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ndiddy

10,398 karma · joined April 1, 2019

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ndiddy··on PS5 Relapse Exploit
This is a different exploit. This one is a kernel exploit, the one that caused the drama is a hypervisor exploit. A kernel exploit lets you pirate games but running Linux requires a hypervisor exploit.

Note that Sony significantly improved the PS5's security on firmware 14.0 and above, likely to prevent GTA 6 from getting pirated. Ripping a PS5 game apparently requires a hypervisor exploit, and the last known one was sold to Sony. This means that nobody will be able to rip GTA 6. Even if it was ripped, they would then need to "backport" it to run on hacked PS5s running earlier firmware versions, which would take some time and expertise.

ndiddy··on McDonald's push to have AI price your Big Mac
If we're already seeing dynamic burger pricing based on market rates, does McDonald's also plan on offering a burger derivative market so customers can hedge their pricing risk in case unforeseen events cause the burger price to skyrocket?
ndiddy··on macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess
To me it basically feels the same as 26. All the "they're fixing Liquid Glass guys" hype turned out to be over a slider to control the transparency of the glass, when you could already set it to opaque (tinted) in 26. I guess it's an improvement for however many people were dying to have specifically 70% opaque Liquid Glass. If anything Golden Gate looks a little worse than Tahoe. They added a faux-3D effect to the Liquid Glass, which clashes with the flat design used on whatever part of the UI isn't Liquid Glass. It's as if you were using Windows 10, then got halfway through installing a Windows 7 theme before cancelling it, so random stuff is Aero vs. flat.

The biggest problem introduced in Tahoe was the massive padding areas around everything, which remain unchanged in Golden Gate. I've seen rumors that Apple is planning on a touchscreen Macbook, so maybe the padding is to make it so people will be able to use their fingers more easily. I guess they've decided to repeat the mistake Microsoft has made in Windows 8 and newer, where they destroy the UI for everyone in order to cater to whatever percentage of users prefer 2-in-1 convertible laptops.

ndiddy··on What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI
That's interesting, thanks for sharing!
ndiddy··on What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI
Was it an issue that Infocom had been shut down? For example for making a version of the Z-Machine for Windows 95 or whatever was current. Did Activision have an archive of all the Infocom development stuff, or were you able to go off of whatever documentation fans had come up with when they were making unofficial Z-Machine interpreters?
ndiddy··on Fool's Expertise
Yeah the article is treating the RAND paper as proving that people complaining about AI risk are alarmists. The paper is about how AI won't wipe out humanity (which it defines as reducing the total global population below several thousand) because even if there was an AI-induced nuclear war or pandemic, it wouldn't literally kill everyone. For example there's a section on how an AI-induced pandemic isn't an extinction risk because the AI would have no way of distributing pathogens to isolated island communities after the pandemic had already caused severe damage to the infrastructure it depends on to operate. It's a very strange thing to use as an argument.

I agree with you that the most likely risk seems to be whatever happens after the large-scale automation of most jobs. I can envision a scenario where there would be a lengthy transition period where white collar work is largely automated away but blue collar work isn't, which would probably be pretty ugly to live through.

ndiddy··on The Murky History of Soviet-Born Tetris
I mean it takes what's actually compelling about the story (the comedy of errors that caused the Tetris rights to slip through Robert Stein's fingers, culminating in the Soviets entirely redefining who has which rights in two days of simultaneous negotiations with all involved parties) and adds all sorts of nonsense about the KGB being involved in everything from the start, about Pajitnov's family being threatened over the licensing, about Tetris somehow having the potential to both keep the Mirror Group empire from imploding and liberalize the Soviet Union, etc. Then the film has to deal with the problem that it's ostensibly about real events, but the characters' motivation makes no sense because of all the embellishments. It all just comes off as cartoonish.
ndiddy··on The Murky History of Soviet-Born Tetris
By far the most compelling telling I've seen of the "How BPS and Nintendo got the Tetris rights" story is in chapters 13 and 14 of David Sheff's book "Game Over". The whole book is a good read if you're into game history (apart from the Atari chapter, which leans too hard on Nolan Bushnell as a source), it's basically the only time people at Nintendo talked at length with a reporter.

