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Comment by sterlinm | Hacker News Reader

What's the actual use case for this? I don't mean that critically, it's just not a thing I have ever needed to do personally. The GIFs on the linked page look like like the streaming code in The Matrix (i.e. incomprehensible).

I feel similarly interested but baffled by GNU poke, which has been posted here a few times. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26274466

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Author here. It's a purely intuitive display. I've found it helpful developing creative new binary formats like Actually Portable Executable. The eye grows accustomed to recognizing certain types of data based on what these glyphs show us. I don't even see the glyphs anymore, I just see elf, utf8, redhead. For a more detailed answer to what's shown in the particular gifs on that page, see this Reddit comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/commandline/comments/jr6bat/memzoom...

Thanks!

Here’s a good post by a kernel hacker that suggests how a tool like this can aid in debugging subtle corruption: https://blog.valerieaurora.org/2008/02/17/howto-debug-silent...

Not quite the same thing, but I've found loading binary files in Audacity (with dithering turned off of course) is useful for distinguishing structured data from random noise in a corrupted file (though a hex editor with an entropy measurement might help as well), as well as splicing together two files, one incomplete, another corrupted, by eyeballing the sections that match.

I imagine it having uses very similar to Veles or cantor.dust, which use various 3D mappings to help you recognize patterns in binary data. This one just runs in a 2D terminal, which means you can use it more places more conveniently, though it has fewer pixels at its disposal.

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