I feel like this is a good spot to mention that Dmitry's a friggin beast when it comes to engineering. As that Tweetster put it: "Dmitry is an insanely skilled dude. Easily on par with Carmack or Karpathy IMO. They almost had to delay the original Kindle Fire tablet because of a rare bug that all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't fix in 6 months, but Dmitry nailed it in a few days"
Summary of the events unfolding by Sargonas on Reddit:
Maybe this will help with a listed summary of the known facts from first hands accounts. I am leaving gaps where there has just been speculation or second hand unverifiable information, and welcome anyone with first-hand knowledge of those aspects to comment below me to fill in the gaps. I'm merely presenting the facts as we have them from first-hand accounts (mostly from reddit and discord), without personal opinion or bias (hopefully, human nature is a tricky thing.)
Entropic Engineering designed and built the circuitry of the badges, physically. They were either only partially, or not at all, paid by DEFCON for this work, contrary to whatever formal agreement they had in place. (Other amazingly talented individuals create the silk screen design, the shells, and the game, but are totally removed from this drama so I'm leaving them out of it.) Subsequently, all references to them have been removed in various materials, and even one of their logos was removed from the silk screen. (apparently small one may be left under the battery? but I can't check because I affixed mine to the board to stop it's shifting.)
dmitrygr wrote the firmware for the badges as well
Somewhere along the way, Entropic was cut out of the process and left to the side by DEFCON in a way that left Entropic feeling burned and under/un paid for their non-trivial work (according to some comments below it is 6 figure sum, but this is second hand info).
Dmitry felt this was unfair, and put an easter egg into the badge code. This easter egg simply comments that Entropic engineered the badges, and had their credits removed everywhere, with an address for donations if you wish to support them. This was entirely Dmitrys doing as a gesture of thanks to the Entropic team.
This easter egg more or less flew under the radar until EoD friday.
Friday evening, after spending most of his day traveling to DEFCON and writing a 1.5 update in his spare time on his flight to fix some issues, Dmitry was up on stage with the other badge creators about to present the usual badge talk, when word of the Easter egg went around (likely due to him including some slides on his portion of the presentation about it.)
DEFCON staff had Goons escort Dmitry off stage shortly before the talk started, delaying the talk some.
during the talk, a comment was made about “unauthorized code“ being on the badges.
Dmitry setup himself on the sidewalk outside the hall, and basically held his own mini talk about the work he did and Entropics contributions.
At some point, LVMPD showed up. It is unclear to me personally who issued the call but second hand info says it was DEFCON staff. They noted Dmitry was simply talking to people (albiet nearly 100 of them) on a public sidewalk, outside a building owned by the county, and nothing was really amiss, and left shortly after.
Dmitry, in his (likely valid) opinion feels this whole situation has not been handled well, and since his code was written free of charge, without any signed agreements with DEFCON or consequently any rights assignments, has announced that he intends to assert his legal ownership of the code (which is his right under us copyright law). As a result, he will gladly issue a non-transferable right to the code to any attendee who asks him for one, but is no longer going to "turn a blind eye" to the fact DEFCON does not have a legal license to his code, and instead look into taking actions that are within his power to take to clarify their lack of ownership of the code on the badges. (I believe in discord he may have gone so far as to say DMCA, but I need to double-check.)
bearing this in mind this does add a curious wrinkle to the statement about “unauthorized code” from DEFCON given… The obvious.
