The Room Was Out of Air
A room can lose oxygen when authority asks for deference before it has accepted burden, but the allergy to counterfeit authority can become its own vanity.
lospino.so writing
Essays, notes, and occasional project updates from lospino.so.
Latest posts
The Sentence Changed the Room
A real conversation does not merely exchange finished thoughts; it changes the room, which is why velocity without hospitality can become a form of taking.
The Supports That Leave a Scar
Support matters because it has to know when to hold, when to leave, and which marks its removal should honestly leave behind.
The Scorecard Was Not the Candidate
A scorecard can discipline judgment, but it does not make the candidate identical to the evidence we manage to collect.
The Pew Does Not Argue Back
The first church service that reached me did so through exhaustion, belonging, and constraint, which is why the comfort was both real and difficult to trust.
The Model Is the Evaluation Protocol
A model score arrives as one number. Recovering what it means requires reconstructing the entire decision and evaluation protocol that produced it.
The Presents Still Wrapped
A Christmas present left wrapped six months after Christmas turns provision, memory, and distance into something the tape cannot quite hold.
Abrade After the Happy Path
Abrade v0.3.0 updates a small C++ crawler for modern TLS, body-level evidence, clearer automation, and repeatable releases.
MIL-STD-1553: Authority, Cadence, and Role-Bound Claims
More visible role structure still does not turn a transaction artifact into whole-system knowledge.
Modbus RTU: Boundaries, Silence, and Observer Reconstruction
A timing gap can help bound a transaction-shaped artifact without explaining the register meaning.
UART: Timing Is Part of the Evidence
A decoded UART byte is a timing-relative reconstruction, not an atom the artifact simply hands over.
The Badge That Would Not Become Small
A red reminder badge becomes personal when a small attestation, portal, or form exposes the gap between visible reliability and hidden administrative friction.
DBC: Where Signals Get Their Authority
A signal map can make bytes legible without making the decoded value authoritative.
Classical CAN: Frames Without a Story
CAN frames show structure and recurrence before they show sender identity or signal meaning.
A Bus Artifact Is Not the System
Five rows can support useful claims about the artifact before they support claims about the machine.
The Water Keeps the Books
The body can feel power before the system has received it; the discipline is learning to hear what the boat, crew, and water report back.
The Model Wants to Exist
A model may begin as appetite rather than proof, but measurement alters the system and can quietly acquire authority.
After the Essay
A prize can validate capacity, but it cannot tell you what that capacity is for.
Calls Are Now a Security Surface
The finale: calls and returns are no longer just conventions; platforms increasingly enforce parts of the control-flow protocol.
The ABI Is the Boundary
Native boundaries stay hard even when high-level languages make them look ergonomic.
It Works Until the Stack Walker Arrives
A post about the failure path: modern ABI contracts must be explainable to unwinders and tooling, not just executable on the sunny path.
The Rule That Actually Runs
Hackers are interesting not because they disregard rules, but because they learn what a system actually enforces, and who has authority to repair it after it runs.
ARM64 Is Not Just x64 With More Registers
ARM64 separates ISA facts from platform ABI rules: link registers, x18, stack policy, and ARM64EC all live at different layers.
Varargs: The Function Call With Missing Type Information
A focused post on System V AMD64 varargs, Windows x64 floating-point duplication, and the practical advice to avoid variadic FFI.
Hidden Arguments Are Everywhere
Result storage, receivers, runtime context, and adjusted object pointers are fields the source call may not spell.
The Bugs That Make ABI Rules Memorable
The adversarial post in the ABI series: learn ABI rules by watching what breaks when the call packet is malformed.
Same Function, Three Realities
A side-by-side ABI comparison built around one boring five-integer function.
After the Thing Stands
Some work is ignition. Some work is stewardship. The mistake is trying to make them feel the same.
The Function Signature Is a Lie
Hidden result storage shows why the source signature is not the whole call.
The Question Before the Number
Most statistical failures begin before the calculation. They begin when the question, unit, baseline, time axis, missingness, or join has not survived inspection.
The Workshop Has Changed
On coming back to the bench, finding warp drive in the drawer, and relearning selection under abundance.
C Constructs That Still Don’t Work in C++ — and a Few That Changed
A language-mode-aware update on the C constructs that still break or change meaning in modern C++.
Gargoyle, a decade later
A nearly decade-later look at Gargoyle as temporal memory-state research: what the original Win32 proof taught, what the refresh fixed, and why better evidence matters.
Airborne Connectivity Doesn't Need to Come with Cybersecurity Baggage
An Aerospace America essay on aviation connectivity, cybersecurity risk, and designing protection into aircraft systems.
Protecting Against Aviation Cyber Attacks
An Aerospace America essay on aviation cybersecurity, embedded systems, and visibility into aircraft data.
Space Race Needs Better Cybersecurity
An opinion essay on space-system cybersecurity and the need to invest in resilient space infrastructure.
Emerging Themes in Cybersecurity - 2021
A co-authored First In essay on cybersecurity themes and where technical pressure was accumulating in 2021.
C++ Crash Course
A reflection on modern C++, technical books, and the work of teaching systems programming clearly.
C Constructs That Don't Work in C++
C idioms that fail or change meaning in C++, from pointer conversions to prototypes.
Fish Out of Water
An essay on why military personnel systems struggle to retain technical talent.
Vulnerability Patched in Democratic Donor Database
A responsible-disclosure writeup on predictable subscription-management links, entropy, and unauthenticated account portals.
gargoyle, a memory scanning evasion technique
A Windows technique using APCs, tail calls, a ROP gadget, and a stack trampoline to evade memory scans.
Defeating the USB Rubber Ducky with Beamgun
Introducing Beamgun, a lightweight USB Rubber Ducky defense for Windows.
Underhanded C Contest Submission (2015)
A small Underhanded C submission where a plausible overflow check hides the actual failure mode.
Common x86 Calling Conventions
A practical guide to cdecl, stdcall, and fastcall on x86, with stack layouts and NASM examples.
Getting Started with Reverse Engineering
A static-analysis walkthrough using strings, dumpbin, and IDA on a tiny Windows binary.