If, like me, you were wondering how a 52 year old could have been a developer on a game you remember playing on an NES in the late 80s or early 90s: It looks like Īda's Castlevania involvement started around 2003, working in increasingly senior roles on Castlevania games released since then.
Same... I remember when Super Castlevania IV came out on the SNES our jaw dropped when we saw that the whole level began to rotate. We were already coding back then but probably not old enough to be professional game developers (although some started really young).
Mind-blowing effect (for 1991) begins at 2min 12s:
I must have been really intimidating to come on only 6 years after Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and after a run of forgettable entries in the series.
This is what I do too, but be warned about “fire proof” - a fire that results in the total loss of your house will create enough heat for enough time that fireproof gun safes and smaller fireproof lockboxes will be destroyed, or even if not, their contents will get hot enough to combust anyway.
A bank safe deposit box offers a different security profile that’s probably more robust against fire because banks burn less often than houses.
It’s probably not practical to really be robust against fire without being buried several feet deep.
While the fire resulted in the total loss of the house it was actually the water from the fire department not the heat that did proportionally more damage.
As a mental model you shouldn’t think of it as “what if my house burns down?” so much as “what if nice strangers roll up to my windows and chainsaw through my roof and spray 50,000 gallons of water in here?”
Yes everything in the mechanical room melted but everything in the rest of the house got hot, smoky, soaked and then moldy.
For root of trust materiel like social security cards, cash, passports put in a ziplock bag in a fireproof, waterproof safe. But for other storage I use clear “Ezy Storage” brand stackable 50L tubs labeled with Homebox QR codes. In the US, Target and Home Depot frequently stock them. I am very anti black and yellow tubs.
The majority of work post-fire goes to itemizing your house inventory for insurance. Even cataloging all your bathroom’s soaps by brand name rather than generic can make $100 difference. Multiply that by 500x different things.
From a threat model perspective I look at rooms from a “what would be salvageable in here if I emptied a swimming pool’s worth of water from some fire sprinklers”. Furniture and TVs are easy to replace. Other stuff less so.
We did that with major hail damage a few years ago. I learned that in a disaster, you should count on everything being junk, and you're lucky if you can salvage anything. We also learned the value of itemized lists.
1500/piece for 20 junk windows I was building a greenhouse with that I dug out of the trash the year before. $250 for a bird feeder because they couldn't find one outside of specialty stores. $40k instead of 10k for a new roof on the shed because it was heavier gauge metal than standard.
Exact replacements can be expensive, but you need to make sure your insurance has 100% replacement instead of adjusted for age or like-kind replacements.
After that experience, we itemized EVERYTHING in the house with make, model, serial number, and color. It was a bitch to get set up, but took the value of our home contents from around 75k to over 250k for exact replacements.
Copies of these records along with our master password for our keepass database are in two bank deposit boxes about 45 minutes apart. For $50/year we can sleep easy.
We have keys. In the event those are lost or destroyed, they will provide access to an approved list of individuals and drill the lock for $40.
Also they're small town banks, so that makes it easier as well. We don't really need to worry about providing ID, but if we did and couldn't access ID or something like that, we have four other people listed with access, one of which lives hours away in case of a disaster impacting everyone else on the list. They don't have keys but could get into it for us. So for a few hundred dollars, we're set and insured for the declared value of the contents of the boxes (250k max for another $15/year) if the banks are both destroyed as well!
Bank vault can be key+combination (eg three letters) or dual key or others. For example in a dual key: one key from the bank and one key being your own key.
If a key is lost, you go and prove your identity (easier if any bank employee is familiar with you) and ask for a new key. A date is set and a locksmith shall come, you are next to him and next to the bank employee while he uses the bank's key and lockpicks your lock. Then he configures it for a new key (or replace the lock).
It's cost you something like $300 or whatever.
Source: been next to locksmith opening a bank vault, twice, in two different countries. Once for a bank belonging to a deceased family member (we had the key but not the three-letters combination) and once not because I lost my key but because the bank's lock (on my vault) went defective.
So it's not "my key from the my vault at the bank melted during a housefire, so I can never access my vault at the bank anymore" nor is it "I forgot my three-letters combination, so until the end of the universe that bank vault shall stay locked".
