32-bit Memes

Oh look, it's the 2038 problem in action! When you store time as a signed 32-bit integer, you're basically giving your system an expiration date of January 19, 2038. After that? Total digital apocalypse. The poor guy is staring at a calendar showing both December 1901 and January 2038 because his phone just time-traveled to the edges of its numerical universe. When that integer counter maxes out, systems will wrap around to negative numbers—hello 1901, goodbye sanity! Somewhere, a COBOL programmer is muttering "Y2K was just a practice round."

When you ask for a 32-bit integer but the judge gives you a signed one. That ~32,768 years sentence is suspiciously close to 2^15, which is exactly what happens when you overflow a signed 16-bit integer. The criminal probably wanted an unsigned int that goes up to 65,535, but instead got the negative range too. Classic rookie mistake. Should've specified the data type in the plea bargain.

This programmer just executed the most beautiful integer overflow exploit in history! First wishing for wishes to be counted as an unsigned 32-bit integer (max value: 4,294,967,295 wishes), then ensuring the subtraction happens after the wish completes (avoiding the "no more wishes" rule), and finally wishing for 0 wishes which causes an underflow to 4,294,967,295! The genie's face says it all - he just got absolutely destroyed by a classic buffer overflow vulnerability. This is what happens when you don't sanitize your inputs, magical beings!