Ooh, fair point. We don’t know that any of these options boot.

I cannot fathom having my shit together to such a degree that my bootloader has a theme.

NAME THE GOD DAMN GAME!

The legal battle over arbitrary exclusion is a difficult fight by innocent victims.

Not having backups is a confession by morons with nobody to blame but themselves.

These two things can coincide.

‘1920s Germany also had cops and racism’ is tacit denial of what got worse in the 1930s.

Not aided by straight-up lying about the Florida concentration camp, because god damn, you have a psychological need to blame the previous democrat for every evil done by republicans. Ron Desantis built that camp last month. Can’t let that stop you from recycling time-vampire nonsense about Obama also separating children… from child traffickers.

Natural-born citizens are being snatched off the street and maybe shipped to foreign prisons the same day, but hey, I’m sure that was status quo under Biden. We had immigration laws and cops were shitty, so that’s totes mcgoats the same thing as publicly salivating about rounding up sixty-five million people.

We did it, Patrick!

Thank god you’re here to let everything get worse.

‘Attacking the preferable option is fundamentally counterproductive.’

‘When will it not be?’

Incorrect.

And how’d that work out, last year? Did attacking Harris make things better in general? Or even on this specific issue?

Yes, let’s make this about the most progressive figure in the conversation, and not the supermajority of conservative bastards who openly want civilians dead.

Oh hey, found an old comment:

I admire the concept behind Denuvo.

Programs bounce around between a ton of different code segments, and it doesn’t really matter how they’re arranged within the binary. Some code even winds up repeated, when repetition is more efficient than jumping back and forth or checking a short loop. It doesn’t matter where the instructions are, so long as they do the right thing.

The machine code still tends to be clean, tight, and friendly toward reverse-engineering… relatively speaking. Anything more complex than addition is an inscrutable mess to people who aren’t warped by years of computer science, but it’s just a puzzle with a known answer, and there’s decades of tools for picking things apart and putting them back together. Scene groups don’t even need to unravel the whole program. They’re only looking for tricky details that will detect pirates and frustrate hackers. Eventually, they will find and defeat those checks.

So Denuvo does everything a hundred times over. Or a dozen. Or a thousand. Random chunks of code are decompiled, recompiled, transpiled, left incomplete, faked entirely, whatever. The whole thing is turned into a hot mess by a program that knows what each piece is supposed to be doing, and generally makes sure that’s what happens. The CPU takes a squiggly scribbled path hither and yon but does all the right things in the right order. And sprinkled throughout this eight-ton haystack are so many more needles, any of which might do slightly different things. The “attack surface” against pirates becomes enormous. They’ll still get through, eventually, but a crack delayed is a crack denied.

Unfortunately for us this also fucks up why computers are fast now.

Back in the single-digit-megahertz era, this would’ve made no difference to anything, besides requiring more RAM for these bloated executables. 8- and 16-bit processors just go where they’re told and encounter each instruction by complete surprise. Intel won the 32-bit era by cranking up clock speeds, which quickly outpaced RAM response times, leading to hideously clever cache-memory use, inside the CPU itself. Cache layers nowadays are a major part of CPU cost and an even larger part of CPU performance. Data that’s read early and kept nearby can make an instruction take one cycle instead of one thousand.

Sending the program-counter on a wild goose chase across hundreds of megabytes guarantees you’re gonna hit those thousand-cycle instructions. The next instruction being X=N+1 might take literally no time, if it happens near a non-math instruction, and the pipeline has room for it. But if you have to jump to that instruction and back, it’ll take ages. Maybe an entire microsecond! And if it never comes back - if it jumps to another copy of the whole function, and from there to parts unknown - those microseconds can become milliseconds. A few dozen of those in the wrong place and your water-cooled demigod of a PC will stutter like Porky Pig. That’s why Denuvo in practice just plain suuucks. It is a cache defeat algorithm. At its pleasure, and without remedy, it will give paying customers a glimpse of the timeline where Motorola 68000s conquered the world. Hit a branch and watch those eight cores starve.

Denuvo duplicates code at random, so executables bloat into a Gordian knot.

C is dangerous like your uncle who drinks and smokes. Y’wanna make a weedwhacker-powered skateboard? Bitchin’! Nail that fucker on there good, she’ll be right. Get a bunch of C folks together and they’ll avoid all the stupid easy ways to kill somebody, in service to building something properly dangerous. They’ll raise the stakes from “accident” to “disaster.” Whether or not it works, it’s gonna blow people away.

C++ is dangerous like a quiet librarian who knows exactly which forbidden tomes you’re looking for. He and his… associates… will gladly share all the dark magic you know how to ask about. They’ll assure you that the power cosmic would never, without sufficient warning, pull someone inside-out. They don’t question why a loving god would allow the powers you crave. They will show you which runes to carve, and then, they will hand you the knife.

This entire community is automated clickbait.

Put it in the goddamn title.

Improve your reading comprehension.

But the no client list definitely included Bill Clinton!

Sending people to places they’ve never been is not “deportation.” It’s trafficking.

It’s the wrong fucking continent.

AI tends to be distinct, because things move so fast that we’re exposing programmers’ stupid internal names.

What an obviously terrible name.