Which fate is the worst (4th edition)

Lounge EndeavourOS pub
1
  • The GPL family of licenses being declared unenforcable by international law, making the Linux kernel illegal to modify/whatever.
  • systemd becoming a part of Windows. To remove it and use OpenRC or the default Windows “init”, you must pay for a SaaS subscription of 1$ per bootup.
  • Every individual must watch 10 hours of Skibidi Toilet a day, otherwise 1 bit in RAM randomly gets flipped for every minute you do not comply.
  • Linus is forced to add an NSA backdoor to the Linux kernel.
  • Every individual must install Grub-Customizer and use GRUB as their bootloader, otherwise your program counter gets incremented or decremented by 0x01 every cycle where /dev/urandom returns 0x01 on that cycle. If you’re on ARM, the computer wil just execute a random instruction every 666th cycle instead.
  • Dalto getting Discourse to remove polls (do not harrass dalto, this is a joke)
  • Other (you must elaborate or get sent to the depths of Tartarus)
0 voters
2

To be sent to the depths of Tartarus.

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3

You always insist on picking “Other”, and that’s great :rofl:

But being in Tartarus is worse than having your computer’s program counter go haywire? Hades was never portrayed in an evil sense, so I think he’d smell me out and say that I don’t belong there :slight_smile:

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4

The European Citizens’ Initiative petition regarding the destruction of online-only games doesn’t go through.

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5

While I’ve always hated always-online DRM, and support Stop Killing Games, it’s not as bad as the GPL ceasing to be, for example.

Also, to everyone: if you aren’t an EU citizen, don’t sign. Then the EU can throw it out as “the signatures are phony”.

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You need to verify your real life identity to sign it, to my knowledge.

7

Which, of course, requires an EU citizenship.

8

Forgetting to back up/save/lose 10 hours of work.

2 Likes
9

Well you can always just do it again, but having one byte of RAM flipped could be a disaster (it could change the “write to disk” routine in RAM to never stop)

10

Not always, when it comes to creativity sometimes you need to be in the same headspace to remake or come close to things that you made. Even changing one setting can drastically alter the results at times.

Honestly I don’t know too much about this stuff except it’s not good.

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Not always, when it comes to creativity sometimes you need to be in the same headspace to remake or come close to things that you made. Even changing one setting can drastically alter the results at times.

Just wait until you are, lol

Honestly I don’t know too much about this stuff except it’s not good.

If your computer flipped one bit, even if the same bit, every cycle, your computer would go through a General Protection Fault in mere moments. All software and firmware assumes that whatever it sets, stays set, and whatever it does not set, is uninitialized. If that’s not respected, nothing works properly.

12

With my brain it’s never the same from one moment to the next, it can be very erratic at times.

I’m going to have to do some more learning on this at some point, like I get what you are say but have no idea at the same time.

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With my brain it’s never the same from one moment to the next, it can be very erratic at times.

Surely, there’s a way to make your environment put you into flow state, am I right? (Maybe I should stop acting like I know how brains work)

I’m going to have to do some more learning on this at some point, like I get what you are say but have no idea at the same time.

There are 8 bits in 1 byte. For example FD is a byte. F is a hexadecimal (base-16) nybble (1/2 byte) meaning 15 (Computers start counting from 0), which consists of 4 bits 1111.

For example, if I flip that 1 on the right side, the number will become E (14 in decimal). But If I flip the leftmost bit, suddenly it becomes 7. FD, ED, and 7D are all different bytes. If your computer were to flip one bit, and the memory location just so happened to be a pointer, the computer could end up doing anything from dereferrencing NULL to literally overwrite your entire harddrive. Or just straight up crash your system.

Thanks for coming to my computer science TED talk.

2 Likes
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Yer and no, there are a few things that can help focus it a bit but it’s generally all over the place and rarely gets back into the same place.

Thanks, yer this is part of why I never got into doing ROM hacks for GBA, this sort of stuff I can get the gist of but still struggle to understand. But totally get what your saying here (I think)

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Thanks, yer this is part of why I never got into doing ROM hacks for GBA

Very specific.

this sort of stuff I can get the gist of but still struggle to understand

I learned all this stuff by reading way too much and wasting my time on experiments.

But totally get what your saying here (I think)

In hopefully simpler terms, flipping one bit can adversely affect the system depending on how it’s used.

If the bit was part of a number, the program would not get back the number it was expecting, leading to a program taking an incorrect codepath, numeric overflows, or other garbage.

If the bit was part of an instruction (read: code), it may end up being invalid, shutting down the CPU, without saving anything. If it is valid, it may modify other values the program was expecting to remain the same.

If the bit was part of a boolean (true/false value), logic could be inverted. If you’re lucky, this could trick a game you’re playing into not letting you take any damage. If you aren’t lucky, the monster’s attacks now do tons of damage. More likely, the game just crashes.

If the affected bit is part of a string (read: words), the program would display garbled information.

The idea is that even if the same bit was flipped every CPU cycle (read: like the second hand on your clock, but much faster), something’s eventually going to go wrong.

Yer and no, there are a few things that can help focus it a bit but it’s generally all over the place and rarely gets back into the same place.

Like I said earlier, I really should stop pretending I understand how brains work. Obviously, if you’re angry, you won’t be able to make cool art, for reasons which are intuitive.

Anyways, the guy who picked the GPL option should probably talk here. Maybe I’l make a “Which fate is the best” next time.

1 Like
16

This explanation makes a lot of sense and is what I was sort of getting reading your other example.

Lots of resources available for them (especially now) but the guides on how to do anything where just too much for my brain to hold onto.

I learn best by watching and doing or having very clear examples to guide me. Experiments are never a waste, one of the best teaching tools out there for stuff as long as you learn from past mistakes. My current project is pretty much an experiment and teaching me a lot about mapping and also learning a bit about Ruby and how to use all the different tools to make a game. So far it’s coming along pretty good and I constantly make 2 backups of it everytime I go to make any changes and have kept one copy of each of these with general notes to let me know what it was I changed in each one.

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17

“waste” was used ironically, to say that I hardly, say, play a friggin’ game with my brothers (because they’d rather watch YouTube instead).

Indeed, my interest in Linux had me started trying out Linux Mint in a virtualbox vm. I didn’t use Linux as my main OS until about 5 years later.

1 Like