easyThrowaway

I was lucky enough to speak with one of the guys who ported Final Fantasy VIII to Windows (A crazy talented guy from Naples and one of the earliest members of the OG playstation emulation scene) and the porting team of several IREM arcade shootemups to the Game boy advance (incidentally they were also from south Italy) and both of them told me the same story:

The source code they were given for the job was so specific to the assembler, compiler, build stack and internal company libraries and SDKs (which often they had no access to) that reverse engineering the final game was usually the quickest route.

> Certainly from the game historian's perspective.

That's a completely different topic, and I mean, sure - from an historical perspective it's absolutely essential, even simple changelogs become of enormous importance.

The whole "Taste makes all the difference" has been meme'd to death too: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYuj_4dxVg2/.

Also... I won't add any details to avoid doxing myself, but trust me on this, Rick is the last person nowadays you'd want to listen to for anything taste-related, unless we're talking about feeding your own ego and carefully curating your own public image, and disappearing for weeks. I'd pay very good money to be around his ghost producers/writers/engineers again, though.

What we too easily forget is that for millennia we had societies where an infinitesimally amount of people (a dozen of families, at best) held almost all the wealth, another thousands ensured that order was maintained throughout the kingdom/empire by force, and everyone else lived by subsistence economy.

Such societies were terrifyingly stable, lasting hundred of years before slowly collapsing. We're not immune to going back to this.

It has become a meme at this point but this sentence still stands: "The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth".

I wouldn't be surprised if the original source code is probably lost and forgotten in a ZIP drive stored in a basement somewhere in Tokyo.

I've made a similar point in an earlier comment, but consider the following:

Even if the original sources leaked in a human-readable format, the original game was probably written in a mixture of the device-specific dialect of the Mips R3000 assembly used by the Nintendo 64, whatever in-house assembler macro routines SGI provided for the RSP game-specific microcode, and some C89 glue code in an IDE like Metrowerks Codewarrior 4, by a team of overworked japanese developers in a hurry.

We can safely assume that the final decompiled code is way more readable/usable than the original.

Only if you're going after the "vibe coders" audience. Regular developers would be fine with a lightweight local llm capable of scaffolding and wiring a dozen of bog-standard components in a few lines of natural language.

I've been in the "someone performed it" and "someone mixed it" role for some tracks that I found utterly mediocre and yet ended up being some of the most successful stuff I've ever worked on. I mean, sure, previous works, marketing and hype can do a lot to alter the general perception, but most of the times it's just matter of being the right audience.

Because the alternative would've been telling everyone "here's the Stochastic Machine. The more what you write looks like the sources we blatantly stol- I mean, trained from, the closer it gets to output working code". And we're not ready to admit we don't want to know how the sausage is made.

By anthropomorphizing it, we give it some sort of authorship, which clears our collective conscience from what's really happening.

It matches the current "2K aesthetic" revival. Probably the last device that fully incarnates that specific time frame.

You can commonly see it in major fashion adv campaigns, with models using anachronistic Sony CD Players, digital cameras and recorders.

I mean, after having spent some time in both LA and Sicily, I can see some merits on the idea /s.

Unfortunately no, outside of the clubbing and the winemaking scene there are way too many differences. Trying to sell a coffee in Palermo for $5 would be cause for public commotion, for a start.

Calling someone a "bloody...ahem meridionali" sounds a lot like those guys who would address a black guy as an "annoying N...nuisance, I mean".

Tell him he can drop the politically correct facade and call us Terroni (or Terun, with an hard-R), no need to pretend otherwise.

We got a 3000m tall volcano in the middle of Sicily (currently full of snow unless it changed somehow since I last saw it this morning) and the Appennini in Umbria and Marche (800-2400m elevation) whose temperatures are roughly on par with those in most of northern Europe.

People living in those areas are not particularly smarter than those living on the coast, I'm afraid. Correlation is not causation, yadda yadda.

One of my parents is from Ragusa and I've spent more than half of my life in Sicily. The answer can be summed up in "Culture, Corruption, Infrastructure, in this order".

I can see the last point improving over time. I give absolutely 0% chances to the first two points changing over time, bar some apocalypse-level destruction and rebuilding of society.

> However I think you have perhaps not internalized yet how CSS variables and scoping rules work have created a situation that allows for often elegantly solving problems that one might wish one had a more powerful query language to handle.

As you already said, this approach would work fine if you had no external payloads that inject their own HTML and CSS on the page, either at runtime or by being loaded by other modules in a CMS.

It also breaks when your :root selector is being polluted by overly generic variables by your platform, like in the most recent versions of Wordpress.

