I wish I had more time and I'd throw Calibre at it.
This is just a job posting in disguise for Jane Street: solve the puzzle, get a call from one of their recruiters.
This is absolutely not how reverse engineering a digital logic ASIC works.
Either the story got embellished through retellings, or this person was a fantasist.
There are people who hack on GPUs but it’s done at the software level.
I did get a kick out of imagining a scene where someone is trying to connect an oscilloscope to a circuit board to reverse engineer the CPU opcodes. That’s like the CSI: Miami version of what this would look like.
You'll have more luck reverse engineering the software driver first. They're not hidden, you can just open the driver files in Ghidra, the almost-universal tool for open-sourcing proprietary code. Hidden opcodes can be discovered first by just trying all the opcodes you couldn't discover any other way. You only need to go to the physical level if they're really hidden.
You can't tease out the right information by applying random inputs. Which input would you even use? The PCIe interface? You'd first "randomly" need to get past its complex training sequences...
Your postdoc probably wrote micro-benchmarks of some sort. That is a common technique.
So...agreed...far more likely there was a software solution of some kind if this happened.
Circuit designers use these tools basically daily for two reasons - the first is Layout Versus Schematic. We want to make sure that the physical layout matches the schematic, so the tool turns the layout GDS into a netlist and compares that to the netlist created from the schematic (basically a diff, but more complicated). The second is so we can run simulations that take into account the "parasitic" resistances and capacitances of the wires and metal shapes in the physical layout. It's basically the same procedure as LVS with an extra step that analyzes the metal shapes to determine said R's and C's.
Theoretically Yes, as an ion-beam-mill and electron-microscope combination machine can slice up semiconductors layer-by-layer. Given these machines can often also give precise x-ray analysis material data, the exact makeup of the chip can be extracted by competitors given enough time. =3
Or maybe some kind of hybrid of x-ray microtomography and spectroscopic analysis all in one.
But, maybe the energies involved would be about the same destructive power as some microtome slicing technique...
These things can definitely erode the targets. Tomography experiments have to think carefully to optimize the set exposure angles used during a session, because the target degrades more with each shot.
https://www.chu.berkeley.edu/modern-semiconductor-devices-fo...
LLMs have already been shown to cause cognitive/skill performance losses in some users. =3
Fable needs no advertising. It was more important than the printing press. Code singularity.
But it's old news, Fable is no longer my favorite LLM. I mostly use Kimi k3 now. It's also more competent than you are in general.
The primary point you're avoiding is that programming is not a job for professional humans anymore. At least not humans with any dignity or self respect or economic value.
I'm sure you at least agree with this point, like every other reasonable person does now too.
Sorry to interrupt your smugness, but have you actually read that study? It's basically tautological: people remained mostly unfamiliar with code they did not write, and remained mostly unfamiliar with a library they did not use. That's kind of the whole point to begin with! https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rni/papers/realprg.html
Unless you want to argue that anyone who cannot code is brain damaged, I'd say it's a bit difficult to suggest that this would amount to any kind of clinically relevant cognitive impairment, much to the contrary of the masses desperately hoping and asserting so. Losing a skill you don't use / want / need is very normal cognitive function.
I was waiting for some writeup about permutation decyphering
but reminds me how we're going to find out on an industrial level when the Saudis give China some nvidia chips they were grifted
they've cloned lots of chips before but nothing that advanced
They weren't trying to steal IBM's design, they already had one of their own, what they wanted to know was "is there any as yet unannounced functionality in the IBM VGA chip?" they didn't want to be caught out when some unknown registers popped up. Of course it turned out there was as yet unannounced functionality - but not by IBM's design, more because of the orthogonality of the design - MODE-X was discovered and became the basis for DOOM's speed, anyone who didn't support it lost out
Rapid Chip Reverse Engineering Using Laser, Focused ion beams, and Scanning electron microscope https://academic.oup.com/mam/article/30/Supplement_1/ozae044...
FIBs are also used to test modifications before doing a respin. I'm still in awe that matter can be manipulated so precisely