#[programming]

[lumbar-puncture-to-the-skull]

little doodle i made

i wanna say this is art fight practice but it's literally the only oc i have lol

[cidthecoatrack-blog]

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

[hyperoperationfractallisation]

[prokopetz]

Some highlights for those who haven't been following the Portal 2 patch notes lately (these are all verbatim):

March 14th, 2023: Fixed several remote code execution and crash exploits against co-op partners.

March 25th, 2023: Fixed two remote player crash exploits.

April 26th, 2023: Fixed several crash and remote code execution exploits.

January 5th, 2024: Fixed several remote code execution and crash exploits against co-op partners.

February 2nd, 2024: Fixed several exploits that could crash a coop partner's game.

June 3rd, 2024: Fixed some exploits that could lead to crashes or remote code execution against a co-op partner.

June 24th, 2024: Fixed a remote code execution exploit and out-of-memory exploit in cooperative mode.

January 20th, 2025: Fixed exploits used to crash remote players.

TL;DR:

Valve has evidently spent the last two solid years trying to fix a bug or series of bugs which permit hostile remote code execution against one's co-op partner in Portal 2, seemingly without success.

What the fuck is going on in the Portal 2 co-op scene?

[track-maniac]

in the gitted lab. straight up "pushing it". and by "it", haha, well. let's just say. Bad code

[engravedlives]

random green blinkies

[chongoblog]

Programming is so funny. It says

"ERROR: int can not be converted to a string"

And you're just like "oh, okay. *adds ".ToString()" to the end*"

"Alright that's okay ^w^"

[ahsnapitskat]

Hey, I know we may not know each other but I wish you the best of luck with whatever you have going on. I hope something great happens to you, you deserve it. 💕

[coffin-spider]

The gremlins in my mind want to own a lil mini computer like this as if I we're some strange sci-fi novel character. To you beautiful humans who make stuff like this and know how to use raspberry pies, I love you. My fantasy to be a cyberpunk/lainecore/space girl is fuled by your mastery of this lil goobers

[eikotheblue]

How do you *accidentally* make a programming language?

Oh, it's easy! You make a randomizer for a game, because you're doing any% development, you set up the seed file format such that each line of the file defines an event listener for a value change of an uberstate (which is an entry of the game's built-in serialization system for arbitrary data that should persiste when saved).

You do this because it's a fast hack that lets you trigger pickup grants on item finds, since each item find always will correspond with an uberstate change. This works great! You smile happily and move on.

There's a small but dedicated subgroup of users who like using your randomizer as a canvas! They make what are called "plandomizer seeds" ("plandos" for short), which are seed files that have been hand-written specifically to give anyone playing them a specific curated set of experiences, instead of something random. These have a long history in your community, in part because you threw them a few bones when developing your last randomizer, and they are eager to see what they can do in this brave new world.

A thing they pick up on quickly is that there are uberstates for lots more things than just item finds! They can make it so that you find double jump when you break a specific wall, or even when you go into an area for the first time and the big splash text plays. Everyone agrees that this is neat.

It is in large part for the plando authors' sake that you allow multiple line entries for the same uberstate that specify different actions - you have the actions run in order. This was a feature that was hacked into the last randomizer you built later, so you're glad to be supporting it at a lower level. They love it! It lets them put multiple items at individual locations. You smile and move on.

Over time, you add more action types besides just item grants! Printing out messages to your players is a great one for plando authors, and is again a feature you had last time. At some point you add a bunch for interacting with player health and energy, because it'd be easy. An action that teleports the player to a specific place. An action that equips a skill to the player's active skill bar. An action that removes a skill or ability.

Then, you get the brilliant idea that it'd be great if actions could modify uberstates directly. Uberstates control lots of things! What if breaking door 1 caused door 2 to break, so you didn't have to open both up at once? What if breaking door 2 caused door 1 to respawn, and vice versa, so you could only go through 1 at a time? Wouldn't that be wonderful? You test this change in some simple cases, and deploy it without expecting people to do too much with it.

Your plando authors quickly realize that when actions modify uberstates, the changes they make can trigger other actions, as long as there are lines in their files that listen for those. This excites them, and seems basically fine to you, though you do as an afterthought add an optional parameter to your uberstate modification action that can be used to suppress the uberstate change detector, since some cases don't actually want that behavior.

(At some point during all of this, the plando authors start hunting through the base game and cataloging unused uberstates, to be used as arbitrary variables for their nefarious purposes. You weren't expecting that! Rather than making them hunt down and use a bunch of random uberstates for data storage, you sigh and add a bunch of explicitly-unused ones for them to play with instead.)

Then, your most arcane plando magician posts a guide on how to use the existing systems to set up control flow. It leverages the fact that setting an uberstate to a value it already has does not trigger the event listener for that uberstate, so execution can branch based on whether or not a state has been set to a specific value or not!

Filled with a confused mixture of pride and fear, you decide that maybe you should provide some kind of native control flow structure that isn't that? And because you're doing a lot of this development underslept and a bit past your personal Balmer peak, the first idea that you have and implement is conditional stops, which are actions that halt processing of a multiple-action-chain if an uberstate is [less than, equal to, greater than] a given value.

The next day, you realize that your seed specification format now can, while executing an action chain, read from memory, write to memory, branch based on what it finds in memory, and loop. It can simulate a turing machine, using the uberstates as tape. You set out to create a format by which your seed generator could talk to your client mod, and have ended up with a turing complete programming language. You laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

[giggibaloggio]

proud to be learning c++

[captaindrewboy]

I hate when I tell people I'm into Comp Sci and programming and they go "ooh there's a lot of money there". I'm not DOING it for the MONEY I'm DOING it because I want to FUCK the COMPUTER!!!!

[cplusplus-official]

This month we are coding in lesbian C++

[prokopetz]

I 100% agree with the criticism that the central problem with "AI"/LLM evangelism is that people pushing it fundamentally do not value labour, but I often see it phrased with a caveat that they don't value labour except for writing code, and... like, no, they don't value the labour that goes into writing code, either. Tech grifter CEOs have been trying to get rid of programmers within their organisations for years – long before LLMs were a thing – whether it's through algorithmic approaches, "zero coding" development platforms, or just outsourcing it all to overseas sweatshops. The only reason they haven't succeeded thus far is because every time they try, all of their toys break. They pretend to value programming as labour because it's the one area where they can't feasibly ignore the fact that the outcomes of their "disruption" are uniformly shit, but they'd drop the pretence in a heartbeat if they could.

[systemdeez]

Let's write a C++ program together. I'll start us off.

int main() {