In general, identity (the bank checking who you are) is often involved in regular unlocking and there will be an identity-only recovery procedure that will work even if you lose your usual credential (key, passcode, card, whatever). This may involve drilling a lock and the bill for that.
My insurance agent has recommended that once a year or so I carefully walk through the house with a video recorder, opening every cabinet and drawer and tool box and so on. It's easier than constructing a detailed inventory, but gives you the raw data you need to construct one in the unlikely even that you need it.
The plastic used in the black/yellow brand is brittle when it gets cold — it breaks upon simple impact/sliding. Also, you cannot see inside them without opening the lid.
The clear plastic is usually a bit thicker, and more rubberized — it'll still break, but more difficultly.
As to why they're against them, I don't know their reason, but there used to be only one size of tote. There there was big and small. And then, for some fxcking reason, they decided to make ones that were roughly as big as the big ones. Just enough that you have to take half a second to re-eyeball-ruler measure them. But in isolation, if you've got one in front of you, you can't know if it'll tetris properly with another one until they're side-by-side and it turns out they're not.
In December 2025, items worth an estimated €30 million were stolen from a Sparkasse bank in the Gelsenkirchen suburb of Buer, Germany. The thieves used a large drill to break into the bank's underground vault and proceeded to crack over 3,000 safe deposit boxes.
Don’t need events that extreme. Regular branch banks have stuff go missing from the safety deposit boxes shockingly regularly. The locks aren’t particularly secure and various people are able to access them. It can be hard to find articles about them because they don’t make the news like the more remarkable incidents do. Examples of boring security box failures (but that were noteworthy in other ways so they did make the news): Jennifer Morsch, Roberta Glassman, Lianna Sarabekyan (multiple customers affected), Philip Poniz, Wells Fargo in Cape Coral FL, Wells Fargo Katy TX (many customers affected, blamed on road construction down the street), lots of individual stories where banks just totally stopped following their own procedures on ID checking and logging.
The vast majority of these don’t make the news because there’s no proof there was even anything inside the box in the first place so anyone could be lying.
> Mr. Pluard, who tracks legal filings and news reports, estimates that around 33,000 boxes a year are harmed by accidents, natural disasters and thefts.
> Oddly, the bank returned to him five watches that weren’t his. “They were the wrong color, the wrong size — totally different than what I had,” Mr. Poniz said. “I had no idea where they came from.”
> Regular branch banks have stuff go missing from the safety deposit boxes shockingly regularly. The locks aren’t particularly secure and various people are able to access them.
My late wife had a safe deposit box in the Almaden Valley (San Jose) branch of US Bank. Her key to the box was nowhere to be found. So I had to get the box drilled open.
This would normally require a hefty fee. But the branch was moving to a new location, so they invited customers to make an appointment to show up a Saturday with proper ID for a lock drilling party.
I showed my ID and the death certificate, and we went into the safe to have the lock drilled.
But there was no real drilling involved. The locksmith had a little handheld gadget that she pushed into the lock, gave it a little twist, and the door came right open.
The ironic part? All that was in there were a few pieces of costume jewelry, worth maybe $50 in total.
She was paying more than that per year for the box rental, and if I'd had to pay for the "drilling" it would probably be more than that.
I was with my mother when she went to close her safe deposit box. Her key did not work, so after checking her ID (could be fake), they used a tool that very quickly removed the lock. We were then left alone in the camera-less room with all of the other boxes and the tool...
Sure... if you don't have a spouse, leave it with a sibling. I put my Bitcoin key in my brother's safe. And if you don't have a sibling or parent or best friend, you can usually rent a locker at a bank.
A real innovation from the Bitcoin world! There are several physical password store systems that they have suggested for this kind of use case. The simplest is basically using a nail to punch out a password onto a piece of sheet metal.
Only thing about safe deposit boxes - make sure that things needed in the event of your death, especially your will, are not there.
The bank will seal the box as soon as they discover you are dead, and require a court order. Without a will, the executor will be whatever statutory person your state calls for.
