This is absolutely insane. If you look at joelreymonts recent activity on GitHub, there is what I would consider an bomb of AI slop PRs with thousands and thousands of changes, AI generated summaries/notes, copyright issues, you name it.
People like this are ruining open source for the rest of us, and those poor maintainers really have their work cut out for them sorting through this slop.
What are you going to do? You can't expect some sort of self-censorship based on righteousness and morals. I see joelreymonts as a pioneer planting chestertons fences. LET THE MAN COOK!
You’re just limiting yourself for no reason. It’s not Apples fault that you are sitting in front of an un-upgraded computer that is tool-less (for one of your tasks, at least) and has step by step instructions meant for beginners.
All of the side channel attacks for CPUs has been from in depth use of branch prediction techniques that make up a significant part of every modern processor’s performance. It’s one of the main things we can do aside from just clocking them higher.
I work in videogames and we often use custom binary file formats, a HEX editor is very useful because, as an industry, we don't document anything and the code is often a car crash :)
What title are you referring to? I am guessing that title got edited and initially used partial header from github page "A Hex Editor for Reverse Engineers" cutting of second part "Programmers and people who value their retinas when working at 3 AM".
Hex editor can also be very useful for programmers when working with binary file formats. Implementing support for image and archive formats. Testing that your code outputs the thing you expected it to output or inspecting a file which your program fails to process because some other program included some unexpected option fields or something like that. It's sometimes even useful even when working with text fails, typically because they included some invisible symbols which you didn't expect or differentiating between similar looking unicode symbols.
How else are you supposed to debug misbehaving byte order markers and emojis and other U̷̼͌T̷͔̑F̷̤̂ ̴̯͗b̶̤̋l̵̜̈́a̸̭̚c̵͕̊k̶̦̅ ̶͓͆m̸͙̎a̴͖̿g̴̠͝i̸͛ͅc̸̡͌ in your "plain text"?
At work, I sometimes have to encode or decode binary data, to which I have full specs, and a hex editor is an extremely valuable tool.
A hex editor is to binary data what a debugger is to code, a packet analyzer is to networking, and an oscilloscope is to electronics. These tools can be used for reverse engineering, but it is certainly not their only purpose.
I don’t work with binary files much these days but I still use hex editors a lot just to debug any weird rendering glitches in terminal emulators. The ability to see the exact character codes being generated rather than the terminal emulators interpretation of them is invaluable. Though for that purpose hexdump is usually sufficient.
Back in the 90s, when I was working with binary data regularly, I’d have killed for something like ImHex.
If you're writing tools that generate spec-based binary files, you need a debugger that lets you examine generated files at the binary level. For instance, I don't think you can do any OpenType font tool engineering (as in, working on applications that generate fonts) without having a good hex editor to check whether the binary internals of your files are structured correctly.
I can’t imagine firmware updates providing tangible performance gains aside from critical issues (which may affect performance). I just don’t think it’s really in the interest of these manufacturers to invest in R&D to improve an already existing and purchased product, as lame as that is.
People like this are ruining open source for the rest of us, and those poor maintainers really have their work cut out for them sorting through this slop.