This (roughly) came up in a chat just yesterday. Someone posted a screenshot of a web browser using a font face with no glyphs or something, or I assume this is what causes this display of the codepoints(1). Reminded me of the kind of amateur magic lessons I see regularly:
So, people on the internet who feel like they are some kind of computer wizards will try to school each other online about how computers work. They will go on, like, Quora and ask weird questions like "what is one programming language every real hacker should know?" And someone will come along and write an incredibly definitive-sounding and confident essay about how a real hacker has to know the language of binary, because everything that's happening in a computer is all just binary, 1s and 0s. They heavily imply (at the least) that a real hacker regularly peruses binary values. Not like how you might use a hex editor. Rather, as if wannabe hackers read source, but real hackers read the raw binary. Some kind of M-x Butterfly shit. Assembly language is rarely mentioned.
I don't blame them for it, it's just kind of funny. I can kind of imagine that the way low-level things are glossed over for the sake of explaining high-level things has reasonably left some people with the impression that binary is somehow expressive and that people who truly know computers are fluent in it. And I probably had stranger conceptions than that on my own journey.
Anyway, this screenshot is what they must imagine a turbohacker's computer looks like all the time
Ah, this is the reason I avoid internet squares and chats filled with those who started but didn’t go deep. I just cringe to almost fainting everytime I read something there and my ears burn. Programmer’s humor sections are especially triggering. Surprisingly, HN is not that programmy at all (there’s lots of tech but no code nor “hacker secrets”), so it’s relatively nice to be in.
Lol, now for some reason I'm wondering what you think of the old "how to shoot yourself in the foot" / "how to determine which programming language you're using" jokes.
I guess one actually realistic version of the fully-jacked-in-hacker fantasy is network guys who are in so deep that they can read bin/hex numbers fluently without consciously "converting", etc. This I know of, and from there, I can conceive of someone who has become familiar with the binary representations of certain instructions? Or something? But I guess it would have to be a very specific (and probably read-only) situation. And, unless I'm missing something, it wouldn't amount to a deeper or more enlightened understanding of anything meaningful to software concerns
So-so, honestly. Was okay at the time. Sorry for not sharing it, but that’s how I feel.
Btw, reading and calculating hex is not that hard. In Hiew (and other hex/asm binary file editors that showed hex together with mnemonics) you quickly learn that e.g. B8 xx xx is “mov ax, imm” and C9/CB is a return. You can actually spot these in an 8-bit hex view, and yes, code has a pretty distinct feel in hex and ascii/exts. Zips and data don’t look like code.
For me hex code was read-only, but I remember my granddad entering programs through literally 8 on-off switches plus some more on a pre-sinclair “computer”. I could input hex values. He could input D0-D7 and #CLK itself.
That said there’s not much “hacker” in it. It’s just a knowledge induced by a relatively low level tooling and the times. We did what we did out of interest, not for social attitude. So yeah.
So, people on the internet who feel like they are some kind of computer wizards will try to school each other online about how computers work. They will go on, like, Quora and ask weird questions like "what is one programming language every real hacker should know?" And someone will come along and write an incredibly definitive-sounding and confident essay about how a real hacker has to know the language of binary, because everything that's happening in a computer is all just binary, 1s and 0s. They heavily imply (at the least) that a real hacker regularly peruses binary values. Not like how you might use a hex editor. Rather, as if wannabe hackers read source, but real hackers read the raw binary. Some kind of M-x Butterfly shit. Assembly language is rarely mentioned.
I don't blame them for it, it's just kind of funny. I can kind of imagine that the way low-level things are glossed over for the sake of explaining high-level things has reasonably left some people with the impression that binary is somehow expressive and that people who truly know computers are fluent in it. And I probably had stranger conceptions than that on my own journey.
Anyway, this screenshot is what they must imagine a turbohacker's computer looks like all the time
1. https://i.vgy.me/qNU6J5.jpg