'94 but I was on Usenet (actually probably not usenet but definitely one of the “readers”) when I heard about it first. That would’ve been around '93. Me and a buddy were pretty nerdy and his dad worked at Bell Labs and they got a couple floppies. That was my start. It was just the kernel and Gnu Utilities. Literally Linux+Gnu. Shortly after that I grabbed SLS Linux, that became Slack. Then Debian, I was in the listserve when Ian would still answer questions and fix bugs. I hope he’s found the peace now he was searching for in life.
I’ve contributed to quite a few open source projects over the years, nothing foundational. I didn’t really know anybody from the old old days. Just a geeky kid lucky enough to have a computer and a modem at the time. I am very privileged to have grown up when I did and where I did.
I don’t envy the kids coming up now. Completely abstracted away from their systems to the point where they actually think it’s magic. I had a very junior engineer ask me how to print a pdf the other week at work. I can’t imagine how modern education and tech have failed them. I hope I’m wrong but it feels like LLMs are talking away curiosity and hacking. I’m sure that’s just me being a crusty old bastard though.
Speaking of I’ve been having fun playing around with this as of late.
You’d need to have access to the prompt tooling, or worse yet the RAG, otherwise you’re just hoping that a user feeds your email into an LLM. The hidden ascii though, old tricks are new again.
Lol! I thought vi was genuinely a new layer of the OS, like an embedded console. Ended up creating 10 files containing exit, or quit, or ^c, until I hit the escape key and the cursor changed…then I rebooted from frustration and actually read the man page. The controls are all from this dumb terminal keyboard that had useful decals on them. That’s where navigation with kjhl came from and :q to quit.
Genuinely curious. When was your first time touching Linux/GNU?
'94 but I was on Usenet (actually probably not usenet but definitely one of the “readers”) when I heard about it first. That would’ve been around '93. Me and a buddy were pretty nerdy and his dad worked at Bell Labs and they got a couple floppies. That was my start. It was just the kernel and Gnu Utilities. Literally Linux+Gnu. Shortly after that I grabbed SLS Linux, that became Slack. Then Debian, I was in the listserve when Ian would still answer questions and fix bugs. I hope he’s found the peace now he was searching for in life.
I’ve contributed to quite a few open source projects over the years, nothing foundational. I didn’t really know anybody from the old old days. Just a geeky kid lucky enough to have a computer and a modem at the time. I am very privileged to have grown up when I did and where I did.
I don’t envy the kids coming up now. Completely abstracted away from their systems to the point where they actually think it’s magic. I had a very junior engineer ask me how to print a pdf the other week at work. I can’t imagine how modern education and tech have failed them. I hope I’m wrong but it feels like LLMs are talking away curiosity and hacking. I’m sure that’s just me being a crusty old bastard though.
Speaking of I’ve been having fun playing around with this as of late.
https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2024/m365-copilot-prompt-injection-tool-invocation-and-data-exfil-using-ascii-smuggling/
You’d need to have access to the prompt tooling, or worse yet the RAG, otherwise you’re just hoping that a user feeds your email into an LLM. The hidden ascii though, old tricks are new again.
I’m close, 93 also I think, slack on a 386.
Got stuck in vi, had to reboot.
Remember thinking how awesome 6 virtual consoles were. I think my tmux addiction came from there.
Lol! I thought vi was genuinely a new layer of the OS, like an embedded console. Ended up creating 10 files containing exit, or quit, or ^c, until I hit the escape key and the cursor changed…then I rebooted from frustration and actually read the man page. The controls are all from this dumb terminal keyboard that had useful decals on them. That’s where navigation with kjhl came from and :q to quit.
https://pikuma.com/blog/origins-of-vim-text-editor
Rage quitting vi/vim really is a right of passage.
Remember ed?
Do you remember…
When someone first showed you tab completion?
Like absolute fucking wizardry man, like a Jedi Master appeared in front of you with the knowledge of the ancients.
Before that instant in your life you were typing out full pathnames, like some fucking schmuck.
And from then on, everything changed, forever.
Absolutely. Bash was such a game changer with history too, and ctrl+r
You mean I can search recent history and get a recently used command?!?!?!?!?!