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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2472 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 10, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I've... picked up a Claude Max 20x plan. No, I can't disclose how I acquired it, though I didn't have to pay a cent (and it's all legit). It's so fucking good, but at the same time, the more I use Opus 4.6, the more I'm impressed by how close Sonnet 4.6 gets. Sure, Opus is legitimately better, but the difference is nowhere near as stark as say, Gemini Flash vs Pro, or GPT's Thinking or Instant mode. Anthropic cooked, and I can't wait to try Mythos when the version for plebs comes out.

PS: If anyone has a good guide to Claude Code or agentic setups, I need one. I have some serious experimentation to do while I have it.

Last time you solicited requests for AI tasks the motte crashed for like a full day.

I'd say work on TheMotte bug fixes if I was being perfectly altruistic.

What I personally want is my own personal incremental game, cultivation setting, time loop, etc.

What incremental games do you like? I've invested many hours in kitten game, cividle, idle wizard, magic research 2, as well as of course the classics clicker heroes and cookie clicker long ago.

I've tried probably two dozen others (I put a ton of time into cell to singularity last year but don't really recommend it). Military Incremental Complex is the one I played more recently, its fine but nothing to get devoted to. Execute didn't really hook me, same problem with astro prospector, farmer vs potatoes, zombidle, click mage.

Groundhog life is maybe one of my favorites. Or just any games in that vein. Magic Research 1 and 2 are both similar.

https://old.reddit.com/r/incremental_games/comments/115dfw6/collection_of_time_loop_incrementals/

Time loops incrementals just scratch an itch.

I will occasionally go browse game recommendations from /r/incremental_games. I've maybe played hundreds over the years.

I do eventually end up cheating or abandoning them if cheating is impossible. Usually I just cheat to make sure it's not an "idle" game. Cheatengine for speed hack and memory editing, and if that doesn't work, editing the system click and abusing offline bonus time mechanics.

Creature collector games I tend to avoid. And loot focused auto battlers have to be best in genre for me to like them.

I’ll never forget how I learned hexadecimal. When I was very young I was a curious kid and I loved my video games. I ended up getting irked at one point playing Diablo II where I found it too difficult to advance in the game so I started looking for ways to manipulate the engine and get all the most advanced items and then just destroy my way through everything.

I ended up downloading a hex editor, and I located and then started editing the .d2s save files to max all my character attributes, stats and abilities during runtime execution. The rush of euphoria I felt was awesome. I felt like a God. Naturally you could only make it work seamlessly in offline play, once you connect to the server you start battling against direct memory inspection. I didn’t have time for that. Most of the techniques used even today though, remain the same as they were 20-30 years ago: entry point analysis, patching conditional jumps, tracing serial verification subroutines, etc.

Forging CD-keys was fun back in the early days of StarCraft and Battle.net. One thing I ended up finding out was that StarCraft used checksums for a license key. Checksums are just very rudimentary expressions performed on a block of binary data, such as simply adding all the numbers together. In the checksum StarCraft used, the 13th digit was used to validate the first 12. So you could literally enter anything you wanted for the first 12 and simply generate the 13th and create a valid license key for the game. It's why you could generate keys like 1234-56789-1234 that you could register, and it was widely used to pirate the game. Not all checksums are equal in this way, but the type of way they calculated it was very simple:

x = 3;
for(int i = 0; i < 12; i++)
{
     x +- (2 * x) ^ digit[i];
{
lastDigit = x % 10;

There were two approaches you could take to cracking this. You can run the algorithm and calculate the correct value of the last digit. Or, the other way, is you can brute force it because there's only one digit you have to figure out and you only have to calculate from 0-9. Had Blizzard been more careful they would've hashed the keys beforehand. Not great security hygiene still, but it adds another layer to wasting a hacker's time; and it's essentially how Microsoft verifies legitimate software through digitally signed keys. Spyro the Dragon also had a hilarious anti-piracy scheme.

We use similar schemes in other ways. Credit cards work the same way, incidentally. The digits on your debit/credit card aren’t derived arbitrarily or at random. The first digit is the “start code,” often referred to as the major industry identifier (MII). This specifies the industry it’s in (e.g. banking, airline, etc.) and network (e.g. 3 = Amex, 4 = Visa, 5 = Mastercard, etc.). Those are all 1-6. The remaining ones are your account number and the last digit is the checksum used to validate your identity. People mistakenly think credit cards XOR the card number with your PII at the point of the interchange but that isn’t how that works. Your card number isn’t a “secret,” to someone who’s determined to know it. It’s like knowing someone’s bank account number. That information isn’t terribly relevant if someone has it, unless coupled with other information. All it is, is simply a pointer to your database. I don’t care if someone hacks or obtains it. But only ‘some’ payment processors validate the name. Most don’t. For modern systems, name and number are distinct and separate fields.

Reverse engineering is extremely fun on closed, proprietary systems to me but difficult as hell as you move on to more complex things. If you try performing dynamic analysis on a binary and you see ones that are packed with a loader like VMProtect that decompresses, decrypts and generates the code in memory, it becomes a gigantic pain in the ass. It’s much more complex than battling against say UPX where today you can easily automate its deobfuscation. Myself and a couple friends of mine once spent a night trying to examine how it worked. It works by substituting native machine code into a customized bytecode format that runs on a VM. Trying to find the OEP before the packer added its layer can leave you feeling like you're going insane. If the entropy of the code section is high, everything you do is going to amount to an examination of the loader stub and not the real code. Those are all wasted hours.

RE is one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done in my entire life. In another life it’d have consumed 100% of my attention and I’d be doing that professionally. I’ve reached some very high levels of mathematical proficiency, but even so I was never one of those guys who could see the matrix. I'm a very visual and intuitive learner. I have to touch and feel what it is I'm doing, otherwise I can't understand it. I envy the former type of people.

(Edit: Hey Lydia!)

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