Why would you ask ChatGPT to tell you what a base64-encoded string is? Just base64 decode it! This blog post's "investigation" is worthless when it's just copy/pasting what a chat bot said. There is no reason to rely on a chat bot for this.
You are forgetting the world we live in now where, as time passes, fewer and fewer people will know how to do anything on their own and more and more will only accomplish things by using AI.
And we should call out and shame that behavior wherever we can just like our teachers were not amused when we simply copied from a Wikipedia article instead of following the referenced sources.
I don’t disagree, but the problem is, in the very near future the people who are the teachers who should be calling out this behavior will be the ones who have relied on it.
As a kid who was raised editing and tinkering memory blocks out of CONFIG.SYS, I've been watching this for a while when the GenZ-Mobile-Generation showed up and was not able to do the darnest things. I see with terror in my heart that the downward ride isn't yet over.
And it's little brother, autoexec.bat! The thing I found most bemusing through all of this is people insisting that people growing up with tech would somehow have this deep intuitive understanding of it. It made no sense. Using tech doesn't somehow make you aware of how it works. If anything, the refined final product can end up hiding it from people.
We all use elevators but know basically nothing about them -- hence the countless nonsense Hollywood scenes with a cut elevator cable (spoiler: you'd be fine). By contrast when they were first being introduced, every single person that rode on an elevator was probably quit well aware of the tension brake systems and other redundancies - because otherwise, stepping foot in one would feel insane. But when you grow up with them and take everything for granted, hey who cares - it works, yeah?
People growing up with personal computers did get that intuitive understanding for the most part. The problem is that zoomers and gen alpha are now growing up with idiot proofed appliances that hide all the details from them instead.
I'd argue a bigger part is the endless entertainment. A big part of the reason I started tinkering with things is because I was bored, and I'm fairly certain that was a very common motivator.
At Half Price Books I picked up a book on assembler and started writing my first code using debug.com simply because of boredom. In an era where I could have instead been watching endless entertaining videos on any subject imaginable, or playing literally free video games optimized for thousands of hours of entertainment? I'd certainly have never been bored, and I'm not sure I'd have ever even gotten into computers (or anything for that matter). Indeed a disproportionately large number of zoomers seem to have no skills whatsoever, and that's going to be a major issue for humanity moving forward.
Gen-Z people without AI (AWS' downtime for sure put tons of vibe coders/vibe sysadmins in their place) will be doomed. Mark my words.
I didn't grow by editing DOS config files, but I began with it in Elementary and I've got Debian Woody (later Sarge) in my late HS teen years. OFC I played with game emulators, settings, optimizations, a lot, and under GNU/Linux I even tweaked some BTTV drivers for some El Cheapo TV Tuner. The amount of thinkering these people had omitted because of smartphones and such it's huge.
> The amount of thinkering these people had omitted because of smartphones and such it's huge.
On the other hand, I've met people in the Godot game engine community that have built entire games on Android devices using Godot (yes, actually used an Android phone and the Godot game engine to build a game; not simply exported an Android game from a PC), so that only proves to me that if someone's got that "hacker spirit", they'll find a way to indulge it, even if the only thing they've got to work with is a smart-phone (and a spare keyboard / mouse layin' around). Problem is that mentality isn't encouraged quite the way it used to be back in the early days of the tech industry. The advertising and entertainment industries have "optimized" the Internet for "engagement", but most definitely not for the betterment of humanity. You gotta have that drive to build and create things or you'll get sucked down the various total waste of life rabbit-holes provided by the brain-sucky industries.
Matter of fact, I can, and have done, all of these things. Recreationally.
The idea is not to be hypergeneralist. What I observe - subjectively - is that we are losing whole generations of what used to be the 'nerdy IT/ham-radio/electronics-folks'. Sure, there is a small remnants with the makerscene, but that's mostly older people (beginning in their late teens).d
Yeah it's interesting. What's the incentive to spend 10 years learning tedious stuff anymore? In another 1-2 generations all non AI knowledge will be gone.
Okay, so one can "improve themselves" as a hobby at a leisurely pace instead of cramming for exams and becoming a competitive professional. Same thing.
"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome"
There is a (temporary) misalignment of incentives. ChatGPT is cheap--for now. But it cannot remain so for long. Someone(s) will have to pay for those huge datacenters and the gigawatts of power they require, and the investors speculating on them.
I was a guest lecturer at a university, and got a glimpse of a staff meeting about the problem of plagiarism (in code assignments). It was a surprise to them when I asked "why wouldn't you use something like diff for obvious cases?". None of the computer engineering lecturers knew about diff.
these AI services also won't really distinguish between "user input" and "malicious input that the user is asking about".
