Alice, Bob, and Charlie would all say "I find getting up the hills of San Francisco difficult". But "doesn't everyone find that hard" conflates the causes and severity of the difficulty for the three of them in a way that isn't useful for making their complaints feel heard, or addressing the complaints such that they don't have that issue.
For example:
Alice could get an electric wheelchair.
Bob could take public transit / Ubers up, or get rides from their friends.
Right. But then when someone says "I see the symptom of broken legs everywhere now. When the blog author said they had trouble getting up the hills of San Francisco, I just knew they must have an undiagnosed broken leg", it's fair to be more than a little skeptical.
It seems silly because a broken leg is obvious and easy to diagnose. So the idea that someone has an undiagnosed broken leg is absurd.
A lot of illnesses are not as easy to spot. Even illnesses that have clear diagnostic factors might be undiagnosed if no one has done the right tests. For instance, gallbladder disease. Easy to test and diagnose, but only if someone has gone to the doctor and the doctor has done the right tests. If you've experienced gallbladder disease, you know the symptoms. So you might start noticing them in other people who just think its indigestion or a pulled muscle or whatever.
That analogy ignores what was actually confusing about this topic. A better analogy would be:
Alice has a medical problem related to hill walking so she walks up the hill wearing sneakers, Bob also had a medical problem related to hill walking so he uses a handkerchief to wipe off his sweat while walking up the hill, and Charlie, the out of shape adult, also uses sneakers and a handkerchief but not in a medical way even though his feet hurt without sneakers and he does sweat.
ADHD-I has a range of symptoms where the person needs 5 or more that are significantly disruptive to their life for at least 6 months.
So when someone reads the first paragraph and immediately thinks the author has to be ADHD because they talk about 1 of these symptoms that in isolation the majority of the world has, I ask "but aren't we all like this?"
The question on my mind: how do you figure out what the functions do without reverse engineering?
If I were to guess, you're saying that you reverse engineer the API boundary without reverse engineering the implementation. But then figuring out what the API contact is without documentation seems intractable for most API boundaries.
For context, my tooling is a Ghidra extension, so there's all the usual Ghidra stuff that applies here.
Indeed, it depends what the API boundary is for the selection to be exported.
If it's the whole program without some well-known libraries (like the C runtime library for a statically linked executable or the Psy-Q SDK for a PlayStation video game), then the API boundary is trivial in the sense that it's a documented one. The hard part is actually figuring where those libraries are so that you can cut them out of your selection while exporting.
If it's a particular subset internal to the program then it's trickier because you don't have that (but if you know you want to export it, then you must already know something about it). Traditional reverse-engineering techniques do apply here, it's just that you only care about the ABI boundary instead of the whole implementation, so it's usually less work to figure out.
However, if you get it wrong then the toolchain will usually not detect it and you'll have some very exotic undefined behavior on your hands when you try to run your Frankensteinized program.
Troubleshooting these issues can be very tricky because my tooling doesn't generate debugging symbols, so the debugging experience is atrocious.
I've always managed to muddle through so far, but one really nasty case did take me a couple of weekends to track down (don't cut across a variable when you're exporting because you'll truncate it, which can lead among other things to corrupting whatever was laid out next in memory at runtime when the original delinked code tries to write to it).
But then I can't spend my money for several weeks - the feature that crypto can't implement is having the reversal window be wider than the lockout window.
> I should be able to state that two species have a different lifespan based on a difference in mean age of death - without needing to provide any specific biological mechanism in my study.
You need to control for confounders. For example, if I told you:
- Mean lifespan of species 1 is: 3 years
- Mean lifespan of species 2 is: 10 years
Does that mean that species 2 has a longer lifespan than species 1?
What happens when you find out that species 1 is domesticated cattle, which has (almost) all of its males slaughtered at age 2?
You could then say "I meant for two species that are in controlled conditions", but now you need to define what conditions you're controlling, which implies what casual mechanisms you're controlling for.
> which implies what casual mechanisms you're controlling for.
Without thinking terribly deeply about it, it seems like this could be modified to
"what correlated mechanisms we're controlling for", in which case, yes I think if we controlled for the highly correlated variable of "does this cow live on a meat farm" with the mean age, we would be able to make broad claims about cattle lifespan without needing to be privy to the internal mechanisms of the agriculture industry
Alice is in a wheelchair.
Bob has a broken leg.
Charlie is unfit, but otherwise a healthy adult.
Alice, Bob, and Charlie would all say "I find getting up the hills of San Francisco difficult". But "doesn't everyone find that hard" conflates the causes and severity of the difficulty for the three of them in a way that isn't useful for making their complaints feel heard, or addressing the complaints such that they don't have that issue.
For example:
Alice could get an electric wheelchair.
Bob could take public transit / Ubers up, or get rides from their friends.
Charlie could take up running with friends.