alberto-m

This is literally the tale of Alexander and the pirate, told in “The City of God” (V century). Nothing new under the sun, unfortunately.

The argument of your imaginary dialogue is very weak. To run a valid marathon one must cover 42 kms, but we do not run marathons because we want to be 42 kms away. Building a robot to do that would be probably an interesting feat for robotics, but it would not leave any mark in the history of the sport.

people defending theft and then arguing that if you change the position of one comma in the entirety of Harry Potter, then it's an acceptable new product.

History rhymes, indeed. Almost two centuries ago, Balzac wrote:

A man spends ten years of his life searching for an industrial secret, a machine, some kind of discovery, he takes out a patent, he believes he is master of his thing, he is followed by a competitor who, if he has not foreseen everything, perfects his invention with a screw, and thus takes it out of his hands. [Illusions perdues, 1843]

Obligatory xcancel link:

https://xcancel.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/206959220964578529...

It's surprisingly hard to know what your team has to do to get through with the new regulations.

As an Italian, I disagree :-)

Really well made site. Good info density, plenty of data presented in a logical order. Thanks for sharing it!

I think because a proprietary IP owner can allocate some budget to sue the infringers. A community of OSS contributors may lack the money, the will or the know-how to do that.

They will also face a much harder task when explaining their case to a judge. The contributors to the open-source chess engine Stockfish needed a lot of time and energy to convince a German court that it was illegal for the commercial engine Houdini to copy their algorithms.

The dev blog is one of the best retro-reversing journals you can find. Happy reading!

Unless you develop your AI agent from scratch or you clone a never-released game, it would be extremely easy for the rightholders to claim that both agents have most certainly ingested the binary during their training phase, since it's well known that the hyperscalers have pirated everything that could be pirated to train their LLMs. Which is why malus.sh is a parody, not a real service.

One should be honest about what one builds. The F-15 project does that: the aim is the reconstruction of the original game, down to the opcodes; on the other hands it requires the user to provide the original game assets.

I got 96/100 with minimal guessing. Being a native speaker of a Romance language is a huge advantage here; words like “Quotidian” and “Defenestrate” might be exotic in English, but are almost trivial for an Italian.

Decades ago, Sid Meier's Pirates had a more realistic sailing model, which made you feel the difference between triangular and square sails, in a game where the player had a lot of other challenges to master. And Meier is a designer who always put fun and playability above realism.

Eh, it's not so clear cut. LLMs have definitely killed a lot of fun in reverse engineering old games by making it trivial to solve riddles that in the past would have been interesting problems to work on.

But the field still offers many mysteries that need human brains to be solved.

Whether LLMs are a net positive here depends if one is result-oriented (e.g. wants to rewrite an old game in a modern language) or process-oriented (is there for the investigation work and the intellectual challenges).

Mountaneering nerdery is in some sense nobler, since people practising it put their health and lives at stake. Debates about C++ undefined behaviour would get a different flavour if every now and then some high-profile developer were killed by nasal demons.

In my final attempt I managed to reach 1000+ tractors at the 120th turn exactly, only to be immediately shot by the workers. Task accomplished unsuccessfully.

The premise is interesting, but an incremental game with learning-by-dying mechanics seems a bad idea. I am not going to click the same button hundreds of times only to be faced by the n-th identical “game over” message.

I very much hope newly-produced cars in Germany must obey the TÜV regulations from the start. Imported cars also must immediately undergo certification.

Fun fact: some Italian cars have the left light pointing somewhat lower to avoid blinding incoming drivers, and the right one higher to see further along the road margin. The TÜV did not like this, so I had to adjust my lights to be symmetrical when I moved to Germany.

Related:

Malus – Clean Room as a Service https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47350424

Just like for 1984 and the Torment Nexus, someone took the concept not as warning but as instruction manual.

It's a tradition, not a rule

Amended, thanks!

The strong point of the Swiss political system is that the government is, by (EDIT) convention, made up by all significant parties. No major political force can say “if only we were in power...” because they already are. Also, no party can create disasters and then disappear and leave the consequences to the following election winners to deal with.

