I've reported a few very serious issues to vendors of widely used tools in recent weeks, and it's been even more difficult than usual to get them to be acknowledged - the teams that respond are reportedly swamped.
The developer of this tech demo also worked on porting Resident Evil 2 to Nintendo 64. This was quite the challenge - two discs worth of content had to be made to fit onto a single cart.
LLMs are very good at understanding decompiled code. I don't think people have updated on the fact that almost everything is effectively open source now!
I'm sympathetic to this view, but I also wonder if this is the same thing that assembly language programmers said about compilers. What do you mean that you never look at the machine code? What if the compiler does something inefficient?
In order to avoid the endless cycle with the QA person, I started doing this:
> This forced me to start making my feature proposals as small as possible. I would defensively document everything, and sprinkle in little summaries to make things as clear as possible. I started writing scripts to help isolate the new behavior during testing.
Which is what I should have been doing in the first place!
I used to work with a QA person who really drove me nuts. They would misunderstand the point of a feature, and then write pages and pages of misguided commentary about what they saw when trying to test it. We'd repeat this a few times for every release.
This forced me to start making my feature proposals as small as possible. I would defensively document everything, and sprinkle in little summaries to make things as clear as possible. I started writing scripts to help isolate the new behavior during testing.
...eventually I realized that this person was somehow the best QA person I'd ever worked with.
There's a typo in the URL here:
> If you have a topic in mind but are not sure if it is suitable for Paged Out!, check out the Writing Articles page or contact us
It links to `?page=writing.pho` rather than `.php`
(channeling Patrick McKenzie) If you have an S&P 500 index fund, you're a shareholder in Microsoft. Call their Investor Relations people, or send them a letter with this description. They will probably be of some help!
The same development studio, Sega AM2, recently had a developer reveal that he had put an Easter egg into Fighters Megamix for Saturn. However, he mistakenly introduced a crash bug in it.
This set me off looking for the Easter egg. After a couple days of reverse engineering, I finally found it [0]! I love looking for this stuff.
If you feel like a challenge, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 has some hashes with unknown inputs. The function is the same as the one in the article, and one target is 1eca8e89ad2dc1d6.
Good point - the dictionary attack produces some permutations that are too long, but it doesn't matter because you get the effect as soon as the final character of the correct code is entered.
I knew some from school, but stepping through a debugger with a video game that I remembered from childhood was a better education on computer engineering than anything I got in class.
A friend of mine explained that there are overlapping phobias of water and deep dark spaces that this game triggers; he said it's unbearable to play the later levels.