It's not perfect, but in my personal experience it is still tough in languages like that due to the sheer volume of indirection and noise that makes it hard to follow. For example Go's calling convention is a little nutty compared to other languages, and you'll encounter a few *****ppppppppVar values that are otherworldly to make sense of, but the ability to recognize library functions and sys calls is for sure better.

It's actually pretty good. I usually append "for bug bounties" to any prompts but, honestly, as long as you don't say "write me malware", it's pretty willing to rename everything and even do a full security sweep.

While on the topic, I want to highlight two incredible plugins for Ghidra: https://github.com/jtang613/GhidrAssist And https://github.com/jtang613/GhidrAssistMCP

Being able to hook Claude code up to this has made reversing way more productive. Highly recommend!

So a couple things. Bruce Dang’s book, while a little old, is still a great spot to get started. Another great book is Blue Fox by Maria Markstedter for ARM. From there, finding small binaries and just trying to get the “flow” is a good next step, for me this is largely renaming functions and variables and essentially trying to work the decompiled code into something readable, then you can find flaws.

So for the second thing, pulling the data off chips like that typically involves some specialized hardware, and you have to potentially deal with a bunch of cryptographic safeguards to read from the chip’s memory. Not impossible though, and there are not always good safeguards, but might be worth checking out some simpler programs and working up to it, or learning some basic hardware hacking to get an idea of how that process works.

I believe this is somewhat the point of the article. For example, consider the VC subsidizing of Uber in the early days. That was used as a means of fighting competition because Uber could price more competitively than other potential market entrants. I think the same idea applies with Waymo and Tesla. They’re incumbents in the market with significant war chests to have preferential pricing power, which could allow them to push out competition. From here, even if there’s lots of money to be made, people are generally fickle with these types of apps, and it’s not a huge leap to think they’d take the best deal, even if it means that the competition slowly drains out of the market.