There's an old joke about two mathematicians in a cafe. They're arguing about whether ordinary people understand basic mathematics. The first mathematician says yes, of course they do! And the second disagrees.

The second mathematician goes to the toilet, and the first calls over their blonde waitress. He says to her, "in a minute my friend is going to come back from the toilet, and I'm going to ask you a question. I want you to reply, "one third x cubed.'"

"One ther desque," she repeats.

"One third x cubed," the mathematician tries again.

"One thir dek scubed."

"That'll do," he says, and she heads off. The second mathematician returns from the toilet and the first lays him a challenge. "I'll prove it. I'll call over that blonde waitress and ask her a simple integration question, and see if she can answer." The second mathematician agrees, and they call her over.

"My friend and I have a question," the first mathematician asks the waitress. "Do you know what is the integral of x squared?"

"One thir dek scubed," she answers and the second mathematician is impressed and concedes the point.

And as she walks away, the waitress calls over her shoulder,

"Plus a constant."

One of the most useful concepts ever:

the Curse of Knowledge.

Explaining something to someone? Zoom out. Back up. What if that person were an alien, how much more context would you need to explain?

The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, who is communicating with others, assumes that others have information that is only available to themselves, assuming they all share a background and understanding. This bias is also called by some authors the curse of expertise.

Just yesterday I ran into some chucklehead here on Lemmy that had convinced themselves that the average person would interpret "crypto" to mean SSL rather than cryptocurrency.

All the code I know is stackoverflow search results.

Isn't there a version about mineralogy?

It's insane how close that handwriting is to randall's, did he make multiple versions of this comic or was this written by a professional forger?

NOP sled gang rise up

NOP is $EA, of course, and... um...

...sorry, I'm just a Commodore 64 scrub, I don't know nothing about this high and mighty Intel 8086 nonsense.

[looking up]

...it's 0x90 on IA-32? WHAT? Someone told me every processor used 0xEA because that was commonly agreed and readily apparent. ...guess I was wrong

I feel attacked.

I mean who hasnt watched "Assembly Language in 100 seconds" by Fireship

I mean I'm only missing int3

It still confuses what basic computer skills the average person lacks. Like, how are you even supposed to troubleshoot your computer, if you don't know the basics about your computer?

I recently took a class on ARM assembly, and yet I don't even know half of these x86 instructions.

of course nods along

I’m pretty sure I’ve had this exact conversation. Took me a minute to understand what the point was.

They are talking about computer things, that's about how familiar I am with whatever they are talking about.

As a bytecode tinkerer, I'd say considering NOP to be global knowledge is a slippery slope.

"oh you laughed at that joke despite the fact that the bridge followed the falling action instead of preceding the punch word? Amateurs shouldn't be allowed to watch comedy."

Now I want to know what int3 does.

Here's the source:

https://xkcd.com/2501/

And the alt text:

How could anyone consider themselves a well-rounded adult without a basic understanding of silicate geochemistry? Silicates are everywhere! It's hard to throw a rock without throwing one!

Alt text: "How could anyone consider themselves a well-rounded adult without a basic understanding of silicate geochemistry? Silicates are everywhere! It's hard to throw a rock without throwing one!"

Is there any situation where you'd want to remember the opcodes? Disassemblers should give you user-friendly assembly code, without any need to look at the raw numbers. Maybe it's useful to remember which instructions are pseudo instructions (so you know stuff like jz (jump if zero) being the same as je (jump if equal) making it easier to understand the disassembly), but I don't think you need to remember the opcode numbers for that.

Edit: Maybe with malware analysis where the malware in question may be obfuscated in interesting ways to make the job of binary analysis harder?