5 Comments

I come to this post as I develop an open source lib that wrangles some third party hardware into doing what everyone wants via LD_PRELOAD -- after realising my abomination shared C lib with the whole go runtime contained within (naturally has to be executed as root in my context) probably could easily be a rootkit if there was malicious intent.

It's somewhat telling of the software eng of today that I so nonchalently embedded 3mb of whatever the feck inside my massive_unicorn.so to achieve my goal when I have never once in my career even considered memory safety seriously beyond some guy with a beard straining to explain malloc as an undergraduate. I can already hear my veteran coworkers' dismay and the subsequent opportunity to tell them I was considerate enough not to embed 40mb of nodejs. And yes, I admit, there was some limited and tactical use of ChatGPT to get past some dusty old C stuff. I have non-ironically become everything they say we millennials are but if I had given this to my genz reports they' be embedding the whole chromium bin in there.

...I guess I'll recommend building from source

Expand full comment

“Now that the era of shared-use Unix systems is mostly over”

*cough* jumboxes in devops *cough*

Expand full comment

Very cool! Not really the same thing, but reminded me of 'Reflections on Trusting Trust'; https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/358198.358210

Expand full comment

Awesome but your unicorn.so link is dead :-)

Expand full comment

Super fun! :)

Expand full comment