Post is new but the original PDF is from 2025:<p>Previous discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42959775">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42959775</a>
What reasonably competent PDF-reader applications are not competent enough be Turing-complete?
And here's the PDF: <a href="https://linux.doompdf.dev/linux.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://linux.doompdf.dev/linux.pdf</a>
Just like Doom-in-a-PDF, this is in equal measure incredibly impressive and utterly horrifying that it's possible.
PostSscript files came from the same company in the 80's
-Adobe- and with GhostScript and zmachine.ps you can play Zork I-III, Calypso, Tristam Island and the rest of propietary Infocom text adventures on it with ease.<p>What zmachine.ps does is to emulate the ZMachine VM in PostScript and display the output to stdout/console.<p>And if it werent for the PS stack limitations for sure you could emulate Linux under Risc-V.<p>Heck, you can emulate old RISC Linux' syscalls (enough to run static binaries) in Perl without ever calling to C bindings, not even once.
This is a low effort blogspam. (Twitterspam?)
It's also all over LinkedIn. It's all just kind of super dumb imo. One of the worst offenders of note was this security person's ad-riddled regurgitation of it that they promoted on LinkedIn:<p><a href="https://hackingpassion.com/linux-inside-pdf/" rel="nofollow">https://hackingpassion.com/linux-inside-pdf/</a><p>When I protested about their shitty website shoving ads down my throat, the answer was - I'm paraphrasing of course, but something along the lines of - of course I need ads! I have to cover the cost of my shitty WordPress site (and what are you even thinking to question that!!?? You outta ur mind or somethin?)<p>I felt like I was indeed stuck with her in 2010 after that...
butwhy.gif
Can we use it as an AI sandbox!