I mean... sure, just tell me how to write a fully responsive landing page straight from a PSD file by the marketing dept in roughly less than an hour without using Bootstrap or, for goodness sake, Tailwind and I'm ready to drop any framework and write "bare metal" (Ah!) CSS.

I'd also like if anyone could look at the specifications for CSS, ideally for Grid, especially the `grid-template-*` and `grid-auto-*` subset of rules, mixmaxing and gotchas and tell me what CSS exactly is right now, So I can avoid turning it into something that is not.

...just like the divine right of kings!

Honestly, If anyone asked me "T'as fait quoi?" I'd blurt out "J'ai amené ma voiture chez le lavage". Background: I stopped speaking french when I was ten and my family isn't native, but it feels more conversational than "station de lavage".

Very awkward and formal. Anyone would call it lavage auto, lave-auto or simply lavage if the context is clear.

It feels more like a question on english linguistic conventions than logic.

If someone asked me the same question and I wanted to give a smartass reply, I'd tell them "You want to wash your car, good to know. Now, about your question, unless you tell me where you wanna go I can't really help you".

It's the least convincing excuse used to circle around GDPR and similar laws. "I swear, it's for security! (please ignore the part in our ToS that says we can resell your HW configuration profile and installed software stats to our commercial partners)".

Thanks!

> The updates are over https. The default certificates are 10year expiry.

I wish I knew this last week while trying to restore a 2010 21" iMac.

Apart from this, I encountered another annoyance mid-way; the official download urls for Sierra and High Sierra were nowhere to be found. I somewhat remember being able to download the official dmg/disk image from some official repository, probably some App store public url?

Many of the decompiled console games of the '90s were originally written in C89 using an ad-hoc compiler from Metrowerks or some off-branch release of gcc-2.95 plus console specific assemblers.

I willing to bet that the decompiled output is gonna be more readable than the original source code.

In the music industry they have a saying about sampling and IP clearance which easily applies here too: "The lawfulness of your actions is directly related to your law firm fees compared to the other part".

Are Dolphin and emulation in general going to be legal in the future? Easy, if Nintendo chooses to go with Morrison & Foerster or Fish & Richardson for a lawsuit I'm going with "no".

The point isn't simply "class removal affects cascading", but "anything upstream is capable of placing the original content in an unrecoverable state".

Where "anything" could be your framework, your CMS, you or your coworkers a few years after the original CSS has been written and you can't fully remember what ".format-header__nav-wrapper:not(:last-child) .model-header__nav-wrapper:not(:last-child)" is doing.

And yes, that's a real CSS selector from a refactoring job I'm doing right now.

A safer assumption would be that our body influences our behavior and tastes, and in turn they are directly affected by changes in our body, like an organ transplant.

A more interesting question regarding the case above would be "what's in our hearth and lungs that affects our perception of capsaicin?".

Hopefully this will help decompilation projects into generating better pseudocode. Some sort of "generate code -> build and execute -> test against existing executable if it behaves like the original -> change code again" loop.

CSS Zen Garden is quite the opposite of a good example of your point. Even small changes to the original page layout would completely break most of the provided styles.

If I removed the .page-wrapper class it would be also nearly impossible for a different developer to reverse-engineer the issue from the existing Template and CSS files.

For those who don't know, Native Instruments software synths were...uh, instrumental in developing several music genres and styles. Radiohead used Reaktor extensively while recording Kid A. Early Dubstep artists used Massive to get the "wobble" sound. Several founders of the Hyperpop scene (SOPHIE, Danny Harle, A.G. Cook) made use of Razor for sound designing most of the metallic leads and drums sounds.

Last one became so common that while recording Charli XCX's "Brat" A.G. Cook decided to ban it altogether... only to end up using another Native Instruments Patch for Reaktor, "Lazerbass".

Their tools were basically everywhere.

I can't believe their parent equity decided to fuck them up so badly to the point they burned so much cash they're liquidating.

It's... a bit more complicated than that.

That episode, the Falcone Judge murder, was a bit of a last straw in the way most of italian political parties had dealt with mafia till that point. They realized the issue couldn't be contained to the sicilian cultural and political environment and they couldn't be... that much complacent (they still are, but at least they try to save face when they're found).

Long story short, every political authority at the time was pretty much aware the murder was going to happen, they just didn't expect a terrorist-like approach.

Once we got to that point, a newish department, the DIA[1] was given full authority to handle the issue... again, for a time. Then it went swallowed up too in the neverending whirpool of shit that is the Italian politics.

In the meanwhile, the Mafia got smarter, and rather than going in a full frontal attack with the authorities, they became much more... diplomatic, offering indirect support trough some proxies to some newly political figures that emerged shortly after. You probably heard about that Berlusconi guy.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direzione_Investigativa_Antima...