Is there a better class of safe one could use that might be more successful even if not a guarantee? F/e even with a safe deposit box, one might still have some lower-tier items that would be impractical to store in one but you might want to do better than just out in the open.
do you store stuff in a bank? could you tell me more about it? my account gives me access to one for free and been meaning to put a yubikey there for a while but never have
I do. I have a small safe deposit box in my local branch for about $1 a year.
It's great if you want to store some documents. But don't expect _real_ security. It's guarded by a minimum-wage employee, and the keys are usually laughably insecure. Banks know this, so they cap their liability for the loss of the deposit box at around $1000.
So don't even think about storing gold bars there, like they do in movies.
There _are_ companies that provide safe storage for high-value items, but they are pretty exotic.
What if you RAID01 it, so you have four safety deposit boxes, two with the first half of your password, two with the second half of your password? Then no snoop at a particular bank would be able to get your password, but also if one or two go missing, the password won't be lost. And you just check all four boxes once or twice a year to make sure everything is good.
My (large) bank is yanking their safety deposit boxes out. They let subscribers know that they have, like, 1 or 2 years to go. They're doing it across the branches. They basically feel it's not worth the liability any more, and the way it was presented to me, it's not just them, but other banks are also doing (or at least considering) this.
Things we take for granted. When my father passed, I was digging stuff out of SDBs that he had for decades.
Maybe not safe for valuables. What about stuff that has no value to anyone else? I'm not a villain from Ocean's Eleven, no one is stealing my passwords to break into my elaborate safe.
What I found out when I was burgled, was that they don't care. I had nothing valuable in my firesafe but they still took it wholesale. I found some papers from it drifting around outside afterwards like they had dumped it out. But not my passport or SSN card. The lock was even broken so they could have just opened it to see that and saved themselves the lift. But again, they don't care.
As someone who recently replaced a few windows in my house, I can say in no uncertain terms that spending $1200 for a lamp and paying to feed it 0.58kW is cheaper than hiring a contractor to add another window. And it works all day.
This is really useful for those of us who are really only familiar with the US system. Let me restate a few things to make sure I understand, and follow with some questions:
1. The "procureur" and "juge d'instruction" are chosen from the same pool of judges, with the former appointed by the government executive, and the latter nominated by the judges themselves.
2. Does the executive choose one "procureur" to serve a particular region for a particular span of time, or do they choose a "procureur" every time there's some sort of criminal activity they think needs investigation?
3. How is the pool of judges themselves chosen? In the US, for example, federal judges are chosen by the president and confirmed by the senate, and serve for life. While state court judges are typically elected for a specified term.
4. Supposing we both live in France and I break into your house and steal from you. What happens next? For the sake of telling a story, suppose that you have a security camera from which I could be recognized, but not so clearly that anybody can be certain it's me until someone searches my garage and finds your stolen things. Walk me through the process of who does what?
Sorry, I'm not a legal expert, it's mostly what I remember from classes. I'll do my best
1-2/ I'm pretty sure the procureur can be named from anywhere , to any court, an can be an ex-arttorney while I think the juge d'instruction is named by the local magistrates, but have to have followed a very strict formation beforehand (and I think you have to be a top scorer or something).
3/ judges are chosen by passing a very competitive test before 31yo, then being taught during 3 more years (to access the test you need a master degree, if you fail you can still become an attorney, and attorneys can work a number of years and pass the test again, but in that case the age limit is like 40)
4/ here I'm not exactly sure. I go to the police, they investigate. If they found nothing but have reasonable suspicions, they ask a judge to authorise a 'perquisition' (basically a warrant, which have to be served between 8 AM and 10 PM). A juge d'instruction will only be responsible for an investigation in very difficult administrative cases (they are insulated from political pressure as much as possible, that makes them very good to investigate corruption cases) or in a heinous crime (basically anything involving children, multiple murders, terrorism)
> Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The Terminator would never stop, it would never leave him... it would always be there. And it would never hurt him, never shout at him or get drunk and hit him, or say it couldn't spend time with him because it was too busy. And it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.
The AI doctor will always have enough time for you, and always be at the top of their game with you. It becomes useful when it works better than an overworked midlevel, not when it competes with the best doctor on their best day. If we're not there already, we're darn close.