Someone's gotta get the word out, I'm seriously sick of all these ridiculous LARPers trying to magic Rust into existence
Rust is a joke, it's a complete waste of time and effort to try and use it. It's the EU cookie law of native code - well-intentioned nonsense that doesn't work at all in reality
Personally I'd rather be able to game on my beefy iPhone 15 with a clip-on gamepad than have to lug around a slow, loud, gigantic Steam Deck or a laughably primitive Switch
Their support raises issues directly to the dev teams when they happen often enough, too. There's a good chance the touch screen team is working their asses off right now on this already
Alex St. John's blog was like that for Microsoft in the 90s, but unfortunately he took it down after a bunch of internet Marxists got mad at him for encouraging entrepreneurs to work long hours building games
Pretty wild.. what's the point in even making them go to school if you're just going to let them goof off on their phone all day? Just let them sit around at home watching TikTok until they turn 18 and have to get a minimum wage job
All the subs I followed are a shadow of their former selves.. there's still some half-assed content posted, but it's not worth bothering to try and keep up any more
I was on a bunch of small niche subs with 10k users or fewer each
Seems like the giant subs like you're talking about are still running, although they're a lot lower quality now that it's effectively impossible to use Reddit on a phone
hmm, I could never see any open parking spots either.. it's weird too, that place is packed even in off-peak times
I'll admit the burgers are a lot better than McDonald's, although still not as good as something half-assedly home made with bottom-shelf Safeway ingredients
In n Out always has a 30+ minute line when I try to go there.. quicker to buy ingredients at a grocery store, go home, cook burgers myself, then clean up
Summary of the events unfolding by Sargonas on Reddit:
Maybe this will help with a listed summary of the known facts from first hands accounts. I am leaving gaps where there has just been speculation or second hand unverifiable information, and welcome anyone with first-hand knowledge of those aspects to comment below me to fill in the gaps. I'm merely presenting the facts as we have them from first-hand accounts (mostly from reddit and discord), without personal opinion or bias (hopefully, human nature is a tricky thing.)
Entropic Engineering designed and built the circuitry of the badges, physically. They were either only partially, or not at all, paid by DEFCON for this work, contrary to whatever formal agreement they had in place. (Other amazingly talented individuals create the silk screen design, the shells, and the game, but are totally removed from this drama so I'm leaving them out of it.) Subsequently, all references to them have been removed in various materials, and even one of their logos was removed from the silk screen. (apparently small one may be left under the battery? but I can't check because I affixed mine to the board to stop it's shifting.)
dmitrygr wrote the firmware for the badges as well
Somewhere along the way, Entropic was cut out of the process and left to the side by DEFCON in a way that left Entropic feeling burned and under/un paid for their non-trivial work (according to some comments below it is 6 figure sum, but this is second hand info).
Dmitry felt this was unfair, and put an easter egg into the badge code. This easter egg simply comments that Entropic engineered the badges, and had their credits removed everywhere, with an address for donations if you wish to support them. This was entirely Dmitrys doing as a gesture of thanks to the Entropic team.
This easter egg more or less flew under the radar until EoD friday.
Friday evening, after spending most of his day traveling to DEFCON and writing a 1.5 update in his spare time on his flight to fix some issues, Dmitry was up on stage with the other badge creators about to present the usual badge talk, when word of the Easter egg went around (likely due to him including some slides on his portion of the presentation about it.)
DEFCON staff had Goons escort Dmitry off stage shortly before the talk started, delaying the talk some.
during the talk, a comment was made about “unauthorized code“ being on the badges.
Dmitry setup himself on the sidewalk outside the hall, and basically held his own mini talk about the work he did and Entropics contributions.
At some point, LVMPD showed up. It is unclear to me personally who issued the call but second hand info says it was DEFCON staff. They noted Dmitry was simply talking to people (albiet nearly 100 of them) on a public sidewalk, outside a building owned by the county, and nothing was really amiss, and left shortly after.
Dmitry, in his (likely valid) opinion feels this whole situation has not been handled well, and since his code was written free of charge, without any signed agreements with DEFCON or consequently any rights assignments, has announced that he intends to assert his legal ownership of the code (which is his right under us copyright law). As a result, he will gladly issue a non-transferable right to the code to any attendee who asks him for one, but is no longer going to "turn a blind eye" to the fact DEFCON does not have a legal license to his code, and instead look into taking actions that are within his power to take to clarify their lack of ownership of the code on the badges. (I believe in discord he may have gone so far as to say DMCA, but I need to double-check.)
bearing this in mind this does add a curious wrinkle to the statement about “unauthorized code” from DEFCON given… The obvious.