Recent content in Samy's Blog on Samy's blog
AI coding agents run plugins with full system access. They can read your files, write code, execute commands. And right now, there is no mechanism to verify that the plugin files on disk are the same ones you reviewed and approved. Think about that for a second. You install a plugin. You review the code. Looks good. A week later, the author pushes an update. Or their account gets compromised. Or…
I nearly died. I won’t tell you what happened. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Just know that it happened, and that this was the second time I stared at the edge and the edge stared back. Also, I’m doing great. You’d never know I nearly got my card punched if you saw me a day before, and a day after it happened - in the physical world everything’s the same.
The Swordless Samurai is the story of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a peasant who rose to the rank of Kampaku or the emperor regent – the most powerful role in the Japanese government of that era. What makes his journey interesting, aside from being a peasant which in itself is a huge deal because it was almost impossible to break out of your social class back in the day (as far as I know, it was like this…
I genuinely love meeting new people and getting to know them. Still, small talk has always been a hit or miss for me, sometimes it just flows, and yet sometimes it crashes before ever taking off, so I decided to do something about it, and hence began my quest: to get better at small talk, get better at starting it, and become great at keeping it going. I hopped on Amazon and found this book with…
TL;DR: A nice and easy fantasy read – the plot is straightforward, and almost predictable which makes it a good choice for a short and healthy form of escape to disconnect from noises of daily life to recharge WARNING – Massive spoilers ahead. What is this whole thing about? My first exposure to Warhammer 40k was through a computer game , I didn’t quite follow the plot back then, but I enjoyed the…
A few months ago I was talking to a few colleagues about books and what’s everyone reading. One person mentioned she’s reading a fiction book by Brandon Sanderson, I hadn’t heard of him before, one google search later I was on his website in the “Start Here” section (link) , and next thing I knew, Amazon was telling me the book is ready to read on my Kindle. Ah! The perks of modernism!
One of the reasons I didn’t enjoy writing before was that my brain thinks too fast for my hands. Ideas and branches of thought flood my mind as I write, but my hands aren’t fast enough to put these fleeting thoughts on paper. The result? Writing was reliving the same battle that started in my brain and ended with my hands hurting from trying to keep up with the flow, and my psyche frustrated and…
I recently set up a local Paperless-ngx instance to manage the unending stream of paper documents I have to manage. As a part of this setup, I bought a Brother ADS-3300W – A wifi duplex scanner with an automatic document feeder that scans and uploads documents to an SFTP server (among other things). The SFTP server I set up is a simple Alpine container running OpenSSH that mounts the same…
Pain is an inevitable part of life, a subscription fee for living and doing things that matter. There’s no escaping it, no shortcuts, hacks or magic spells to make it disappear. Instead of running away from pain, I’ve learned to embrace it, to welcome it as a sign of growth and change. Looking back through my journal, I’ve noticed a consistent pattern: The amount of pain I have…
I can never have enough of two things: time, and mental energy. I’ve learned to value these so much that I have a mental checklist I go through to decide whether I want to spend them on something. Here are some of the things that helped me save my mental energy, and as a by-product my time: Default answer is No I’ve thought myself to say No. It’s a skill I had to learn on my own,…
__UPDATE - 22, Sept, 2024 ___ I have received two emails recently, one that said it worked and thanked me for sharing this, and another one that said it did not work for them. Unfortunantely I don’t have this monitor anymore to try and figure out why. I recently got a new monitor, a MAG 274UPF to be exact. I’m liking it so far, but I noticed that I’m getting a lot of Eject "NO…
A few days ago Tailscale stopped working on my Mac. The tray icon was there, but the context menu wouldn’t show up, and I couldn’t login from the command line either. The regular saviour duo, reinstalling, and rebooting,didn’t do much either. Looking at the console logs, I could see a weird message: Received error: fetch control key: Get…
TL;DR Not recommended. 1/10. I recently picked up “Dopamine Detox” by Thibaut Meurisse. I’d seen it mentioned across various platforms, and thought since I’m on the topic, “Why not give it a go?” Welp, let me give you the lowdown on what I found. Skin Deep The first thing I noticed was that the book was… well, pretty shallow. Like, if this book were a…
I’ve come to realize that regardless of my efforts, my workday is consistently interrupted. Despite blocking my calendar, setting my Slack status to DND, and disabling all notifications, there’s always someone with an urgent matter that disrupts my flow (and that’s OK). It’s part of the job, addressing time-sensitive queries that can influence the outcome of a deal or…
During one of our casual talks over lunch, a friend of mine tossed an interesting thought my way: " We all should listen more to poets, not pros". I think it’s a variation of this quote: In the very end civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets. Jonas Mekas Something about it really hit home, you know? Maybe because I’ve always been a bit of a…