Obviously the input here was only designed to be run in a terminal, but if it was some sort of prompt injection attack instead, the AI might not simply decode the base64, it might do something else.
I am (not) looking forward to a future where people are unable to perform the simplest tasks because their digital brain has an outage and they have forgotten how to think for themselves.
There is no guarantee ChatGPT did the correct thing. There may be no indication whatsoever. This is not like comparing pen&paper to a calculator, it's more like comparing pen&paper to "calling a random, allegedly smart person on the phone".
> "Why use a calculator all the time? Just use pen and paper!"
"Why use a calculator all the time? Just use ChatGPT!"
Maybe you want to be an helpless baby who can't do anything and needs to chug a bajillion liters of water and depend on OpenAI to decode base64, but the thought of this becoming the norm understandably upsets reasonable people.
In addition to the other responses, ChatGPT is more wasteful and uses a lot more computing power than a locally run Base 64 decoder. When masses of people use LLMs for such trivial calculations, the environmental cost adds up.
ChatGPT failed at doing the job, and it was the wrong tool to use.
It explained that it saves a file and executes it. That's a nothingburger, it was obvious it's going to execute some code.
The actual value would have been showing what's in the executed file, but of course it didn't show that (since that would have required actually executing the code).
Showing the contents of the file would have provided an exact and accurate information on what the malware is trying to do. ChatGPT gave a vague "it executes some code".
It already decoded the string so I'm not sure what your question is.
There is 0 value in chatgpt telling you "it executes some code". The interesting part would be what is inside the /tmp/... file that the malware intends to execute.
To turn this question around, what did you gain by asking ChatGPT this question? You would have not run this command before, and you wouldn't run it after, and you wouldn't have run it either if ChatGPT told you "yeah it's safe go ahead".
What you would have liked to see is besides the point.
Nowhere did the author tell us he was interested in finding out what running the code would do rather than what the string said. So there's no failure here, and the 'right way' people are bringing up here (decoding b64 algorithmically) would produce no more meaningful a result.
For 7 × 5 using a calculator should not even be a thing for most people. Sure, some people just can't do the basic tables, but most people should be able to tell how much seven €5 items cost in a supermarket. If you could do this as a teenager, but lost that skill afterwards, you are just sacrificing your brain.
Yes I thought about that after writing it and should've used an example with bigger numbers. But I didn't want to ninja edit too much. I think the point came across.
This is ridiculous, given that even the browser itself already includes a calculator in the URL-bar, and they are probably not using a website without a browser.
The security implication here was writing a blog post. You're allowed to use a cheap box cutter even if you work at NASA, as long as you use it to open mail. That's what satisficing means.
What are you talking about? How is it the right tool? You have a command you can use instead that will give back the exact answer, immediately, with no possibility of mistakes or hallucination
Why not? its a good use of ChatGPT, just throw the text at it, and let it figure out whats going on. It's not me executing code on my machine, or accidentally executing code.
I mean some people asked what "cat" is, then I remembered there was a time when I had no idea how to use mIRC, so whatever. In my defense though, I was REALLY young.
No need to apologize, needing an excuse to lack knowledge is how we end up with people afraid to ask.
I try to make it visible when I’m among juniors and there’s something I don’t know. I think showing the process of “I realize I miss some knowledge => here’s how I bridge the gap” might help against the current trend of going through the motions in the dark.
It used to be that learning was almost a hazing ritual of being belittled and told to RTFM. That doesn’t really work when people have a big bold shortcut on their phones at any given time.
We might need to make the old way more attractive if we don’t want to end up alone.
> needing an excuse to lack knowledge is how we end up with people afraid to ask.
While we should encourage people to ask questions without fear, this doesn't mean we should lower standards or simplify everything for the lowest common denominator (which seems to be trending a lot!).
That said, there is the real issue of "this must stay complex because that's how it really is" as well, undeniably so.
> It used to be that learning was almost a hazing ritual of being belittled and told to RTFM.
Been there! I think it did more good than bad to me though. Survivorship bias? In any case, I don't try to make the case here that it is optimal pedagogy. I wouldn't know. Thoughts?
> No need to apologize, needing an excuse to lack knowledge is how we end up with people afraid to ask.
Yes!
There is no shame in ignorance. We are all, without exception, ignorant of more things than we're knowledgeable about. Shame should be reserved for remaining ignorant of things when it becomes clear that we would benefit from learning about them.
