100 Days of learning – Day 20

There’s no end to the amount of “sharpening the saw” that is necessary for moving from high-level scripting and abstraction … even the rookiest of the most nooby rookie pentesters quickly understand why it’s necessary to ditch the GUI and work in a terminal with the command line interface.

If you wanna do serious things in AI/ML, data science and MLops, you really will need to understand something about how your chain is dev’d and that includes understanding the source and how the stuff is built. This is partly about information security … but mostly, it’s about information technology effectiveness, efficiency and dependable reliability.

Unless you are just a consumer with an infinite bank account, it is necessary to clear away the abstraction and have significantly greater control with things like NEW C standards, C mastery including the ol’ ncurses library and implementing ultra-fast, ultra-clean code with embedded intelligence or neural network search/find utilities in C or Rust.

If you really want to design in observability into your tools, you have to write your own databases or at least be in some semblance of control over the data structures … again, this is about implementing ultra-fast, ultra-clean code with monitorability in C or Rust … so that you can MONITOR it and use your tools to pick the meaningful flyshit out of the monitoring pepper.

Obviously, monitorability depends upon exploiting how your smart monitoring tools are going to work … it’s a LONG way to the htop.dev if you wanna rock’n roll(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21998638) in Rust or C … nobody should care if something is written in Rust as a fashion statement, ie this is not Node.JS or React or some form of resume bullshit bingo.

What really matters is understanding how the tool is implemented; the fundamental first principle of infosec is KNOWING that there is not some EXTRA VOODOO implemented in there as well … simplifying enough to make things clean enough to expose the vulnerabilities is about getting close down to bare metal … and that is damned tough when even bare metal interface itself is plenty complicated is why the smart people in the room know that they cannot possibly that smart by themselves … which it’s why “It’s [always] the COMMUNITY, stupid!”