my 2025 predictions in computer science

packing for defcon, is there any software I missed?. I've got: .Adobe Flash.IE6.Windows XP (SP2).MS Office (VBA Macros ON).Log4j (2.14)

no, I’m not lazy. as a video creator with 47TB+ of projects and counting, the time investment is insane. It feels so close; natural language search for feature recognition across photos and cloud documents is already quite good. I want it deeply integrated at the OS level.

more than anything else, I want an LLM filesystem. I don’t want to *think* about files, how they are organized. give me a semantic system organized by concepts so I can ask things like:. "show me the pdf of that paper I used in my youtube video on PTX 6 months ago".

Then URLs came along, and messed everything up. Berners‑Lee’s design goal was maximum reuse of existing Internet infrastructure; meshing hypertext, DNS and TCP. URLs look *weird* because they have two hierarchies, plus a scheme:. Outward through the network .(Most->Least

It started out wonderfully, exactly matching the postal system. DNS resolution began at the root, splitting down into smaller chunks (walking the tree). Keep in mind, this was before URLs were a thing:. Fred @ PC7 . LCS . MIT . ARPA.Most specific -> Least specific.

In the ARPANET era, every host->address mapping lived in a single text file. Entries were updated *by hand* at the Stanford Research Institute. By the 80s, this was getting out of control. DNS was developed as the automated map from IP addresses to human-readable domains.

Web addresses are kind of backwards. Postal addresses follow a logical structure from most to least mutable:. Laurie Wired, 308 Negra Arroyo Lane, Albuquerque, New Mexico. URLs have protocols (https), TLDs (.com), and subdomains mixed in a wild order. Here's why:

At the time, the iBit API had no limit for JSON calls. If you imagine an attacker spamming 20 requests per second, that’s about $2,000 a day at today’s prices!. The bug was reported on HackerOne and fixed, where the researcher was awarded a whopping…$1000 bounty :(

iBit, a Bitcoin exchange, encountered a “free money” glitch for this reason. Orders were parsed as floats; you could create an order smaller than a single satoshi (minimum unit of Bitcoin). Source wallet would round down (no change), target wallet rounded up (+1 satoshi).

Go ahead and try this. Let’s add three dimes. Open up a python terminal, and type in:. 0.10 + 0.10 + 0.10. Uh oh. See that little remainder? . It may seem trivial, but this mistake happens more often than you’d expect!

An early rule you learn in computer science is:. “Never store currency as floats”. Nearly every popular language has special, built-in types for money. But why?. The *majority* of money-like numbers have no float representation, accumulating to massive errors over time:

if you google "bad UX" all the results are in comic sans lol

yes, the card (was) real, released in 2009. ironically, the holding bank was kind of a privacy nightmare

it’s okay guys lunch is on me. *swipes linux credit card*. *instantly declines*

Link to Tool:.

Full Video Overview (+ glitch token behavior!).

Berners-Lee warned that powerful languages have “all the attraction of being an open-ended hook into which anything can be placed”. It’s hard to do, but sometimes you should ask yourself: can this be declared instead of coded?. Purposefully constraining yourself to the

Imagine an alternate-reality Web, where HTML didn’t exist. Java applets would have been a serious contender; they certainly allowed for rich interactivity. Yet, without a way to freely scrape simply formatted data, search engines would be a non-starter.

Don’t take my word for it. Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of HTML, HTTP, etc) had this to say:. “the less powerful the language, the more you can do with the data. ”. HTML is purposefully *not* a real programming language. The constraint pushed innovation to data processing.