This Unending Pursuit of Being Happy A very dear friend of mine recommended “Dopamine Nation” to me not so long ago, almost as if he knew the internal dialogue I was having with myself. It was like fate had a hand in it. I found myself wrestling with a prevalent message that’s been echoed from all directions, saying “You should always be happy”; if you’re not,…
Picture this: It’s 2 am, you’re on your fifth coffee, and you’re up against a deadline that seemed impossible two hours ago. Suddenly, a magical AI genie (like ChatGPT) appears, ready to help you finish that report, presentation, or spreadsheet. What a lifesaver! But wait – are you sharing too much with this digital genie? (Hint: Yes.) The Curious Case of Accidental Leaks AI…
What a bet really is: a decision about an uncertain future Annie Duke Around a year and a half ago, I was working on a critical and time-sensitive project and realized that I was frequently making decisions without fully understanding how I arrived at them. Despite making the right choices, I struggled to explain my reasoning and thought process. How was I coming up with these decisions?…
About six months ago, I decided it was time for a change so I went ahead and looked for a new job. After interviewing at a few places and getting a few offers, I chose the one I liked best and joined the team. I wanted to be better at owning my career, so I started looking for resources to learn from before my start date. That’s when I found “The First 90 Days,” among others -…
TL;DR Open the native Mail app on Windows (10 or 11), find the invalid event in the Calendar (bottom left), and delete it from there. I’ve been having an annoying problem lately, I tend to set reminders for recurring tasks in my calendar, why have something take up expensive space in my brain when a software can do it for me? However, I recently had an annual event that I no longer needed,…
I was recently reviewing an application written in Python for possible security vulnerabilities. I came across a file upload feature where the user had control over the filename. It looked like I might be able to overwrite any arbitrary file on the system; however, the filename was properly sanitized to prevent directory traversal and there was no way around the mitigation. I started by reading…
Why did I choose to quit caffeine? A few months ago I started noticing a few things that bothered me for a while but I kept shutting them down. I felt like my heart was missing a beat or two from time to time. It’s a very unpleasant feeling, just like when you hear a shockingly bad news. I later learned that these “missed beats” are called heart palpitation. I was feeling a mild…
OpenSuse Tumbleweed comes mostly ready for use with YubiKey (Assuming you have already configured your Yubikey before). All you need to do is a few simple configuration: Create .gnupg directory under your home directory and cd into it mkdir ~/.gnupgp && cd $_ Create gpg-agent.conf to store the required gpg-agent settings vim gpg-agent.conf Tell gpg-agent which tty, SSH_AUTH_SOCK, and program to…
TV is like fast food for the brain, easy to grab, easy to absorb, little to no benefits. Social media is like cocaine; you get high on likes and pseudo-approval of random strangers, then comes the hangover and yearning for another fix. Reading, on the other hand, is like eating healthy, but is it enough? I know quite a few fit people; if you measure their vitals, everything is within range.
We all have done glue work. You talk to person A and ask for a specific field in their API’s contract, then you go back to system B and write some code to do X, so system C can do Y that’s needed by feature Z. You make arrangements and glue stuff together to make something happen. Glue work (including glue code) is not fun, but it is necessary. It is necessary if we sign up to do the…
Whether you’re working toward a goal, changes are inevitable. After all, the very purpose of reaching a goal, whatever the goal might be, is to make a permanent change, to form a new identity of some sort, hopefully, a positive one. Weight loss, starting your own business, getting that product out the door, or adopting a new agile process have all but one in common - You need to make changes…
Is it a duck, or a rabbit? “Kaninchen und Ente”(“Rabbit and Duck”) from the 23 October 1892 issue of Fliegende Blätter Reality is our interpretation of truth. It is, therefore, possible to have multiple realities describing one truth, they can even be in contradiction with each other. The reality is that this image is a duck, and it is also a rabbit. You can see Mona Lisa…
Breaking a rule means having to make an exception. An exception means an edge case that the rule did not cover. Making an exception means that the rule was not specific enough, that it was too general and too broad, and that the rule’s criteria matched against situations that the rule does not apply to. On the one hand, good rules must be specific not over-generalized, but on the other hand,…
The Practice: Shipping Creative Work The Practice is by certainly one of the most amazing books I read in the past few years. I always thought what will I respond if someday someone asked me this question? “What’s the book you gifted the most?” I know I really want to say “The Practice by Seth Godin”, but I’m also pretty sure that it’s not going to happen,…
SG-1100 is a decent firewall for a home setup, It uses PFSense as its core and has 1 Gbps throughput. The only problem is that if it loses power for any reason like power outage or getting unplugged, it sometimes goes into a boot loop because of filesystem gets corrupted. You definitely don’t want this to happen to a production firewall. The fix is easy though. 1- Connect to the device using…
I eventually got tired of ugly fonts, and decided to install a few fonts. After searching a bit and not finding a copy-paste-enter solution, I decided to install some fonts from Google Fonts. Browsing through the catalog, I got confused by all the choices I had in front of me, so I did what a 5 year old would do when faced with more than one option : Choose them all.