What is interesting about the decision of the Terminator not to continue this role as a father-figure for John (aside from the requirement to destroy it's embedded Skynet technology), was that it explicitly understood that while it could and would do all those things to protect him, it lacked the emotional intelligence needed to provide a supportive development environment for an child/adolescent.
Specifically:
> I know now why you cry, but it's something I can never do.
While the machine learns what this complex social behavior called 'crying' is, it also learns that it is unable to ever actualize this; it can never genuinely care for John, any relationship would be a simulation of emotions. In the context of a child learning these complex social interactions, having a father-figure who you knew wasn't actually happy to see you succeed, sad to see you cry ...
But the top of their game includes them make things up and getting things wrong. They always give their best, but they always include mistakes. It's a different trust proposition to a human.
A real, actual doctor told my brother, who has a chronic headache disorder, to just keep taking OTC painkillers.
You very specifically should not do that; you'll develop a medication overuse headache and be worse off than you were.
It gets worse, though. I was able to ask them a few questions about their symptoms, compare them to entries in the International Classification of Headache Disorders, and narrow it down to, iirc, two likely possibilities.
One of them was treatable. The treatment works. They still have pain, but can do stuff.
An AI that makes stuff up and gets stuff wrong isn't any different from the doctors we already have, except you can afford to get a second opinion, and you have the time available to push back and ask questions.
Edit: to expound on quality of the doctor - diagnosis and proposing a treatment was the work of several hours for me, a layman. A doctor should have known the ICHD existed. They should have been able to, in several minutes, ask questions about symptoms, reference the ICHD to narrow down likely diagnoses, and then propose a treatment with a "come back if that doesn't help".
That's because people actually powered off their computer after work/leisure sessions. Someone on an unlimited night dial-up could had discovered it well before "anybody" but it's not like there was a built-in function to actually send a crash report to Redmond.
> CPUs fetch data from memory in fixed-size blocks of so-many bytes, and performance degrades when data is misaligned.
A memory bus supports memory transactions of various sizes, with the largest size supported being a function of how many data lines there are. The following two statements are true of every memory bus with which I'm familiar, and I probably every bus in popular use: (1) only power-of-two sizes are supported; (2) only aligned transactions are supported.
Arm, x86, and RISC-V are relatively unique among the multitude of CPU architectures in that if they are asked to make an unaligned memory transaction, they will compose that transaction from multiple aligned transactions. Or maybe service it in cache and it never has to hit a memory bus.
Most CPU architectures, including PPC, MIPS, Sparc, and ColdFire/68k, will raise an exception when asked to perform a misaligned memory transaction.
The tradition of aligning data originated when in popular CPU architectures, if you couldn't assume that data was aligned, you would need to use many CPU instructions to simulate misalinged access in software. It continued in compilers for Arm and x86 because even though those CPUs could make multiple bus transactions in response to a single mis-aligned memory read, that takes time and so it was much slower.
I don't know for sure, but I would expect that on modern x86 and high performance Arm, the performance penalty is quite small, if there's any at all.
It's small, but not unnoticeable... depending on the exact size of the workload and the amount of computation per element. In fact, for huge arrays it may be beneficial to have structs packed if that leads to less memory traffic.
You can use too few bits of color depth to get lossyness in PNG. More generally, I can't find myself very sympathetic to "I don't want a format that can do X and Y, because I might accidentally select X when I want Y in my software". You might accidentally choose JPG when you want PNG too. Or accidentally resample the image. Or delete your files.
If you want a robust lossless workflow, PNG isn't the answer. Automating the fiddly parts and validating that the automation does what you want is the answer.
I use MoneyDance, which does automatic bank sync, is double-entry (although you can make single-entry transactions if you try hard enough), and is a program rather than a web service. It’s got some rough edges, but it meets my needs well enough. I haven’t looked into how hard it would be to read its data files if I wanted to migrate away.
Allegations of copyright infringement where the person making the allegation hasn't done due diligence need to be illegal and subject to civil penalty. The penalties for actual copyright infringement can be so severe that we cannot allow all the copyright wolf-crying that happens.
I think this should become harder to do in general, not just for copyright infringement. A third party alleges an infringement, they do little work since it's AI generated, and then you need to do TONS of work to fix their s*t. THAT needs to be fixed by AI legislation - use AI at your own peril and under your own responsibility.
