Mesh networking is still mostly a playground for hobbyists and hacky, built-on-the-knee implementations. People love shipping a cool PoC, but as soon as the boring stuff starts - stabilization, drivers, edge cases - everyone bails to chase the next hype protocol. We’re left with mountains of half-baked C++ legacy that nobody dares to refactor because the whole house of cards would collapse iirc

It’s hilarious how people are blaming Claude for a human being a total snake. Trademark squatting is the oldest legal trick in the book. AI just gave Andy the leverage to fake "official" status and look busy while the rest of the team did the actual heavy lifting. The tech just fast-tracked the inevitable fallout tbh

It’s funny how a standard power grab over cash and control is being packaged as some "Holy War against AI"

Highlighting the Claude usage in the headline is a blatant move to bait the anti-AI crowd and farm sympathy points. The real issue has nothing to do with who generated the AST -whether it was meat-ware or a transformer - the issue is the brand hijacking. Stop dragging technology into this; it’s just pure legal scumbaggery

This is a fundamentally different beast. BI tools run a predictable set of joins, but an LLM agent is a monkey with a grenade - it can easily hallucinate a 7-way CROSS JOIN or a recursive CTE without a base case. Your read replica will hit OOM or get pinned by I/O in seconds. The only sane path is offloading specific data slices to Snowflake, ClickHouse, or a local DuckDB where you can enforce hard per-user memory and timeout quotas, completely isolating AI noise from your transactional cluster

Regarding the bots: since you're building a privacy-first product, you should look into a Proof-of-Work captcha (like Hashcash or mCaptcha). Just have the user's browser mine hashes for a couple of seconds before issuing the trial token. A normal human won't even notice it, but it'll burn so many CPU cycles for bot farms that abusing your API becomes economically unviable

Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll look into it!

As someone interested in cryptography, I'd also recommend a VDF. A Wesolowski VDF isn't that hard to hand-roll [0] [1] and will make parallel attacks much harder while penalizing low-power devices less.

[0] https://reading.supply/@whyrusleeping/a-vdf-explainer-5S6Ect [1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/623

Mad respect. I tried extracting a clean .o file out of a statically linked ELF once, and it's an absolute nightmare. How are you handling switch tables and indirect jumps? Without dynamic analysis, it's sometimes physically impossible to figure out what a register is actually pointing to

I have analyzers that resynthesize relocations from the contents of the Ghidra database, no custom annotations required. They evaluate relocation candidate spots through primary references and pointers/instructions and emit warnings if the math doesn't check out.

It does require a reasonably accurate Ghidra database to work properly, but I've had users delink megabytes of code and data from a program successfully (as in, relinking it at a different address results in a functionally identical executable) once they've cleaned it up. The accuracy warning in the readme is mostly because it's really complicated to describe exactly what inaccuracies you can get away with, there's a fair amount of wiggle room in reality as long as you know what you're doing.

I'm curious how your analyzers handle those tricky MIPS edge cases like split address loads via lui and addiu where you have interleaved instructions in between. If Ghidra fails to collapse those into a single reference, does your math check just flag it as an error and bail, or does it actually try to reconstruct the instruction chain itself?

I wrote an analyzer to do that, you can find it here: https://github.com/boricj/ghidra-delinker-extension/blob/mas...

It uses register dependency graph traversal and code block flow analysis to try and find which two instructions are the likely targets of a HI16/LO16 for a given reference. It also uses an unhealthy amount of recursion and has been rewritten multiple times in order to deal with all these edge cases.

Unfortunately, my extension is only set up for one HI16 relocation having one or many LO16 child relocations. There's an undocumented GNU extension that allows multiple HI16 relocations to be shared by a single LO16 relocation, and I have a really ugly hack that shifts branch targets to "normalize" this into the standard pattern. I don't know why this hack works (I didn't even know about the GNU extension, I thought it was an assembler peephole optimization), but with it my extension can delink the whole of Tenchu: Stealth Assassins without any manual annotations, just the regular references from the cleaned-up Ghidra database.

Thanks for this thread. I'm so tired of reading about yet another "AI wrapper for sending emails" raising a $5M seed round that I almost forgot what actual engineering looks like. The whole industry feels like a Gold Rush right now where 99% of people aren't even trying to mine gold, they're just reselling each other the exact same shovels (LLM APIs) with different logos slapped on them. It's incredibly refreshing to read about people writing Rust parsers or soldering hardware synths

It's clear that there's growing recognition of the drawbacks of too much screen time

It's also a reminder that there's often a gap between what technology companies market to the masses and what the people behind those technologies actually endorse for their families