daeken

I can nearly single-handedly credit EverQuest with my career. I got my start in the ShowEQ and eqemu sphere, first building little PHP apps to manage servers and such, then reverse-engineering -- I learned x86 and then C++ all to get the lifts in Kelethin working. Hell, nearly 25 years later, any time I work on some new graphics API or game engine, I end up writing an EverQuest zone renderer.

Not my favorite game of all time, but certainly the one with the biggest impact!

Edit to add: also, huge props to that community for both humbling me and teaching me more than I could've imagined. Went from a dumbass 13 year old saying "ROT13? Isn't that some unbreakable encryption?" In the ShowEQ IRC channel because she couldn't imagine saying she didn't know something, to a competent reverse-engineer. I cannot imagine how insufferable I was haha.

I mean ... You're not completely wrong, but you're not completely right either. For context: I've been working full-time in security for 15 years and on the fringes (reversing) for many more.

WAFs in and of themselves provide virtually zero security. They can block naive attacks -- catching the most obvious payloads -- and act as an early-warning signal that an attack may be underway (though the SNR on this is awful). But frankly, this is far less important in practice than the fact that it just makes things more difficult and annoying for attackers. Enough so that it can make a semi-attractive target into a no-go.

This is like defense-in-depth, but instead of layering protections in place so that the holes in the swiss cheese don't like up, you're making the cheese smell awful enough to ignore the juicy apple behind it.

If you're a valuable enough target, they're gonna go for the apple regardless of how bad the cheese is. ... And this analogy may have gotten away from me.

Huh, that business model honestly makes a lot of sense and -- ignoring the time component -- could be helpful for accessibility. My doctor has flat pricing for all members (he makes it public on the site, and included advance notice of an increase in his newsletter), but it is way out of reach for most folks. Not that 300 members goes that far either, but it's tough.

He was recommended by my therapist. Essentially runs an all-inclusive, boutique medical service; expensive, but actually turned out to be cheaper than all the services I'd previously had to use, for the best care of my life. That said, he only sees a limited number of patients (actually just closed new memberships from the web, only accepting referrals until he hits his cap) and only in Georgia.

I imagine there are other boutique providers out there, but this has been a first for me and given me hope that healthcare might not be so goddamn awful for everyone eventually.

My doctor sends out a monthly newsletter sharing things he finds interesting or useful, medical news, etc. Just this weekend he covered this study and shared his own thoughts on this, which I'll summarize since I haven't asked his permission to share verbatim:

This study does show a strong correlation but doesn't attempt to show causation. If cannabis users are significantly different than non-users in terms of activity levels or diet, or the ways they manage anxiety/pain/boredom, this could cause skewing. Since people use cannabis to treat (however effectively) various conditions, what is the risk of those conditions going untreated?

I thought this was a good analysis; glad to see a bit of desensationalism.

I've been trying out Claude Code (the tool I've found most effective in terms of agentic code gen/manipulation) for an emulator project of mine for the last few days. Part of it is a compiler from an architecture definition to disassembler/interpreter/recompiler. I hit a fairly minor compiler bug and decided to ask Claude to debug and fix it. Some things I noted:

1. My C# code compiled just fine and ran even, but it was convinced that I was missing a closing brace on a lambda near where the exception was occurring. The diff was ... Putting the existing brace on a new line. Confidently stated that was the problem and declared it fixed.

2. It did figure out that an unexpected type was being seen, and implemented a pathway that allowed for it to get to the next error, but didn't look into why that type had gotten there; that was the actual bug, not the unhandled type. So it "fixed" it, but just kicked the can down the road.

3. When figuring out the issue, it just looked at the stack trace. That was it. It was running the compiler itself; it could've just embedded some debug code (like I did) and work out what the actual issue was, but it didn't even try. The exception was just a NotSupportedException with no extra details to work off of, so adding just a crumb of context would let you solve the issue.

Now, is this the simplest emulator you could throw AI at? No, not at all. But neither is qemu. I'm thoroughly unconvinced that current tools could provide real value on codebases like these. I'm bullish on them for the future, and I use GenAI constantly, but this ain't a viable use case today.

The scramble to get your paper done in time is traditional! (And why my final paper for the onity lock hack ended up with an entire section I decided was better off left unsaid; woops)

Given the number of times I've bricked hardware during reverse-engineering and driver development, I don't find it super likely, tbh. I'm by no means an expert here, but it's one of those things where if you already have good enough documentation (which in this case could be a known-good implementation) then it's more of a translation task and LLMs could absolutely be helpful there, but the edge cases are sharp and frequent.

Out of curiosity, have you had luck using LLMs for parser generation? I should really try it out with my parser combinator library; would be cool to be able to throw in sample code and some basic instructions and get a usable parser out for prototyping. Think I might try that next time I build a new language, just for fun.

> Python-based image file format

This is one of the first lines of the readme. But this is PNG with some metadata encoded using the most naive steganographic technique (just thrown into the LSB of pixels -- no redundancy, no error correction, no compensation for down sampling, etc). Even ignoring everything else, this is just ... Nonsensical.

