🤖 Sonya Mann  🎀Verified account

gwern is my hero

gwern is the person I want to be, but will never ever be

same, too dumb

i'll up the ante: both too dumb and too lazy

Gwern going full stirner

One must always have a certain contempt for words and spooks... The question, as Humpy-dumpty said, is who is to be master; that is all.

As a pentester, ehhh not a bad take I guess

Also a lot of pentesting is unseeing the specifics to understand the more abstract pattern of failure being repeated

Another question hackers ask: "as this system was built by humans, how will it fail?" There is a finite of number of ways a system can fail such that it has security impact.

That last point is somewhat mathematical, and langsec is perhaps one of the more formal abstractions. So I disagree that the hacker mindset is fundamentally about reductionism See: http://langsec.org/ 

I see langsec as an example because it involves modeling the system in its full complexity, rather than abstracting it in the usual math move. (Just because it involves math doesn't make it not reductionism...) Something like Spectre is not simpler than the exposed x86 arch.

There is so much abstraction that happens in infosec though, and it's what keeps you above the level of atoms, so IDK maybe we have different interpretations of what it means to examine an abstraction

That's why infosec is so hard, though. You can be attacked at anywhere from the atomic level of abstraction (sidechannels) to the human level of abstraction (social engineering).

But ultimately all vulnerabilities can be categorized by a finite number of categories