Try 1989, with the advent of the standardized credit score.
913 karma · joined January 4, 2023
/* 1-21. Write a program entab that replaces strings of blanks by the minimum number of tabs and blanks to achieve the same spacing. Use the same tab stops as for detab. When either a tab or a single blank would suffice to reach a tab stop, which should be given preference? */
When confronted with a problem like this, I begin to think, "Well what's the most robust way of going about this task? What's a simple, good, and useful rule that will accomplish the stated goal?" And I'm not quite sure what happens next - figuring that out might require some deeper introspection, but I end up with the proposed solution:
"Any time we encounter consecutive whitespace characters, including spaces, tabs and newlines, ignore the literal characters and instead simply add up exactly how many columns of whitespace they are going to take up, and then, find the smallest number of newlines, tabs and spaces we can print to the screen to match that amount of whitespace. This way we accomplish the stated goal and also end up with a nice text sanitizer."
I'm still mulling all of this over but I'm pretty confident this goes so far beyond the stated problem that it could be considered self sabotage. There's a lot of moving parts to my solution and I don't have the cognitive tools to break up a problem like that yet. (I'd like to eventually of course, but I have to stay focus on what I'm doing!)
Tangentially related maybe? Witches' Loaves https://www.littlefox.com/hk/supplement/org/C0002439
So the attacker needs write/execute on the machine before the attack can take place? Doesn't seem very serious to me. Maybe I'm misunderstanding this and someone can explain what a realistic exploit chain for this would look like?
Sentiment farming is really bad and scary and we should be talking about it a lot more.