This referendum is an attempt by the members of SVP/UDC, the right-most party, to show that on immigration topics they have more popular support than what their relative power in the government is. Their proposed solution is very crude, on the other hand the opposition parties' position is basically “do nothing, everything is going fine”. I would have hoped the government to offer some kind of compromise proposal (which they are allowed to do and appears as third option in many referendums), but it seems the Swiss citizens will be faced with a “all or nothing” choice.

As a novel immigrant, as much as I appreciate the political system of my new host country, I was quite disappointed by the referendum campaign from both sides. Most of the propaganda concerning this vote has emotional and apocalytic tones (“the immigrants will steal our welfare and overpopulation will transform Switzerland into Kowloon” vs “we will become a pariah state, our pensioners will die unassisted due to the lack of nurses, EU will tariff us to death”).

Lots of people named like him, so worth noting that his profile is at https://www.linkedin.com/in/lcamtuf/

Pretty proud to recognize the “propane and propane accessories” reference, especially given I had mostly heard it in a translated and slightly different version.

(minor typo: repeated --> repealed. Sorry for the nitpicking but it confused me when I first read it)

I used the MT32 audio. Not only because it sounded better, but because it would overload the CPU and slow down the game making it playable on my Pentium 75.

The community is still active! In the meanwhile the car format has been figured out, so that modern-day tournaments like ZakStunts feature vehicles not included in the original game.

The site pirates games that are still being sold by their original devs, like “Ports of Call”. Even for some games published by bigger companies, some of the original developers get a small cut on lifetime sales. So I don't need to “pretend” anything.

What about: if the extender is provided with the game (like DOS/4GW) then it's a DOS game; if it needs to be provided by the user (like Win 3.11) it's not.

allow for being paid for life for a craft that has been made once

It costs on average 7$ to buy a craft that took maybe 2 years for a team of 10 developers (since we are speaking of DOS era games). Are you suggesting such works should have been paid 7$ just once by one person? Reasoning like this is why most gaming companies pivoted to either use Denuvo or to make pay-to-win, ad-filled products. I cannot blame them, seeing people that are wishing to spend hours on a game, but not to pay the rightholders the equivalent of 5-10 minutes of average SWE salary.

Yandex is not obscure, nor “lowest quality, most bottom dollar crap”. It has very good technology behind, though not the trillion dollars of investments Google can afford. Just because it does not come from California it does not mean it's a hobby project anyone could replicate.

I am certainly missing a lot of nuance here, but it seems to me Nate Silver managed to have his cake and eat it too. He surely got good money for selling FiveThirtyEight, and now that the buyer has erased the product, Nate can get back a huge chunk of its readers since he offers very similar analyses on his personal site. Sure, natesilver.net has less brand recognition than fivethirtyeight.com, but it's still decently well-known and can only go up from here.

I appreciate this balanced take! Let's hope one day we'll get the best of today's and yesterday's era.

Any alternative is better than the current state of things.

I don't know, the incentives for creators are already low enough. Any book one writes lands immediately in Anna's Archive and is digested into LLM slop for the profit of Altman & Co. Any piece of investigative journalism, when shared here or on Reddit, sees a link to some paywall-bypass site as one of the most upvoted comments. So we are already in a Bastiat's window situation where people are disincentivized to produce creative work. I'd rather not put the work of software creators even more at risk of being cheaply copied and copyright laundered: any state vault would be an easy target for trillion-dollar corporations.

Aside, as someone doing retro reverse engineering I greatly appreciate the author's words about the tension between software preservation and the need to reward creators for their work.

I might be a contrarian in that I actually like using unsigned integers for sizes and indexes. In my experience, most of their trappings can be prevented by treating any subtraction involving them as a `reinterpret_cast`: i.e.

* Do your utmost to rewrite the code in order to avoid doing that (e.g. reordering disequations to transform subtractions into additions). * If not possible, think very hard about any possible edge case: you most certainly need an additional `if` to deal with those. * When analyzing other people's code during troubleshooting merge reviews, assume any formula involving an unsigned integer and a minus sign is wrong.