.

I once saw an application that would encrypt (not hash, encrypt) passwords but then when a user was logging in, they’d encrypt the password candidate and then compare the cipher texts to see if they were the same. This was using 3des, so no IV.

I just recently joined a company that offers two options for operating systems, Mac or Linux. Windows is explicitly not allowed. Seeing that in my onboarding paperwork was like walking into a warm sunny meadow.

There’s a great interview somewhere with the writers of one of these shows talking about how they knew this was shit and they had unofficial competitions with other shows to constantly one up each other on the stupidity.

You just reminded me of the early days at a company I worked where the factory pattern was absolute. There were interfaces and factories for fucking DTOs. It was insanity! That was the place where I really learned the concept of “cargo cult”

It’s pretty hard to overstate just how many addresses are in the ipv6 address space vs ipv4.

One of my favorite descriptions comes from Beej’s guide to network programming, something I first read probably in the early to mid 2000s. https://beej.us/guide/bgnet/html/#ip-addresses-versions-4-and-6

3.1 IP Addresses, versions 4 and 6 In the good old days back when Ben Kenobi was still called Obi Wan Kenobi, there was a wonderful network routing system called The Internet Protocol Version 4, also called IPv4. It had addresses made up of four bytes (A.K.A. four “octets”), and was commonly written in “dots and numbers” form, like so: 192.0.2.111.

You’ve probably seen it around.

In fact, as of this writing, virtually every site on the Internet uses IPv4.

Everyone, including Obi Wan, was happy. Things were great, until some naysayer by the name of Vint Cerf warned everyone that we were about to run out of IPv4 addresses!

(Besides warning everyone of the Coming IPv4 Apocalypse Of Doom And Gloom, Vint Cerf14 is also well-known for being The Father Of The Internet. So I really am in no position to second-guess his judgment.)

Run out of addresses? How could this be? I mean, there are like billions of IP addresses in a 32-bit IPv4 address. Do we really have billions of computers out there?

Yes.

Also, in the beginning, when there were only a few computers and everyone thought a billion was an impossibly large number, some big organizations were generously allocated millions of IP addresses for their own use. (Such as Xerox, MIT, Ford, HP, IBM, GE, AT&T, and some little company called Apple, to name a few.)

In fact, if it weren’t for several stopgap measures, we would have run out a long time ago.

But now we’re living in an era where we’re talking about every human having an IP address, every computer, every calculator, every phone, every parking meter, and (why not) every puppy dog, as well.

And so, IPv6 was born. Since Vint Cerf is probably immortal (even if his physical form should pass on, heaven forbid, he is probably already existing as some kind of hyper-intelligent ELIZA15 program out in the depths of the Internet2), no one wants to have to hear him say again “I told you so” if we don’t have enough addresses in the next version of the Internet Protocol.

What does this suggest to you?

That we need a lot more addresses. That we need not just twice as many addresses, not a billion times as many, not a thousand trillion times as many, but 79 MILLION BILLION TRILLION times as many possible addresses! That’ll show ’em!

You’re saying, “Beej, is that true? I have every reason to disbelieve large numbers.” Well, the difference between 32 bits and 128 bits might not sound like a lot; it’s only 96 more bits, right? But remember, we’re talking powers here: 32 bits represents some 4 billion numbers (232), while 128 bits represents about 340 trillion trillion trillion numbers (for real, 2128). That’s like a million IPv4 Internets for every single star in the Universe.

My friends Dad had this game back when I was a youngster. For the longest time we thought the trivia was the game.

My favorite one I’ve seen so far was “AI can take a junior programmer and make them a 10x junior programmer.”

Lost access to my OG account because I didn’t find out about this until a month after it was too late.

One of my favorite managers once told me while I was struggling with a severe case of imposter syndrome “if you’re faking it well enough that others can’t tell, you might not be faking it as much as you think.”