Stockfighter's Jailbreak CTF trainer is live

But there are a million other things I want to sink time into improving. Music, my Starcraft MMR, boxing. To finish a day hacking and coding, come home, and - for months, if I want good results - do more hacking and coding feels like an exhausting prospect. Even if the scenario is fun, it feels contrived.

I'm not presenting any solutions. Maybe I'm just not the target market, because I don't have the desire right now to code all day and then code some more. But I wonder how big that target market is?

Tell me about it. Speaking only for myself, I have near-constant coder's guilt - a term I just made up to describe the nagging voice in my head that keeps telling me I should be coding more in my free time. It sounds something like this :

"somewhere a rockstar wizard ninja is writing a C compiler in Haskell and here you are wasting your time with Overwatch, you miserable slacker"

I see some discussion of "files", but seem unable to list them or explore the filesystem. I don't know if this in-game filesystem is supposed to be on the "AVR" device or an imaginary "developer machine". Where do the outputs of running commands like "compile" go? Why can't I inspect the compiler? What actually comprises the state of the system I'm interacting with? If this is notionally to find good developers, why is the UI sandboxed inside a web browser, where building and using tools (which is what good developers and reverse engineers do) is incredibly painful?

Half the commands produce no output and make no visible change to any state, e.g. "load garbage". Almost all commands silently ignore extra parameters. There's no tab completion, no history search, commands don't even show up in the output log...

Links and commands seem to randomly be assigned to either always open in new tabs or load in the current tab of the browser, both in the "debugger" and help pages.

Moving through command history puts the cursor at the left hand side of the prompt. There's noticeable latency when single-stepping the program, which is just astounding.

Did nobody try to use this shit, even a little?

"somewhere a rockstar wizard ninja is building a passive-income side project and here you are wasting your time tending a garden and working in your woodshop, you miserable idiot with stupid priorities."

I want to be able to make something, I also really want to be able to finish my progress on cryptopals, or finally get a real bounty on hackerone, but I'm just not good enough.

And I get caught thinking, well if I just didn't spend so much time playing computer games, or wasting time I could do that stuff.

But is it true, or am I just using them as an excuse, so I don't have to face up to the fact I'm just not that good at it. It's easier to blame my laziness than blame the fact that I struggle to produce output and struggle to find meaningful[1] vulnerabilities.

If I ever do find myself unemployed, then I'd hit stockfighter up straight away, that would I guess give me the motivation to work at the stuff. I think there's a fundamental "understanding gap" between me at the problems presented though. In the same way that I can look at a demo scene write ups and understand the concepts they're talking about but there's this vast chasm between the work I do and the work they do, and it's not clear how to bridge that gap.

Maybe I should read less hacker news and spend more time practicing the craft. But hey, I'm back in the "if only I worked harder" trap.

[1] Sure, I can find open redirects, maybe the occasional http subdomain leaking a cookie from the https root domain, maybe even an open endpoint, but finding vulns worth paying for[2] is difficult when dealing with sites which already care enough to have bounties.

[2] It's not about the money, I'd likely not even claim it given the typically small amounts paid out and the hassle of declaring it, but I'd like to bag a bounty for pride sake.