Kind of tangential, but who are these people who are so comfortable with disassembling a high level language binary, reading assembly, and then making statements about branch prediction and other such low level esoterica? I've only ever meet people like that maybe two or thee times in my career, and yet it seems like every other blog post I read in certain language circles everyone is some kind of ASM and Reverse Engineering expert.
....And then feel OK resorting to ChatGPT for the explanation.
Seriously that threw me, and maybe it makes sense in this context but it seems strange for someone with such an apparent depth of technical knowledge leaning on an LLM for anything.
Partly because that's often not what we're supposed to do; the stuff under the hood "just works" and we're meant to use it to write features, not worry about optimising the stuff that happens under the hood.
And partly it's because the stuff under the hood is increasingly weird and bizarre. Branch prediction is weird, and I still don't understand why that extra print statement changes the branch prediction. Why does it predict `v > maxV` is true when the alternative is to print something, but it doesn't predict that when the alternative is to do nothing?
Is it because printing is expensive, and therefore the branch predictor is going to strongly prefer avoiding that? It's weird that we'd basically have to deceive our code into compiling into a more performant form.
I don't want to have to second guess the compiler.
I see COTS products using ldap memberof queries without LDAP_MATCHING_RULE_IN_CHAIN and stating definitively in their documentation that nested groups are bad (despite decades of best practice).
I see product documentation recommending authenticating against LDAP instead of kerberos, despite the underlying libraries having full kerberos support.
I see sslverify: no, and flags to ignore SSH TOFU warnings, and recommendations to avoid SSH gssapi-keyex (WHY?????), and security approached by buying ever more products creating ever more complexity.
Yes, things "just work" in a horrible, 'youre stuck with your vendors forever' sort of way that results in lengthy outages every 6 months due to mounting, intractable technical debt. But things don't have to be this way, you just need people who are willing to ask "why" or "is that necessary" or "can it be better".