Perhaps another way to say it-using an evil compiler could bootstrap any kind of malicious code in the compiled artifact whether it’s a compiler or not.
442 karma · joined May 9, 2017
This is something that could easily occur with scripting languages, backend systems, open source, closed source, etc.
Basically any black-box system that takes in some input could pre-manipulate the input yielding an unknown/unexpected output.
Also, never have I ate my own words harder with the “Mac sucks” thing.
At the end of the day I’ll use what works.
Back then you bought Apple if you were a sound engineer or into graphic/media design.
I used to tell people I’m a die-hard PC user simply: Mac sucks!
Fast forward to around 2009 and I’ve been a happy Apple user since then for all my software engineering needs.
Is the platform perfect? Nope! And nothing is.
Is it expensive? Yes, but the quality is fantastic and if one really wants to can get 5 years easy out of any Mac computer…I’ve got 11 years out of my family’s Mac mini that I was able to upgrade a few times.
Which brings me to my only real gripe: the lack of upgrade ability and the obsession with “thin” design.
Please address that because everything else I can mostly get over.
The main screen would loaded but when clicked wouldn’t resolve the sub-modules correctly but I was able to just play the sub-modules and individually and see the old content in all its cheesy glory.
It’s written in Rust (don’t shoot the messenger) and was able to play some flash content I had produced around 1999…
Ok I’m going to go crawl back under my rock.
I ask because while some opcodes are obviously needed others as not so obvious and coming up with a balanced instruction set is somewhat difficult design problem.
I only know of snapshotting perhaps being necessary to support coroutine based context switching.
Thanks and very cool project!
But did you know they also often times will additionally fix existing bugs in these games. Bugs that are now decades old!
These classic titles are now even better to play than when they originally came out.
Obviously he wasn’t there for the tail end of things during the acquisitions and fraudulent period but what I found most interesting is how Sierra was bootstrapped in the first place.
Ken is a brilliant thinker and had the foresight to build a game engine that Roberta could plug and play her game content in because she admitted to not being a great coder.
Later Ken wanted his next generation games to be built as a virtual machine (The Sierra Creative Interpreter) which meant they only had to make the game once and build the VM for different architectures. Again a brilliant move.
Check his book out: https://kensbook.com/
Just my personal preference.
Overall learning to combat the problems with anxiety and mental state are not easy. It takes some trial and error but I think the biggest piece of advice is finding ways to break up your routine is helpful. I have gone years doing the same thing over and over with days on forgetting to live a little...it’s not healthy in the long term.
But, she’s still the sweetest little potato ever.
The title just seems to imply skepticism over what looks to be a legit approach.
Inexperienced engineers will nitpick about what is often minor “performance optimization”, clearly not seeing the bigger picture. Example, why should we spend precious developer time to rewrite some code using something that is often less readable when it’s called once every 30 seconds?
To the folks who do this: you are better off spending the time making data-driven decisions and optimizing for the big picture. In other words measure first than come up with an optimization that has a large impact on the system. Not this micro-optimization, I-love-to-tickle-myself stuff.
Learn to see the bigger picture.
One example: People claiming the borrow checker gets in their way in Rust because it’s so strict.
Guess what? If your code doesn’t compile due to the rigidness of the borrow checker, it’s incorrect I’m sorry to say. It’s either got a data race, use after free bug or some other invariant. You don’t want that behavior in your code at all.
I’m happy to offload the responsibility to the compiler to check for this.
You won’t get it until you’ve been bitten.
It’s such a nostalgic feeling of the earlier web back when just interest groups, universities, fan pages, web-rings ruled the web. Back before it became commercialized by greedy folks that threw ads all over the place, tracked everything you do and spammed the hell out of your inbox.
I miss the good ‘ol days for what the web was intended for.
One of my first projects was maintaining the site for: Looney Tunes Teaches the Internet.
If you look hard enough it’s still out there.
Thanks Andrew for pushing the boundaries and rethinking what can be possible with modern tooling.
I highly recommend people to watch his live streams. Excellent stuff.
But I started looking at community projects on Github and found nothing except for Nimlang itself. This is not meant to be critical of what I think is an impressive language...just more of a question of where are Nim open source projects to be found?