bbayles

Also anorexia by another name in many cases, alas.

A lot of it is anorexia by another name. There is a subspecies that involves compulsive exercise. Doing lots of athletics without proper nourishment is a good recipe for low performance and injury.

Well, I knew from looking at a previous game that this development team liked to put Easter eggs on the About menu. That's why I looked there first!

https://32bits.substack.com/p/under-the-microscope-three-dir...

This sort of thing seems to have really fallen off after the Grand Theft Auto "Hot Coffee" scandal. Having hidden stuff in a game went from being a fun thing to a potential liability.

Anecdata, but an acquaintance of mine struggled with lifelong anorexia. Severe enough that he was hospitalized a few times. With great effort he could cling to the bottom of the "normal BMI" range, but his life was generally ruled by the eating disorder - he couldn't have meals with people, he had to do various exercise rituals.

He was an early participant in one of these psychedelic studies a few years ago. After the first treatment, he said he couldn't really tell if it had any effect. But six months later, he was totally changed - able to function almost normally.

We should exercise our usual amount of skepticism about miracle treatments, but my hope is that his experience can be replicated.

There are short term and long term bonds.

Debt-to-GDP ratio is useful for comparing the debt loads of two countries, but not terribly useful in assessing the serviceability of debt for a single country.

That is, suppose two countries both have $100B in debt. One of them is a small island nation; the other is a global superpower. Obviously the global superpower will be better able to handle that - dividing by GDP helps make that clear.

However, this simple division doesn't tell you some important things. How much of the debt comes due very soon? It's worse if the answer is "most of it." How was it incurred? "Winning a war" is much better than "losing a war."

The United States has lots of debt, and personally I'm worried about the long term serviceability of it. But the ratio to GDP isn't why!

Michał Zalewski's article on page 42 is very funny.

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.

In an interview, he describes several engineering heroics that were involved in making everything work: https://hiddenpalace.substack.com/p/hidden-palace-podcast-ep...

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?

Let's call the person in question Alex. Having to make every new feature Alex-proof made all of the engineers better.

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!

Agree on video games! I recently found a "developer photo insert" Easter egg in an old 3DO game: https://32bits.substack.com/p/under-the-microscope-total-ecl...

Fantastic game!

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.

[0] https://32bits.substack.com/p/bonus-fighters-megamix

Excellent - these seem indeed to work. I'll try to figure out what they do.

I'll write up the results eventually. I sent you a note about crediting your contribution here. Many thanks!

Wow, nice work!

The other missing ones are: A75CA25CF4498F87 8FE0C6AA7CE60CEC B343B58CF0B72493 E0B20BEDFA0AC685 EFCC5A6FD62EC6D8

Really cool! I'll play with this to see if I can come up with some missing hashes for Tony Hawk 3.

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.

Yeah, for sure. It's as expensive to generate the permutations as it is to do the hashing in this case!

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.

Thanks! I didn't clock that - should have looked at the decrypted values!

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.

I've poked around a bit with that game! The main trick is to import the memory snapshot (various ways of dumping it to a file; people like Cheat Engine for this) into Ghidra.

Ghidra can analyze the SuperH processor machine code natively, so the auto analysis will turn up lots of functions.

The programmers for this game were in Budapest, so this is a good guess!