Relevant XKCD:
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2026
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I can stop laughing at steamcmd.
How am I still learning about XKCDs I've never seen especially ones in the 1000 range.
When you first learnt about xkcd, did you not S L O O O R P the entire back catalogue?
I guess when I did that there were A LOT fewer. Cuz I'm old.
It's the Key and Peele of geek comics
if $1 is not installed after that, wipe your hard drive and start over
It could be a crate...
Script needs to be updated, Rust wasn't particularly popular back then (if it existed. I don't know how old this one is, but it's pretty old)
Is this satire or is it from a real project O_O?
This is... uh...
It reads like the author doesn't know what containers are. Because this is actually a great use case for containers unless I'm missing something.
Now, do I want reverse engineering software from someone who in 2026 doesn't know of a better way to manage dependencies than "tell AI to install everything"? Not particularly lol
Also:
Install Eclipse Adoptium 21: https://adoptium.net/temurin/releases/?version=21
It's Eclipse Temurin not Eclipse Adoptium. And why not install from distro repo?
Install from https://cmake.org/download/
Also why not from distro repo?
Install Visual Studio 2022, or apt install build-essential / xcode-select --install
NOW distro repo is fine, but only if you use an APT based distro?
and then 3 more dependencies it tells the agent to install from websites.
The weirdest thing is you can get much better results from AI. I'm 99% sure this person gave the AI particularly bad instructions to generate the install instructions, or used a cheap, crappy model.
Please kill me
It is a self-contained runbook with explicit verification gates at every step — preflight checks, building libghidra, installing the LibGhidraHost Ghidra extension, building ghidrasql, and a first live query. Hand it to your agent and let it drive the install; intervene only if a gate reports a failure.
Even the install instructions are written by AI. Good grief
Look what they have to do to mimic a fraction of tar -xaf!
If you trust the site, curl | sh is no worse than any other install method. If you don't trust the site, it's also no worse.
yeah you can also just curl > cat and check the script yourself
🐱.sh
or just curl
Do you mean curl | cat or do you really want to create a file called cat?
Also piping to cat seems redundant but malicious hosts can detect whether the request is getting redirected, using some clever trick, so it's not.
Also, your chance of spotting something bad in a malicious script is probably quite small.
This is my opinion on curl | sh/bash type directions. If the maintainers don't provide a hash so I can confirm that is what they intended, there ain't much I can do unless someone slapped in a function named "totallyNotMalware" into the script. I've looked through scripts, seen what they do, but I'm not good enough to recognize anything funky.
I don't know what the first one is about. Is it about how the Gemini webpage displays the output?
cursed