Back in the 80s most of the (monthly) magazines had a cassette tape glued to them, with demos or full games.
But there was also a brief period of time when you'd get a vinyl instead. I remember loading games from those a couple of times, though the tape deck was the standard approach and much more common.
"I saw your comment about GOLANG and I thought you might be interested in our TOKEN DROP FOR FREE SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS".
Spam from YC companies happens now and again, from other scraped content regularly. I've started making GDPR personal information requests in retaliation; they don't do anything useful but I figure tying up a "real human" for a few minutes at least makes their spam slightly more expensive for them.
> The mentats are theoretically safer because of their imperial conditioning, but even that can be tampered with, as we see with Dr Yueh
Dr Yueh was not a mentat, but a suk doctor who was subject to conditioning. (Which was broken by the Piter de Vries, via the pain amplifiers applied to his wife, Wanna.)
Paul himself was being trained to be a mentat, and there were no hints of conditioning there, neither with Paul, Hawat, or de Vries (albeit he was described as a "twisted mentat", whatever that means).
de Vries was a "twisted mentat" because he was designed by the tleilaxu to be so. I think there were suggestions that Yueh was, too.
That doesn't necessarily mean they were grown in tanks, though, they could just have been "groomed for purpose" in the same way the Tleilaxu's matriarchal counterpart the Bene Gesserit did.
(The Tleilaxu are to me a very obvious stand-in for "patriarchy": there are a few men ruling over a genderless, fluid workforce, and women are literally just birth machines.)
In addition to low salary, and crunchtime, the other big downside in the gaming industry is frequently layoffs, and studioes going bust.
You can't ride on a single game for long, and if the next one goes badly half the company will get fired. Not true of the bigger studios, but of course not everybody works in those.
I have friends who work in gaming, and it's a regular thing for studios to form with a great game, go bust a year or three later, and then a new studio get formed with largely similar staff.
Developers move between the same companies around and around again. The lack of stability is a real problem, especially with increasing use of "AI".
I used my human eyes to submit updates to Redis and Git, fixing typos in comments.
Sure it's low-hanging fruit, but if you're looking at the code it's good to have the comments be readable and not full of typos.
(That said this was a few years ago, and there were no LLMs at that point. I didn't go out of my way to make trivial contributions, but I figured since I saw the "problems" I should submit a patch to fix them.)
I enjoy working on toy-languages, and I've spent the past ten days or so writing a compiler to convert a simple language into (static) linux/amd64 assembly.
It supports strings, integers, and floating-point operations, and is complete enough that I could implement a brainfuck interpreter in it. But otherwise it is very definitely a toy.
This is one of the reasons why I'm suspicious of camera-only systems, here in Finland. Half the year there's a lot of snow and ice around. Which I imagine means most of the view is "white" and "shiny". Coupled with the dark winters it's gotta be a nightmare to deal with.
It's possible that contributes, but to be honest most VPN users are split "privacy seeking" and "abusive". Though I grant you paid users are probably slightly more circumspect than users of Tor, etc.
It seems more likely this is just about load-balancing use against their available nodes.
Very much so. Fixing software so that they correctly recognized my preferred serial number of #12345 was valid. Using soft-ice to register itself was always a deeply ironic.
But to be honest I started before then, on the ZX Spectrum. First of all it was patching games to get infinite lives, or time. But later it became necessary to patch the loaders before you could even access the game-code - speedlock, bleeplock, etc.
Being able to pause a running game and peek/poke at the RAM would have been very useful for hacking games, though of course I'd still need to crack the loader to share the POKEs with other people.
Oh it was. It had its own handy interface where you could alot of
things live in the memory. I remember hacking for infinite lives/credits and finding out secret passwords. It was a very fun and very expensive ( for me ) device. I did not need it for copying games. There were some local hobby clubs which had almost every game and software.
https://github.com/skx/cpm-dist
I found the compiler collection here useful too:
https://github.com/davidly/cpm_compilers
Though I guess some of these things won't run under the linked emulator, because they use SUBMIT and require more than a single-executable to be run.
(That's the reason why my own emulator used the CCP/"shell" rather than just limiting itself to running FOO.COM)
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