I’m waiting for one of these random pixelized images to start pulsing and spit out a glider
Visual Analysis of Binary Files
21–29 of 29 posts
Re: Visual Analysis of Binary Files
#22Pretty neat. It tangentially reminds me of when we used to be able to hear HDDs clatter away, or waaaaay back when we used be able to hear EM interference from whatever was going on in a computer. There was an episode of Cowboy Bebop, where a mechanic held a wrench against an engine cowling to see how much it vibrated (likely a real thing people do with real engines?) and, of course, the computer sounds in the Enterp…
I forget where I read this (maybe PG's blog?) but I read some early 2000s startup had some kind of mechanical device that responded to website visitors, so everyone in the office could hear the traffic in realtime. I also heard stories of professors who would know a program had a bug based on the sounds the computer was making. (Back when they were slightly slower!)
I've heard of people 'walking' old hard drive cabinets by fine manipulation of the read/write heads.
Re: Visual Analysis of Binary Files
#23I have been thinking we should do this for code too. I still haven't had time to execute on this plan, but I think there's probably part of the answer to how to use AI as a tool is how it doesn't automatically give us the same kind of window into what it does. In verbose mode, I've caught things earlier that I wouldn't have caught until later. But even beyond that, it speaks to how we draw lines between code and data and what happens if we erase those lines. What if we applied data vis methods to code? Maybe hierarchical semantic clustering colored by class hierarchy. Not just one floating architecture diagram. But different slices of the codebase.
Re: Visual Analysis of Binary Files
#24I vaguely remember a reverse engineering tool in the mid-to-late 2000s that displayed a similar (albeit greyscale) visualisation of entropy within large binary files. Anyone know what tool that would have been?
Re: Visual Analysis of Binary Files
#25Love seeing the two example OS binaries side-by-side. Even though I don't know exactly what their differences mean, I feel like I'm getting a good impression of their "Gestalt." Thank you for sharing!
Re: Visual Analysis of Binary Files
#26Humans are so good at pattern recognition it's uncanny. Back in the modem days, most people automatically recognised the most important phases of downloads because of the way they sounded .
Re: Visual Analysis of Binary Files
#27Pretty neat. It tangentially reminds me of when we used to be able to hear HDDs clatter away, or waaaaay back when we used be able to hear EM interference from whatever was going on in a computer. There was an episode of Cowboy Bebop, where a mechanic held a wrench against an engine cowling to see how much it vibrated (likely a real thing people do with real engines?) and, of course, the computer sounds in the Enterp…
> There was an episode of Cowboy Bebop, where a mechanic held a wrench against an engine cowling to see how much it vibrated (likely a real thing people do with real engines?)
I was watching a documentary about dirt track racing and they showed one of the mechanics on the team who was blind.
He would put a long screwdriver on the engine and hold the handle to his ear. He could debug timing issues by hearing the vibrations.
There is also the case of the water leak detectors in the UK who use basically a long stick with one end on the ground and the other in their ear. e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVeEoWTsiiw
Re: Visual Analysis of Binary Files
#28[dead]
Re: Visual Analysis of Binary Files
#29Who remembers seeing PSQR everywhere in .COM files?