What stuck with me from the piece was the second-order effects part. I went and tried Aleph One's example on a current machine and it's a real lesson: the `strcpy` code blows up right away, but to get the exploit to run I had to compile with `-fno-stack-protector -z execstack -no-pie` and write `0` to `/proc/sys/kernel/randomize_va_space`. In other words, switching off by hand StackGuard, NX and ASLR, the three layers that were born precisely as a reaction to that article. In twenty minutes I understood more about the history of mitigations than in weeks of reading theory. If Phrack was the industry's unpaid research department, as you say, here's the bill being collected in every `gcc` flag.

:D :D

[deleted]

Reviewing decisions by process alone sounds great in theory, but I think it underestimates something: sometimes the outcome IS the missing information. Like, you could've done the whole analysis right and still missed a signal that only became obvious afterward — and that's not hindsight bias, that's real learning that only showed up because things went wrong. Splitting process from outcome that cleanly feels less like an honest analytical tool and more like a way to protect the ego of whoever made the call. And the quarterly review thing, honestly, works fine for investing or career decisions, but does it hold up for every kind of choice? Relationship decisions, for instance — reviewing those with that same "process vs outcome" coldness feels kind of sociopathic in practice, no? Curious if anyone here has tried applying this outside a financial context and hit a similar wall.

nah I get why people are still salty about it tho. the entire point of a 4k or 64k intro was fighting the hardware itself, not just making something pretty with whatever's available. if the GPU is doing half the creative work for you the challenge kind of evaporates, no?