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Ask HN: What are you building that's not AI related?

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Re: Ask HN: What are you building that's not AI related?

#261
Embed Workflow (https://embedworkflow.com). Embeddable workflow builder for SaaS platforms. Your users design and run their own workflows inside your product.

5+ years now, bootstrapped. I still write most of the code. The product itself isn't AI, it's orchestration. Visual builder, triggers, delays, webhooks, execution logic. Some of our users do wire up AI models or agents through it, but the core is just helping non-technical people build automations for our clients product.

Re: Ask HN: What are you building that's not AI related?

#263
post #170
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

Re: Ask HN: What are you building that's not AI related?

#264

I'm building my own cloud (I actually typed claude instead of cloud there... wow). There's no IaaS or PaaS; it's much simpler. I wanted my own way of connecting to machines and the TCP services on those machines without having to install Tailscale (not allowed on a locked-down corporate PC) or pay for Azure or AWS or GCP or even Hetzner or Linode. I've got 10gbps fibre and a huge workstation at home, and I've got lot…

You should add this comment in your project's readme - because this is far easier to understand why the project even exists.

That's good advice. I just added that to the new project site, https://telaproject.org/ .

Re: Ask HN: What are you building that's not AI related?

#265
post #263
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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