weirdness of computers

Above the iceberg

• y2k
• brainfuck
• Little Bobby Tables
• TCP/IP over carrier pigeon
• year 2038 bug
• spectre/meltdown
• ternary operator
• md5 rainbow tables
• DOOM on a toaster
• self-modifying code
• undefined behaviour
• hungarian notation
• emoji variables
• tracking pixels
• heisenbugs
• perl golf
• parsing XML with a regex
• tar bomb
• all web browsers pretend to be each other
• sidechannel attacks
• rowhammer
• bogosort
• sleepsort

On the iceberg

• typeof(NaN) === “number”
• quines
• javascript was designed in 10 days
• unintentionally Turing complete languages
• :(){ :|:& };:
• human gene renaming due to MS Excel
• numbers that start with zero are interpreted as octal
• hardware backdoors
• Falsehoods programmers believe about time
• manual loop unrolling
• the Sony BMG rootkit
• ping of death
• no computers are turing complete because memory is finite
• fonts can be malicious
• Intel Management Engine
• the 500 mile email
• fast inverse square root
• the “Wat” talk
• “a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors”
• self-hosting languages
• total_hours_wasted_here = 42

Below the water

• X5O!P%@AP[4\\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*\n
• [/usr/bin/- the FDIV and F00F bugs
• magic the gathering is Turing complete
• smart cards run Java
• c++ templates are Turing complete
• “lp0 is on fire”
• PHP’s fractal of bad design
• SVG supports JavaScript
• array[i] == i[array]
• rm -rf $STEAM_ROOT/
• Postscript and PDF are Turing complete
• illegal numbers
• reflections on trusting trust
• INTERCAL
• polyglot programs
• Powerpoint is Turing complete
• cold boot attack
• zero-knowledge proof
• malbolge
• Van Eck phreaking
• CAP theorem
• etherkiller
• null island

Middle of the iceberg

• font hinting is Turing complete
• Therac-25
• adversarial patches
• x86 mov is Turing complete
• FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8
• PDP-10 “more magic” switch
• Duff’s device
• Tony Hoare’s billion dollar mistake
• Super Mario Flappy Bird
• are floats for money really that bad?
• “Thank you for playing Wing Commander!”
• OpenOffice does not print on Tuesdays
• square waves do not exist
• program code can be read by hand off decapped chips
• 42.zip
• most cpu instructions are unused by compilers
• COMEFROM
• c trigraphs
• ADSL over wet string
• Aphyr’s technical interviews
• gps week rollover
• “das ist ein Game-Boy Advance…”

Bottom of the iceberg

• no elegant solution to FizzBuzz exists
• Actually Portable Executable
• ouroboros programs
• soviet ternary computers
• SQL raytracer
• The Story of Mel
• return to libc attack
• tainted canvases
• SIGBOVIK
• billion laughs attack
• “You fool. You absolute, unmitigated, unadulterated, complete and utter, fool.”
• Dual_EC_DRBG
• javascript’s father, son, and holy spirit
• reverse indentation
• killer poke
• YAML vs Norway
• HTTP referer header typo
• Wikimedia flower DDOS
• “The Birth and Death of JavaScript” predicted the future
• python number redefinition
• non-local goto
• The Basilisk Collection

Below the iceberg

• SAT solvers keep getting faster
• perl parsing is undecidable
• Jsfuck
• void *alloca(size_t size);
• x86 instruction set is unbounded
• chucknorris is an HTML color
• TIMTOWTDI
• fractional bits
• CMake raytracer
• nasal demons
• “samy is my hero”
• the Effective Power bug
• cross-language string escaping
• MicroSD cards are Turing complete
• no-knowledge proof
• isUserAMonkey();
• EVE Online vs boot.ini
• RAID write hole
• page fault handling is Turing complete
• weird machine
• black dot of death
• POPCNT: the NSA instruction

Deep water

• GPS chip maximum speed
• radiation hardened quines
• sandsifter
• 00000000000000000021e800c1e8df51b22c1588e5a624bea17e9faa34b2dc4a
• Spyro YOTD is booby-trapped
• Jazelle DBX
• HotJava
• all build systems have a bug with unicode BOM
• airplane ticket mainframe pointers
• NSA ANT catalog
• exploiting linux with 6502 assembly on the NES
• GIFARs
• diverse double compiling
• Wii sensor bar LOLSERIAL
• FJCVTZS
• the scary devil monastery
• 8 and 9 were valid octal digits in pre-ANSI C
• radioactive chip packaging materials
• witchcraft compiler collection
• kleptography
• “Moving online webserver using public transport”
• Crash Bandicoot quantum corruption
• GIF MD5 hashquine

The abyss

• unicode on punch cards
• .fr-016c: fuenf (in your face)
• Coding Machines
• Mario Wolczko’s unix recovery
• WebMIDI permits arbitrary code execution
• “I no longer trust the constants.”
• The Bitter Lesson
• infinite loop inlining bug
• Bedlam3
• Alexander Rhatushnyak broke Kolmogorov complexity and won 8000 euros
• ClueBot NG’s emergency stop button
• The Infamous Japanese Postal CSV
• Orson Welles’ in-band signaling attack
• C64 Safe VSP
• USERSEEUSERDO
• Adrian Thomson’s primordial silicon
• BANCstar
• lost FOCAL interpreter
• Toby Ord’s “Complete Turing Machine”
• GCJ-02
• “The single most useful macro in Praat”
• if your computer bug isn’t a moth jammed in a relay, it’s not a bug. it’s just a sparkling error.
• computers are flattened sand with lightning inside

Additional Cursed Content

Supplemental Bathysphere #1 (February 2022)

• Lies, damned lies, and scans
• wtfjs
• Minesweeper logic gates
• preprocessor_fun
• left-pad
• The DAO
• The FORTRAN-hating gateway
• stuxnet
• Producing Wrong Data Without Doing Anything Obviously Wrong!
• argc == 0
• ambiguous PNGs
• Binary Banshees and Digital Demons
• Linux in a pixel shader
• ambiguous URLs
• Explaining the Entombed Algorithm
• Arbitrary Code Execution in the Universal Turing Machine
• ace w/ fopen
• ubuntu’s surprisingly innocuous compiler bug
• c++ "⇒" operator
• A Turing Machine whose behavior is independent of ZFC
• radr://5614542
• exact reals converge to 6, floats converge to 100
• programming down on bare metal / head crash radio

Supplemental Bathysphere #2 (June 2022)

• Lace card
• Cursed computer memory hierarchy
• The wrong error message
• Hertzbleed
• strfry
• main is usually a function
• The C++ Iceberg
• sinkhole
• The Apple GPU and the Impossible Bug
• Black Sunday Kill
• Array.prototype.contains
• Polyglots
• 80 columns
• the liminal space between fork and exec
• unexec
• 1900 is a leap year
• Escaping HTML
• Mr Self Destruct
• The most vexing parse
• set_trace_func
• aux.h
• C Integers Quiz