Meanwhile the Tetris film was awful. The Tetris rights negotiations were all about the various sides wrestling for power and the Soviets trying to play them against each other. The film basically goes "nah that's too boring for our target audience" and tries to make it into a Cold War spy thriller, but the hamfisted modifications to the events that transpired make the plot nonsensical (especially for general audiences that would be unfamiliar with what actually happened).

ndiddy··on The Copilot+ PC brand is dead
I have a laptop with a copilot key, this maps it to right Ctrl on Linux. How well it works depends on how your specific keyboard implements the Shift+Meta+F23 keypress so your mileage may vary. https://github.com/mishoo/exorcise-copilot
ndiddy··on The Murky History of Soviet-Born Tetris
Gerasimov wrote his own account of the Tetris story here: https://vadim.oversigma.com/Tetris.htm

> Contrary to the claim attributed to Henk Rogers there were no "straightforward business arrangement" between Pajitnov and myself. In the Soviet Union, where private business was outlawed and the concept of intellectual property was not defined, people could not make private business arrangements of this kind. The Computer Center of Academy of Sciences owned everything we made. Several years later the situation in the Soviet Union changed, but this was a different story. When I worked on Tetris, even a government organization could not formally hire me because I was underage. I worked on Tetris just for fun. I don't remember Pajitnov ever paying me for anything related to Tetris either. Pajitnov started fixing the business aspects of the situation a few years later when he and Henk Rogers participated in negotiations with Elorg (the only government organization in the USSR that could sell software abroad). Pajitnov stopped by my home and asked me to urgently sign a paper "to get lots of money for us from game companies". He didn't leave me a copy of the paper. As far as I remember the paper was saying that I agree to only claim porting Tetris to the PC, agree to give Pajitnov the right to handle all business arrangements, and refuse any rewards related to Tetris. I did not entirely agree with the content, but I trusted Alexey and signed the paper anyway. In a few months my name disappeared from all newly released versions of Tetris and all Tetris-related documents. Alexey registered a US copyright (R/N PA-412-170) referencing the free PC version of Tetris (original version 3.12) we developed together.

ndiddy··on August 27 TCRF DDoS Attack Postmortem
It's kind of sad that we've gotten to the point where if someone decides they want to fuck with you, there's nothing you can do besides using a service like Cloudflare. I wonder how much cumulative time the "Checking your browser..." screen has wasted.
ndiddy··on GitHub has not removed malicious imitation software after 3 weeks
This is one of the things I dislike the most about large tech companies. They get way more customers than they can adequately provide support/moderation for and either offer no support or shitty automated support. Then when something falls through the cracks people always go "what do you expect them to do, hire enough people?" Yeah I do!
ndiddy··on Japanese used bookstores see 5x sales surge as books are being bought by the ton
The Google Books settlement was originally going to make Google into a clearinghouse for scans of out-of-print books. The scans would have been available for individuals to purchase for a reasonable price, and libraries and institutions would have been able to subscribe to a service that would give patrons access to the full text of every book. This deal fell apart because some research libraries and authors argued this was anti-competitive, as anyone wanting to make a competing service would have to go through the same process as Google of settling a class action lawsuit. They instead wanted Congress to pass a law to free up the rights to orphaned books. No progress on this was subsequently made because nobody in Congress cares enough about the rights to out-of-print books to get legislation passed. The whole reason why they're out of print when ebooks and print-on-demand exist is that they won't get enough sales to make it worth the time and money to figure out who the royalties should go to. The result is that nobody outside Google gets to see the full Google Books scans.
ndiddy··on Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop
> The year of Linux will start the day we have a capable wayland desktop environment that is not foreign to Mac and Windows users without chasing stupid churn.

