Connecting a 1980s Pinball Machine to the Internet

React Is Holding Me Hostage

G-3PO: A Protocol Droid for Ghidra

Issue #338

2/23/2023

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Connecting a 1980s Pinball Machine to the Internet

Published: 21 February 2023
Tags: fpga, hardware

Eli Lipsitz describes building a device that makes it possible for a pinball machine from 1984 to automatically upload scores to the internet.
Some highlights:

  • The device taps into the machine’s memory bus and monitors the game state, uploading scores after each game
  • Leans heavily into hardware over software
  • Includes design files and code on GitHub for anyone interested in building the device themselves


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React Is Holding Me Hostage

Published: 22 February 2023
Tags: rant, react

EmNudge shares their opinion on React, and how it has changed over the years.
Some highlights:

  • Explores how the framework has evolved
  • Highlights the problems introduced by hooks
  • React is just more complicated than other alternatives, but has other benefits like being more popular and battle-tested


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G-3PO: A Protocol Droid for Ghidra

Published: 21 December 2022
Tags: ai, machine learning, reverse engineering

Olivia Lucca Fraser discusses the motivation and rationale for building a tool that elicits high-level explanatory comments for decompiled function code from the GPT-3 large language model.
Some highlights:

  • Reverse engineers already have plenty of tools for disassembling binaries, but missing tools for explaining what the disassembled code is doing
  • Machine learning is great at giving a rough bird's eye view of what code is doing
  • Sketches out the design of the new tool


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How did I do?

* Amazing
* Articles not relevant to me
* Articles were relevant, but badly written
* Summaries told me everything I wanted to know
* I like turtles

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Stats (updated daily)

Sent: 3053

Opens: 1397

Clicks: 299

Link Clicks Clicks % Unique Clicks Unique Clicks %
Connecting a 1980s Pinball Machine to the Internet 52 21.05% 55 20.68
React Is Holding Me Hostage 140 56.68% 147 55.26
G-3PO: A Protocol Droid for Ghidra 55 22.27% 64 24.06

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