The most interesting part is that IIRC they shipped the entire Windows 3.11 memory allocator to make it work.
I have very little understanding on how allocation works at OS level, but I'm surprised there are no wrappers like dgVoodoo or dxWrapper specifically for this kind of issues. There are quite a bunch of old Windows games (Need for Speed 1-4 for a start) that refuse to run on modern OSes due to rather...bold memory management strategies.
The most controversial part is probably that something like jqwik could be a dependency you're not even aware of. You could be asking your agent to fully analyze a project to isolate a bug and in the right situation that would probably trigger the exploit.
Mark my words: they will keep growing until they collapse, and once that happens, they will use their reach and contacts with the Italian government to ask to be bailed out out of debt. It’s not a matter of “if”, but “when”.
It’s a well known strategy that has been applied by several Italian companies, FIAT (now Stellantis) first and foremost.
My Nokia 5800 express could connect to a VPN and run a bridged internet connection over Bluetooth in 2008. I clearly remember using it in Switzerland around 2010 to pay for a tramway using a QR code.
Sure, UI was way worse compared to UIKit but in term of features Symbian phones were light-years beyond the iPhone at least until the iPhone 4.
Somehow around the 2010s we all decided that everything in the web had to become "reactive" and "asynchronous" - which is a fancy way of saying things can theoretically happen at any time but realistically if you try to make it happen in ways that don't resemble the previous serial approach you get weird race conditions - and instead of making sure this was implemented in HTML now we have to write another web browser on top of our web browser in javascript, using a thing called shadow DOM.
Also somehow now you have to understand how the internet works at protocol level unless you want way worse performance than that page written in Dreamweaver 20 years ago.
But this is fine because this is the way big companies run things, which we all know they always make the correct decisions like giving their AI full access to their login and password recovery process.
Because once shit hits the fan, those responsible for destroying the ecosystem will take a one-way flight for a fully air-conditioned bunkerized apartment lot in Dubai with any Epstein island-level luxury you can think of and fuck the consequences for everyone else, that's why.
I hope before I die we finally prove that the human brain has no peculiar qualia but it is an entirely deterministic, albeit extremely sophisticated, machine. And by touching the right triggers, even the worst human being can become a saint.
That would finally force us to rethink how we see the morality of "virtuosity", punishment and our justice system.
I was lucky enough to speak with one of the guys who ported Final Fantasy VIII to Windows (A crazy talented guy from Naples and one of the earliest members of the OG playstation emulation scene) and the porting team of several IREM arcade shootemups to the Game boy advance (incidentally they were also from south Italy) and both of them told me the same story:
The source code they were given for the job was so specific to the assembler, compiler, build stack and internal company libraries and SDKs (which often they had no access to) that reverse engineering the final game was usually the quickest route.
> Certainly from the game historian's perspective.
That's a completely different topic, and I mean, sure - from an historical perspective it's absolutely essential, even simple changelogs become of enormous importance.
Also... I won't add any details to avoid doxing myself, but trust me on this, Rick is the last person nowadays you'd want to listen to for anything taste-related, unless we're talking about feeding your own ego and carefully curating your own public image, and disappearing for weeks. I'd pay very good money to be around his ghost producers/writers/engineers again, though.
What we too easily forget is that for millennia we had societies where an infinitesimally amount of people (a dozen of families, at best) held almost all the wealth, another thousands ensured that order was maintained throughout the kingdom/empire by force, and everyone else lived by subsistence economy.
Such societies were terrifyingly stable, lasting hundred of years before slowly collapsing. We're not immune to going back to this.
It has become a meme at this point but this sentence still stands: "The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth".
I wouldn't be surprised if the original source code is probably lost and forgotten in a ZIP drive stored in a basement somewhere in Tokyo.
I've made a similar point in an earlier comment, but consider the following:
Even if the original sources leaked in a human-readable format, the original game was probably written in a mixture of the device-specific dialect of the Mips R3000 assembly used by the Nintendo 64, whatever in-house assembler macro routines SGI provided for the RSP game-specific microcode, and some C89 glue code in an IDE like Metrowerks Codewarrior 4, by a team of overworked japanese developers in a hurry.
We can safely assume that the final decompiled code is way more readable/usable than the original.
Only if you're going after the "vibe coders" audience. Regular developers would be fine with a lightweight local llm capable of scaffolding and wiring a dozen of bog-standard components in a few lines of natural language.
I've been in the "someone performed it" and "someone mixed it" role for some tracks that I found utterly mediocre and yet ended up being some of the most successful stuff I've ever worked on. I mean, sure, previous works, marketing and hype can do a lot to alter the general perception, but most of the times it's just matter of being the right audience.
Because the alternative would've been telling everyone "here's the Stochastic Machine. The more what you write looks like the sources we blatantly stol- I mean, trained from, the closer it gets to output working code". And we're not ready to admit we don't want to know how the sausage is made.
By anthropomorphizing it, we give it some sort of authorship, which clears our collective conscience from what's really happening.
I mean, after having spent some time in both LA and Sicily, I can see some merits on the idea /s.
Unfortunately no, outside of the clubbing and the winemaking scene there are way too many differences. Trying to sell a coffee in Palermo for $5 would be cause for public commotion, for a start.
I have very little understanding on how allocation works at OS level, but I'm surprised there are no wrappers like dgVoodoo or dxWrapper specifically for this kind of issues. There are quite a bunch of old Windows games (Need for Speed 1-4 for a start) that refuse to run on modern OSes due to rather...bold memory management strategies.