I hear it often Let’s do X because it’s the low hanging fruit. Low hanging fruits are easy, and dull. They are the opposite of curiosity, creativity and innovation. They are in the realm of the obvious. Dealing with the obvious doesn’t require you to take risks, or to explore the uncharted territories or to deal with uncertainty. There is no need to learn anything new because you…
I was reviewing a huge spaghetti PHP codebase some days back and I needed to have a general understanding of what’s what. So I compiled a list of things I was interested in and made a grep command to search for them. This is not by any means complete, at least not in its current form, I’m just leaving it here for future reference, I may change/update it later on.
I was listening to the Tim Ferris Show podcast where he interviewed Seth Godin . As I was listening I suddenly experienced a satori. I understood why everyone says to make helping others your goal. I thought I knew what they meant, I thought they say that because the goal of helping other humans is a noble one, a goal worthy of one’s life. When you make helping others your priority you find…
It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently. Warren Buffet Go the extra mile to make sure everyone who leaves your company has a pleasant leaving experience. The last impression is a lasting impression.
Manual code review helps with finding vulnerabilities that can stay hidden from automated tools. This post describes my personal method of conducting manual reviews. Doing a manual code review is not an easy task, it requires the auditor to have software development knowledge, working knowledge of the programming language used to write the code you’re going to audit, and a deep understanding…
Sort your emails by “From” instead of “Date”. It gives me a better view of which ones I should delete, and which ones I should take action on or plan for. I’ve been asking myself: How can I change my “view” in different areas of my life? Could re-ordering things help me to see a new view? What if changing something, anything, helps with breaking the frame…
I measured my weight loss progress based on lost pounds. I measured my financial success based on my income. I measured my career success based on the number of interviews and job offers I get. I measured my social media success based on the number of followers. I measured the health of my relationships based on the time I spend with my friends and family. And they all have ONE thing in common:
Most of the world's seven billion people found their destinies largely determined at the moment of birth. There are, of course, plenty of Horatio Alger stories in this world. Indeed, America abounds with them. But for literally billions of people, where they are born and who gives them birth, along with their gender and native intellect, largely determine the life they will experience. Warren. E.…
I have a habit of writing about my day in a journal, It’s been a long time since I started doing this and it really paid off. I also have a decision journal, I write about my decisions there, things like deciding t do business with someone or rejecting it, or about buying a stock or not, or why I like or don’t like a certain person, it’s all there.
A while ago I was doing a security review of a web application, I came across a piece of JavaScript code. It was obviously vulnerable, I could trigger the vulnerability with a typical <img> payload, but not with the classic <script> type. I wondered why, and started digging deeper. The vulnerable JavaScript code I was talking was something like this (changed a bit for easier reading): var…
A while back ago I was teaching son of a friend about different search and sorting algorithms. He was so fascinated about this new world, and asked me to recommend some books he can read on the subject. The de facto books like The Algorithm Design Manual or Introduction to Algorithms are too academic and serious for his age, so I searched for a substitute and found a gem: Grokking Algorithms .
The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*CK is tiny book compared to all other books in this genre, yet don’t let this tininess fool you. Its premise is simple, yet so deep and powerful that I read it twice in a row only to find it even more enjoyable the second time. It’s talking about what you should give a F about, and what you should not, because after all, as the author, Mark Manson puts…
There are times when you need to find all files that may prove useful for escalating privilege either during penetration testing, forensic analysis or securing a Linux server. Doing so is as simple as using the infamous find command. find command is one the most powerful tools in every Linux user arsenal, and IMHO every Linux user should know how to use these tools i.e. find, sed, awk, grep,…
How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie. There’s not much that I can say about this amazing book that hasn’t been said already. I’ll go with my own personal experience with this one, how did it influence my behaviour, my attitude, and my relationships. Dale Carnegie is an amazing author, if dancing with a pen on a paper was a sport, he’d be the ultimate…
Documenting, writing, and thinking. That’s the goal, and the why behind this blog.
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