I was thinking about the RSA encryption algorithm, and I was wondering how they picked the two large primes, p and q. I wondered if they had to be 100% guaranteed to be prime or if probably prime was good enough. So I asked Google’s AI, and it said they had to be prime numbers and that close enough...

   I was using git, and gpg failed to sign something. My terminal, Warp, stepped in to resolve the problem:

   I wonder what benefits you might get if you used an optical guitar or bass pickup . Imagine a camera looking at the strings and then using software to turn the visual vibrations into sound. You could do all sorts of other cute tricks like have certain hand shapes result in certain sounds or even...

  

   I’m definitely not worried about good hackers [i.e. software engineers] getting replaced with LLMs. LLMs are a cute trick, even useful. I don’t believe they’ll generalize to AGI--I just don’t believe it. Something will, but not LLMs.

   Notion sat down on the curb, crushed his cigarette into the pavement, put his face into his hands, and sobbed. It felt good to finally let it out.He thought back on the good times. 2020. Sure, a lot of people were dying, but with everyone working from home, it was a real heyday for guys like him.He...

   Heh, I passed Google Cloud’s Cloud Digital Leader certification I started by taking GCP for Beginners - Become a Google Cloud Digital Leader on Udemy. It was about 10 hours of video. It took me a while, though, because I wrote 95 pages of notes. I was perhaps overcompensating for my poor...

   These are my takeaways from the Stack Overflow Developer Survey:Programming languages:JavaScript, HTML CSS, and SQL are still dominant.Python is the #2 programming language, followed by TypeScript.Only 5% of developers still code in assembly.Lisp moved up two spots to 1.33% of respondents.Rust...

   No, ChatGPT, that’s not right ;) If you try solving this puzzle yourself, it’s not actually that hard if you start by picking the last word first. I picked poems on a quick snake . One of the reasons this is hard for ChatGPT is that it picks the words in order.

   Can anyone else spot it?

   A lot of people use mock.patch() in their tests, but it's also sometimes useful to monkey-patch code at runtime. This blog post talks about why and how. Let's imagine that you're using some library (perhaps something big, like a web framework), and for whatever reason, you're unable...

   When I was first learning AppSec, my buddy, Josh Bonnett, sent me Cryptographic Right Answers. I read it 3 times and still barely understood it. But, now, it’s my favorite page for figuring out the right thing to do when it comes to cryptography.Suppose you need to create a secret (i.e. a symmetric...

   This was my third time going to BSidesSF, which is a friendly, volunteer-run security conference. In the past, I’ve always avoided the CTF (Capture the Flag) hacking competitions because I was afraid of making a fool of myself, but, this time around, I decided to give it a go In the last 3 years, I...

   People are understandably frightened by ChatGPT. They fear that it might put software engineers like me out of business. Some of my friends have even suggested that it’s the beginning of a Terminator 2 situation I’m here to put those fears to rest: First of all, Microsoft is investing in OpenAI....

   I thought of a cute way of infinitely generating prime numbers that I call the Streaming Sieve of Eratosthenes: # usr bin env python3 Streaming Sieve of Eratosthenes I thought of a cute way of infinitely generating prime numbers. from collections import defaultdict # upcoming is a defaultdict....

   I finished reading Web Application Security: Exploitation and Countermeasures for Modern Web Applications by Andrew Hoffman.In summary: It’s not very broad. It’s not very deep. It’s not very complete. It’s not very polished--I plan on submitting a bunch of errata.I was surprised at...

   I finished Monolith to Microservices: Evolutionary Patterns to Transform Your Monolith by Sam Newman. It was great :)There were a lot of things that surprised me in the book.He’s a lot more in favor of modular monoliths than I would have expected. He doesn’t believe that microservices are the one...

   I’ve been spending a lot of time practicing on LeetCode recently, so I thought I’d share some of my favorite intermediate-level Python tricks. I’ll also cover some newer features of Python you may not have started using yet. I’ll start with basic tips and then move to more advanced ones. Get help()...

   Opening Remarks The theme this year is from the ground up . They’re focusing on community, collaboration, and education. It’s a 100% volunteer team. 25 people work year-round. They had speed mentoring sessions. They really need some new volunteers. See bsides.sf jobs. The talks will be on their...

   My buddy, Hy Carrel, joked that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle as applied to queues suggests that the more sure you want to be that an item in a queue is going to get processed, the less sure you can be of how long it’ll take :-P

   TL;DR A world that scrolls infinitely in any direction, an RPG-like UI, and simple, real-time fighting. My younger kids and I built this entry for PyWeek 32 based on the theme Neverending . The key innovations are: It has a neverending world. As the player walks along, it picks up tiles and places...

   I was wondering what percentage of passwords are pure ASCII. Hence, I threw together some code: # usr bin env python3 PASSWORD LIST example.txt num pure ascii 0 num iso 8859 1 not ascii 0 num passwords 0 with open(PASSWORD LIST, mode rb ) as f: for line in f: password line.rstrip(b n ) num...

   nbsp;

   nbsp;(I’m talking about stuff I don’t understand, so feel free to ignore me.)Space isn’t entirely empty. There are a few hydrogen atoms hanging out here and there.Imagine if a spacecraft was flying really fast, and it was collecting those tiny few. It could either use a massive funnel at the front...

   I was using the command line to quickly build out a file hierarchy. I wrote something that looked basically like: mkdir -p dir a b c d I meant for dir to be in my home directory. I should have put the outside the doublequotes. Hence, it actually ended up creating a directory called . I thought,...