Friend who is not a software person sent me this tweet, which amused me as it did them. They asked if “runk” was real, which I assume not.

But what are some good examples of real ones like this? xz became famous for the hack of course, so i then read a bit about how important this compression algorithm is/was.

  • IceHouse@lemmy.zip
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    1 month ago

    Mark Russanovich was just some guy who had trouble fixing Windows computers so he wrote systernals from scratch including widely used psexec and other required tools if you are forced to be a windows admin. He has since grown up into a very hansom man who runs Azure which sucks.

  • prayer@sh.itjust.works
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    I saw a post earlier about Empress returning to game cracking. For modern video games that use Denuvo DRM, she’s the only person who can really crack it, as far as I know. Singlehandedly holding up the AAA game piracy scene.

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      She is kind of a shithead tbf and fwiw it’s more like she’s the only person who is willing to do it. granted cracking denuvo is something that is extremely difficult and only a small subset of people can do but it’s not like she’s literally the only person on the planet who can. There was that guy who would just release the yearly update of football manager, for one.

      It’s far more likely the people who have that skill set just don’t really want to bother with cracking videogames and the potential legal issues that come with distributing them online.

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        1 month ago

        True, but being the only person willing to do something is kind of laudable in it’s own right. Like all of the open source projects relied upon by millions that are sometimes developed primarily by one person in their free time.

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          but my (not really my) conspiracy theory for this is the opposite of open source: when someone is good at cracking games companies like denuvo track them down and offer them jobs to harden their product and take another cracker out of the scene. like I bet denuvo is just filled with nerds that spent their teenage years in sketchy irc rooms with handles like -DooMSlAyEr- and used to actually be members of razor1911 before they realized they could get game companies to pay them 200k a year

          • onlinepersona@programming.dev
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            It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s exactly what Malus did and why it’s harder to root iPhones nowadays (but the EU is seeing to that by forcing them to start opening up their walled garden).

            Can’t remember where I read it, but I think it’s the dude who started AsahiLinux that shared part of his story in the scene. And a few dudes were tracked down and had the choice between a lawsuit and employment. Makes the decision pretty easy.

            Doesn’t help that they did their thing on Github and other public platforms instead of I2P or something.

            Anti Commercial-AI license

    • Dasus@lemmy.world
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      It was somewhat weird waiting for the HP release on her TG channel.

      Like I’ve seen my fair share of terf transphobes, but she’s honestly best described as a hater.

      There were so many rants.

      But like with Harry Potter, I like to separate the artist from the art.

    • JadenSmith@sh.itjust.works
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      I can’t help but laugh at how batshit crazy she is. Didn’t she write a rap at some point??

      I’ll never not be convinced that she’s on a fair amount of meth and/or crack.

    • computergeek125@lemmy.world
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      I’d put the deflate algorithm over the LZMA algorithm just because deflate is used by both windows (zip) and Unix (gzip). Windows I don’t think has added LZMA/xz support until recently if at all.

      • Ziglin@lemmy.world
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        I agree but windows does come with a version of tar preinstalled installed. I’m not sure if it uses xz though.

        The reason I named xz though is the xz-utils backdoor that was such a big deal.

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      Eh, bagder is more than “just some guy” to a lot of people! To me he’s kinda been my tech idol for 20 years lol, he also was a core part of building Rockbox (open source firmware for MP3 players) which was the first open source project I got seriously involved in as a kid ☺️

      • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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        “Just some guy” doesn’t mean they aren’t amazing. I would argue the opposite. It just means they didn’t use their abilities to become rich and famous like some other assholes. They’re almost certainly more capable than them, not less.

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          I think that would be a great situation to be in.

          You have created a cool thing a lot of people use, by being good at something. You’ve done something.

          Also, people have no idea who you are. Nobody is digging through your trash, harassing the people you love, taking pictures of you wherever you go including on your bad hair days, etc. You’re just some guy.

  • weker01@sh.itjust.works
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    A few libraries come to mind immediately: fftw (I think the most widely used fft library) or GMP (I think the most used multi precision library).

  • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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    I mean, it was either Richard Stallman or Dennis Ritchie that created grep in an evening so that a buddy of his could do research on volumes of text that wouldn’t fit in the RAM of a PDP-11 (or similar machine. I’m telling this story from memory). It’s designed to do what you would do with the ancient text editor ed using the commands Global, Regular Expression, and Print. g re p. grep. Probably the most important piece of software ever written in a couple hours.

    • Phrodo_00@lemmy.world
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      Original grep was pretty much a wrapper around sed (or actually maybe ed, I don’t remember). That’s why it’s called g/re/p, which is the sed command to do the same thing.

      • mke@lemmy.world
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        I believe you’re thinking of ed, and yes, grep was made out of ed. I remember reading about a university professor who, if memory serves, gave his students the code for ed and told them to turn it into (basically) grep. Said that no one ever managed, despite having more time than the original took in total. That’s not to say I think this was fair or cool of the professor, it’s just an interesting tale.

  • kia@lemmy.ca
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    Although it’s now a larger organization, Redis was started and maintained by some guy that just wanted to make his website faster. It’s very widely deployed.

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        Yup… IIRC they basically started a company with a similar name when they didn’t really have any association with the project then slowly consumed it.

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    Until very recently the whole Resident Evil modding community relied solely on a Maya 3DS script that a Chinese dude named Maliwei777 created in 2012. The community cherished that script but it got harder and harder to get the correct 3DS version to run it.