I mean that's KDE Plasma 6 right? Over the past few years it's pretty much become the standard Linux DE. From https://pointieststick.com/2025/12/28/highlights-from-2025/ :

> Today Plasma is the default desktop environment in a bunch of the hottest new gaming-focused distros, including Bazzite, CachyOS, Garuda, Nobara, and of course SteamOS on Valve’s gaming devices. Fedora’s Plasma edition was also promoted to co-equal status with the GNOME edition, and Asahi Linux — the single practical option for Linux on newer Macs — only supports KDE Plasma. Parrot Linux recently switched to Plasma by default, too. And Plasma remains the default on old standbys like EndeavourOS, Manjaro, NixOS, OpenMandriva, Slackware and TuxedoOS — which ships on all devices sold by Tuxedo Computers! And looking at the DIY distro space, Plasma is by far Arch users’ preferred desktop environment.

> It’s a quiet revolution in how Linux users interact with their computers, and my sense is that it’s gone largely unnoticed. But it happened, so let’s feel good about it!

> In fact, if we exclude the distros that showcase their developers’ custom DEs (e.g. COSMIC, ElementaryOS, and Linux Mint), at this point the only significant distros missing here are the enterprise-oriented ones: Debian, RHEL, SLE, Ubuntu, and the like. It’s something for us to work on in 2026, but clearly the current state is already great for a lot of people, including gamers, artists, developers, and general users.

I get the sense that Gnome's current popularity is largely because there's a bunch of enterprise specific features (i.e. LDAP accounts, headless RDP, Group Policy configuration) missing from KDE that companies or governments would have to cover the development costs for.

ndiddy··on Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop
Yeah I think that's the ideal use of the desktop, as a temporary area for what you're currently working on. It's a shame that Microsoft didn't copy the "Put Away" feature when they added desktop icons to Windows 95, and the desktop became a combination of a generic storage area for files and a place where program installers dump application shortcuts. Then everybody (including Apple for Mac OS X) copied Microsoft's approach instead of Apple's.
ndiddy··on Linux support is coming to Snapdragon X2 series
Look into something with the Intel Core Ultra Series 3. Performance is worse than the Apple M chips but you shouldn't have a problem running Linux and the battery life is good. I have a laptop with the previous generation of Intel chip (Core Ultra 258). The battery life is great, the computer never gets hot, and the fan rarely turns on (only if I'm doing like a long C++ compile or something, never for stuff like web browsing or watching videos).
ndiddy··on 28% of job postings on company career sites have been open over 90 days
Most job growth for the past several years has been in the healthcare, leisure and hospitality, and construction sectors. Removing these sectors makes job growth negative for 2024 and 2025, and wipes out the majority of job growth in 2026. See https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/economy/spotl...
ndiddy··on 28% of job postings on company career sites have been open over 90 days
You also have to deal with delusional hiring managers. A few months ago I remember seeing a comment on here from someone who had kept job listings up for years while hiring because he couldn't find anyone with the "right experience". Clearly there was no actual imminent need to fill the role and he was just hoping that some superstar would stumble across it, but he kept insisting that this counted as "really hiring for the role".
ndiddy··on Microsoft killed FoxPro in 2007. Anyway, here's FoxPro revived
What issues were your customer running into that made a 64-bit FoxPro necessary? What makes you more confident in rewriting the entire runtime the app runs inside of than rewriting the app itself? That seems just as risky if not more.
ndiddy··on Apple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy
> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.

I guess it depends on what you're used to? The last time I tried using GNOME, I found it very unintuitive. I ran into stuff like:

- Why don't windows have maximize and minimize buttons?

- Why do I have to go to a separate screen to un-minimize a window?

- Why does launching software require going through the GNOME equivalent of the Windows 8 start screen?

- Why can't I make the trackpad scroll speed slower?

