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A comment on Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution.

Re:Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution by ChuckMcM on Tuesday March 02, 2021 @03:06PM (#26319882)
It takes a certain kind of puzzle curiosity to do this sort of thing. I find I would have re-written Lotus 1-2-3 from scratch rather than do all this but that is just another way of spending one's "cleverness beans" as they used to say.

People with this level of curiosity and puzzle affinity make great security researchers/staff. In their own way older binaries are all puzzle boxes that are holding some number of exploitable vulnerabilities to make them do things that their original developer either didn't intend or didn't foresee. Finding them gives a dopamine hit.

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Re:Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution by dj_mc_merlin on Tuesday March 02, 2021 @05:43PM (#26322154)
Hehe, this is Tavis (from Project Zero), so he might know a bit about security.

Dopamine hits are probably a large determining factor of what kind of programmer you are. Making something from scratch has a longer glow, and a fulfilling crescendo, but nothing compares with the joy of finding the right thing to whisper to a machine to get it to do something it was never meant to. Whether it be displaying DOS interfaces in wide screen or dumping its memory. The pain of looking for the right combination only makes finding it sweeter.

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