AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt

Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt by sznio on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @08:34AM (#50365321)

don't we already have the NX bit?

and it's not sufficient anyways. even with NX you could have the attacker control a function pointer you call. in any sufficiently complex program you'll have enough widgets to build anything you want just out of data.

code and data are the same thing. whatever inputs your system receives is "code" that your application interprets, just like your application is the code that the CPU interprets. turtles all the way down.

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Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt by intrasight on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @09:31AM (#50366042)

In a Harvard architecture, it's not possible to point the CPU at data.

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Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt by mxey on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @12:51PM (#50369095)

What about return oriented programming?

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Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt by rootlocus on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @03:32PM (#50371103)

So JIT is not possible on a Harvard architecture?

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Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt by TeMPOraL on Thursday November 05, 2026 @04:01AM (#50376883)

But that's just irrelevant confusion of terms.

There is no fundamental distinction between code and data. This separation does not exist as category in actual reality (and I vividly remember that being one of the bigger points GEB made, early on). They're fundamentally one and the same, and classifying some bits as data and some as code is a point of view that really depends on what you're doing and why.

As for Harvard architecture - every time you branch on your "data", you're effectively executing it, and your "code" can be seen as emulating a system where your "data" is the actual code.

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