17 points

Yea a plane hijacking is totally like a buffer overflow.

Bleeding is also a bit like a buffer overflow, since blood goes in a place it’s not supposed to. Hurricanes are another example of a buffer overflow. Accidentally wearing a shirt inside out? Buffer overflow. Unskippable ads are buffer overflow. War is buffer overflow. I had my buffer overflown by some guy claiming to be a wallet inspector. Aliens are a type of buffer overflow. I sometimes have buffer overflow with my girlfriend. Buffer overflow was an inside job. I put too much shine paste in my polishing machine and you better believe that was a buffer overflow.

When a train crashes into a station building, that’s not a buffer overflow, though. That’s a buffer overrun.

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16 points

You can totally hack a plane using a buffer overflow. C airlines don’t check how many tickets they sell on a single flight. Usually if you overbook a flight, they will simply reallocate some of their buffer into business class. However, if you buy a bunch of tickets to one flight at once, you can craft a scenario where you overwrite the pilot.

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16 points
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Nope, actually this used to work but the genius computer scientists at Boeing put the cockpit in a random place around the cabin, thwarting most pilot overwrite attacks.

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9 points

Aeronautic Seating Layout Randomization.

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12 points

What the hell.

I would like to think I’m a decent developer. I know what I’m talking about when it comes to code.

I do not know what I’m talking about in other fields. So I don’t speak like I know what I’m talking about there.

Hopefully PG learned this skill in the last 20 or so years.

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3 points

As the old saying goes, hope in one hand, Lisp in the other.

If you try it, I personally hope you’ve got a damned good garbage collector…

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1 point

@i_dont_want_to @dgerard have you bumped your head?

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5 points

Hopefully PG learned this skill in the last 20 or so years.

LOL.

LMAO.

I hope this was sarcastic.

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11 points
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Prff typical manager mindset here.

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11 points

Hopefully PG learned this skill in the last 20 or so years.

it’s pretty clear he hasn’t

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17 points

This was so stupid.

A hijacking happens when passengers overflow into the cockpit from the cabin.

Oh no! A little kid has been invited to have a look! Passenger overflow! Hijacking!

His attempt at solution isn’t as cringe worthy, if one overlooks the reasoning. Separating the cabin from the pilots is a way of preventing hijacking that has been attempted, but it has problems. Notably if the pilots get acute medical emergency or indeed if the pilot steer the plane into the ground.

Some ten years ago a french pilot locked out his second and ran the plane into the ground. For increased safety the after 911 the door to the cabin could only be opened from the inside.

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2 points

A lot of hijackings don’t even fucking involve passengers getting into the cockpit. DB Cooper never got into the cockpit.

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5 points

@mountainriver Also of note: the Helios Airways Flight 522 disaster. (Loaded 737 crashed, everybody killed … because of a locked cockpit door: plane depressurized and pilots’ oxygen failed, cabin crew—inc. a pilot—were unable to gain cockpit access in time to save the plane before it ran out of fuel and crashed.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522

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6 points

because of a locked cockpit door

Door wasn’t locked and had nothing to do with the crash. In fact a flight attendant managed to get into the cockpit and turn the plane from a populated part of Athens, likely saving lives shortly before it fully crashed

The plane simply never pressurized and literally as the co-pilot realized what was happening hypoxia took them and the captain, all because a switch could turn pressurization into a manual override and there was no warning before takeoff that it was that way

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5 points

JFC that’s a horrifying story

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7 points

Did you mean the Germanwings crash from 2015? or is it a different incident?

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2 points

That’s the one, thank you.

German pilot, and crash in France, not French pilot. Second pilot locking out the captain, not the other way around. Otherwise my memory seem to have served.

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24 points

I also had some extremely cringeworthy and not-even-wrong opinions 23 years ago, but at least I was 3yo then.

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19 points

I maintain that we should all aspire to be a firetruck when we grow up.

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8 points

I wanted to be a train.

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9 points

Freight or passenger?

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40 points

I hate hate hate this so much. This is precisely the kind of smug, reductionist, dunning-kruger, every-problem-is-a-nail-and-programming-is-my-hammer type of shit that fuels my hatred of not only TESCREAL but pretty much everyone I meet in STEM.

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16 points
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I wonder how much of the coder mindset is behind the anarchist diy chemistry biohacking people (which seems to distress people who have actual experience in chemistry).

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11 points

When I think of diy bio hacking I think of “The Thought Emporium”, thankfully he knows his stuff is not suitable for the public.

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3 points

A reason I support his patron is that when he becomes the next super villain, I’m already on his good list

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10 points
*

these people are full of shit. sofosbuvir contains single fluorine atom in such a place that its introduction requires either hydrogen fluoride (also as NEt3.3HF) or DAST (or other very friendly reagents like Xtalfluor-E) and even then, synthesis sucks balls as in has low-to-medium yield (15-50%) and requires extensive purification. you do not, under any circumstances, fuck around with hydrogen fluoride in your garage

relevant patent https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/search/family/051842422/publication/WO2016066283A1?q=pn%3DWO2016066283 first few pages for literature review, around 97-102 for procedures. these sub-50% yields are already heavily optimized

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8 points

I honestly feel really bad when I see fairly respected leftists and journalists celebrate Four Thieves as something that could make a big difference for folks who are paying way too much for medicine (which is all of us) and enable a mutual support network of hobby chemists saving lives.

and then I look at it and that’s not what I see at all — it’s just a fucking cosplay anarchist (complete with cheap camo pants) with the type of opsec that gets the people around them arrested and an understanding of chemistry that will get people killed. and that fucking sucks! the part of me that’s susceptible to a dream like this thinks a 3D printer for medicine (per the marketing) is a great idea!

every other part of me is horrified. 3D printers barely fucking work and that’s our reliability target for fucking organic chemistry, a branch of science where it’s so easy (and sometimes necessary for a synthesis, as you pointed out) to produce chemical byproducts that give you fucking horrifying cancer if you’re lucky? and then the fucker just forgets or doesn’t know about yield and purification? this fucker calls his output “street drugs” and expects you to fucking bareback them without an appropriate validation to make sure you haven’t synthesized fucking poison in your little tin-foil-and-tape reaction vessel? and he sure as fuck isn’t giving test catalysts out with the pills he keeps throwing into crowds

one thing I’ve noticed from this most recent article is they forked some MIT designs for their synthesis discovery software and their chemical reactor. I’m not a chemist, any chemistry knowledge above was gleaned from YouTube and probably isn’t correct (let me know if I was way off), so I wanna know — is there anything at all to that for any drug, or is the idea as a whole just fucking terrible? I’m leaning towards the latter, but like I mentioned, I’m susceptible to this kind of dream.

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7 points

hydrogen fluoride

Yes one of the !!fun!! chemicals.

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6 points

of course it was on hn

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