- Why don't I have any system tray icons?

- Why do the extensions I installed to work around some of the above problems (some of which have millions of downloads yet haven't been added as settings) break after every GNOME update?

ndiddy··on Apple Copland D11E4 Booting in the Browser
When Apple showed Copland on Computer Chronicles, it was just the Apple guy playing animated mock-up demos and pretending that he was using the computer. I think that shows an incredible lack of confidence, as they weren't even willing to demonstrate the actual OS in a controlled environment. I'm not sure why Computer Chronicles let them get away with this. I would have expected that as a news program, they wouldn't let guests do fake demos. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBRKzJMS6Uw and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXfsAYUjvms&t=242s
ndiddy··on Apple Mac mini review
The comment you're replying to is saying that in fair markets, BYD is taking market share away from Toyota even without the proven track record of reliability. Saying "But I wouldn't buy a BYD unless I knew it was reliable" is kind of missing the point.
ndiddy··on Apple Mac mini review
You'll be looking for a while, looks like they're going for $600-700 used currently. You can get a used M1 Mac Mini for around $350 though. Macs don't depreciate nearly as quickly as PCs do.
ndiddy··on Ogre Battle 64 Recompiled Project at 99.05%
It's basically the same as emulation as long as the recompiled code doesn't get distributed (which this project doesn't do AFAIK). Functionally the only difference between a "recomp" and traditional console emulation is that the assembly code that the CPU runs is translated to C then compiled to native code, rather than being interpreted or JIT compiled at runtime. Traditionally recompilation was mainly used when porting games to platforms where the emulation overhead would have been too much, like if you were making a GBA port of a Sega Genesis game. With these enhanced ports, I guess the idea is that if you're making a game specific "emulator" anyway, you might as well recompile the code and get rid of the overhead of interpretation.

Note that this isn't the same as a "decomp" where the goal is to make readable source code that resembles something that the original developers would have worked with. A "recomp" simply translates the assembly instructions to C. You end up with "assembly code but in C" rather than idiomatic C code.

ndiddy··on Flock is rolling out a voluntary severance program
Good essay about this: https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted
ndiddy··on A graphical desktop for the ZX Spectrum
You really can’t see a difference between what Bison and GCC do and what an LLM does? You cannot tell GCC “I want a ZX Spectrum GUI” and get a working result.
ndiddy··on A graphical desktop for the ZX Spectrum
Well it’s more like commissioning art than making art yourself right? You want a painting of some specific thing to exist, so you find an artist you like and pay them to make it.

It’s not art, but I recently commissioned a translation of a manga that I wanted to read in English. The process was very similar to working with an LLM, just more expensive and the turn length was longer (and of course the output quality is much higher than an LLM generated scanlation would be at this point in time). I would pay for a chapter, he would send me a draft, we would go back and forth iterating on romanization and fixing typos until I was happy, then we’d move onto the next chapter. I achieved my goal of having the manga readable in English when it wasn’t before, but I wouldn’t call it my project.

ndiddy··on Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'
Please read the entire sentence you're quoting, then ask yourself whether that sentence is referring to the US, or to somewhere else.
ndiddy··on Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'
> The status quo of "your knowledge has no protection, but our knowledge is sacred" is the worst of all possible worlds.

This is how IP has always worked. It has never protected the little guy. Draw a picture and then people start putting it on t-shirts and posters without paying you? Great, you can't do anything about it unless you have enough time and money to hire a lawyer to go after them. Self publish a book and then people start uploading PDFs of it? Better hope your real passion is filing takedown requests instead of writing.

ndiddy··on Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'
IP does not protect the little guy. This is nothing new. Draw a picture and then people start putting it on t-shirts and posters without paying you? Great, you can't do anything about it unless you have enough time and money to hire a lawyer to go after them. Self publish a book and then people start uploading PDFs of it? Better hope your real passion is filing takedown requests instead of writing.
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