> Just imagine for a second, that a programmer like this, or a group like Future Crew decides to...focus on just one goal – create a small code that steals your financial data or helps to re-calibrate a Nuclear Reactor. How do you think, would they succeed?

These are no doubt talented coders but the article makes out that they posses some kind of superpower and can do whatever they want with computers. Coding graphics like that in assembler is an impressive feat but it in no way means that these guys could just "break the Windows or Apple integrated security systems" if they wanted to.

Another thing is that we don't see how their code generalises - how it performs for different scenes not shown in the demos. The world changes and one's code has to adapt to these changes, it is no good super-optimising some assembly to generate a scene in 64kb when it takes 3 years to edit that same assembly to generate a different scene.

Depends on your goal. If you're playing code golf and the whole point is a small executable then it is "good"

But to a point I think you were making, skills to do that do not necessarily translate to real-world software engineering.

I felt like this article was a bait-and-switch: it's on an anti-virus site, mentions the comback of low-level techniques in viruses, then switches topics to demoscene. I found the demoscene write-ups too breathless; claiming Airframe by Prime group is the "mother and father of All modern 3D aviation and space simulators" when it was released 12 years after FS1 Flight Simulator.

I remember the old virus scene with groups like 29a that made a virus that could run on different OS and processors. And viruses that rewrote themselves every time they transmit themselves so the anti-virus could not find their signature.

What you propose seems way more interesting a topic. Any writeup about this you would suggests to read about the history of those groups?

Most of the sites have disappeared, as most of the groups, you have some information http://vxer.org/ some more info about 29a http://phrack.org/issues/69/16.html but i don't know if there's something written like an ordered recollection of those days.

I was hoping the article was sarcastic and it was trying to teach young coders that machine code isn't actually scary.

Instead I got an article about the demo scene.