I am very very pro-AI. But this is slop.

This has been really interesting to me. I've been learning Spanish for a while and will mix un poco español en my sentences with ChatGPT all the time, and it's cool to see the same thing reflected back to me. It's not uncommon for a response to be 75% in English with 25% Spanish at the beginnings and ends especially. All of my conversation titles are in Spanish because I always start them with "Hola", so whatever model sets the title just assumes Spanish for it, regardless of what the rest of the message is.

It's possible to do all of this with current technology. Just... Why? The cost would be exorbitant; even with really clever deployment tech, the launch costs are gonna be dominated by solar panels and radiators.

This is a super cool idea and seems like perfect investor-bait. That's about where it ends.

Massive radiators. The ISS has radiators that have a dissipation capacity of about 3m^2/kW. If we use that number, we'd need a 3000m^2 radiator per megawatt, which is the scale they're talking about. This could theoretically be brought down, but not even by an order of magnitude.

I wonder how much cooling the solar panels alone would need, when operating at that scale.

In this kind of hierarchy, I'd personally say fedora is third gen (due to it being so similar to Redhat) and that nixOS is fourth gen. Both came out around the same time, but took such vastly different routes with different kinds of itch scratching.

> (Imagine if we protected against SQL injection or XSS using statistical methods that only caught 99% of attacks!)

For what it's worth, we do that all the time: WAFs (web app firewalls). I can't begin to tell you the number of applications whose protections against XSS and SQLi were a combination of "hope we got it right" and "hope the WAF covered us where we didn't".

Once consulted on an M&A vetting gig, where they pulled me after a day because the sheer number of critical findings meant that there was no way that they would move forward. They used the WAF+prayers method.

I wrote a fiction book, which has sold virtually nothing (maybe $50 gross, against an out-of-pocket cost of ~$4k). Both of these would piss me off if they happened to me or my author friends; I also don't think they should be illegal.

I am an author, a digital artist, a programmer, and an extremely amateur musician. None of those things have demonstrated to me why copyright law is necessary, a net positive for the world, or ethical.

As someone both extremely left and extremely anti-IP, it's been ... Interesting for sure. But a lot of the "pro-IP" positions I've seen are more about the ability for artists to continue earning living wages, or about the sheer level of control we're giving to tech companies, than about IP itself. In other words, they're pro-IP positions only because it aligns with the other things they actually care about.

(This obviously doesn't cover every single person -- some are just legitimately pro-IP.)

You misunderstand the use of "commercial" here. This isn't about private corporations launching their payloads for commerce, it's about private (commercial) entities providing launch services to the ESA and other public space exploration orgs.

Those were their own ports, as per the page you just linked. They developed Microsoft BASIC.

"The Altair BASIC interpreter was developed by Microsoft founders Paul Allen and Bill Gates using a self-written Intel 8080 emulator running on a PDP-10 minicomputer."

Yeah, this is honestly super interesting as a journey, but not as a destination. The framing takes away from how cool the work really is.

Those aren't four different languages. CK and HIP are both just libraries.

Piracy: not bad, unethical, or immoral.

White supremacy: very bad, unethical, and immoral.

Maybe reconsider your priorities here.

Successful touchdown! Congrats to Firefly

I'm baffled. There isn't even the seed of a story here, just someone not understanding that if you put data out there, the data is [checks notes] out there.

The author clarifies later that the listed therapeutic dosage is weekly rather than daily, so that's 3500-7000mg/week versus 35mg/week for an average person (from a quick Google, 70kg).

Not sure where the 300x is coming from, since that's an average body weight.

The fact that police cars can start without the body cams being fully charged, the fact that they don't stream to a centralized and reliable server 100% of the time that they're worn, and the fact that they're possible to turn off while an officer is on duty with effectively zero consequences makes it pretty clear that no one in power cares about bodycams being a tool for the people. They're just weaponized against the populace.

I have spent the last ~25 years deep in assembly because it's fun. It's occasionally useful, but there's so much pleasure in getting every last byte where it belongs, or working through binaries that no one has inspected in decades, or building an emulator that was previously impossible. It's one of the few areas where I still feel The Magic, in the way I did when I first started out.

Ouch, that's a brutal issue -- thanks for letting me know! I'm glad the Folds haven't been affected, given that having this thing open in my pocket is just not doable haha

I genuinely don't understand the durability concerns with foldables. I've been daily driving the Z Fold 3-6 and the only failure I've had was a software issue on the 4 that broke WiFi. Nearly 4 years of heavy daily use, countless drops, and the weak point has only been with software.

I want a trifold (albeit not this one). I switched to foldables with the Z Fold 3 and never looked back; I've upgraded each generation since, because they make my life substantially better. While I still spend a lot of time at my computer for dev work, I have some chronic issues that limit the hours I can manage; to me, my foldable is essentially a disability aid.

I wrote an entire novella on my foldable (only the editing was done on a computer), done countless meetings while splitting the screen for a doc review, etc. It has genuinely changed my quality of life and I'm thankfully in a position that the cost isn't an issue.