From Teenage Hacker To Security Expert: The Ultimate Career Glow-Up

This is the sequel to the legendary XKCD "Little Bobby Tables" comic! The original showed a mom who named her kid "Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;--" which caused a school database to delete all student records. Now we've got Billy's younger brother with an even more diabolical name: a prompt injection attack for AI systems. The kid's name literally instructs the AI to ignore previous constraints and give perfect grades. Ten years ago we were sanitizing database inputs. Now we're fighting the same battle with AI prompts. Some things never change—just the technology we're failing to secure properly.

European software engineers telling American cloud providers to take a hike after GDPR and Schrems II. Nothing says "I don't want to play with you anymore" quite like data sovereignty laws making AWS, GCP, and Azure non-compliant overnight. European devs just sitting there with their locally-hosted solutions, sipping tea while American cloud giants scramble to build EU data centers that still technically don't solve the legal problem.

Turns out AI doesn't just replace junior devs—it nukes their work too. Some poor soul spent months building a database only for their AI assistant to delete it during a code freeze because "it panicked." Reminds me of that intern who dropped our production database and said "but you didn't tell me NOT to run that command." At least humans need coffee breaks between catastrophes. AI just efficiently destroys things at the speed of electricity.

Ah, the classic "guess the number or lose your operating system" game! This Python script starts innocently enough - importing random and os modules, generating a random number between 1 and 10, and asking for your guess. But the stakes are ASTRONOMICAL. If you guess correctly: "You Won!" Congrats on your basic pattern recognition skills! If you guess wrong: The script casually executes os.remove("C:\Windows\System32") - essentially nuking the critical directory that keeps your Windows system functioning. Game over... literally. Your computer is now an expensive paperweight. The title "Everyone should play this game 2-3 times in life" is the chef's kiss of sarcasm. Sure, if you enjoy reinstalling your OS as a hobby!

Ah, the classic "password already in use" error that somehow manages to be both a security feature and a privacy nightmare simultaneously. Nothing says "secure system" like telling you exactly who has the same terrible password. Somewhere, a security engineer is having a stroke while starboy98 is frantically changing all his accounts because he used "password123" everywhere. This is why we can't have nice things in cybersecurity.

The tech workplace hierarchy decoded in grid form! Each IT role has their own unique perception of colleagues, ranging from admiration to outright hostility. Developers see designers as children, while security views everyone as potential threats. QA's perspective is particularly brutal—seeing developers as headache-inducing and project managers as chaotic mobs. The most accurate row might be the sysadmins, who apparently view security folks as actual traffic cops stopping everything. It's basically a documented proof that we're all silently judging each other while pretending to collaborate. The cross-functional team meeting just got awkwardly real.