Thanks for the correction. I sometimes get those two mixed up in my memory, and it’s a really stupid problem that I need to fix.

While it’s true that they’ve been trying to stop emulators for a long time, they haven’t been able to do too much about them because of Sony v Bleem.

Modern emulators exist in a legal gray area, though, and might be violating the DMCA. The more of these assholes that pop up and get sued, the higher the likelihood that one of them refuses to settle, gets steamrolled by Nintendo, and gives them and every other console manufacturer the legal precedent that emulators are piracy/DRM-circumvention tools.

Even if you disagree with my belief that Nintendo would be less aggressive this year if people hadn’t been spotlighting emulation-based piracy and provoking them, you should be concerned about that.

Is that directed at me… or?

Either way, there’s going to be a fair bit of that here. A lot of Lemmings come to the same conclusions, but the reasons are very different and sometimes incomprehensible from an outside perspective.

You’re entitled to your own opinion, but keep in mind that it’s people like him who make corporations condemn the technology instead of the users of the technology. He’s blatantly pirating, trying to profit off of it, and taunting Nintendo to do something about it.

And what they’re doing about it is not just going after him but also the people who created the emulators, so more people like him can’t exist. Nintendo wasn’t nearly as aggressive about going after emulators until people started using them to play unreleased games, and now, in the span of a year, they took out the main developers of both major emulators.

As someone who suffers from severe motion sickness and uses emulation with framerate unlocking patches to alleviate it, these people’s actions are screwing over me and other gamers with accessibility challenges.

Agreed, but this asshole deserved it. He

• Streamed unreleased games
• Handed over prod.keys and firmware files to anyone who asked.
• Told Nintendo “I can do this all day” after being copyright striked.
• And set up a CashApp to make money from all of it.

All while using an emulator. That kind of shit makes emulation look like a tool for bad actors and pirates, which is going to ruin it for the rest of us.

That’s quite a generous interpretation. If we’re being real about it, it’s going to be another “you assholes” email from Timmy.

You can believe what you want, but there’s absolutely no way you would be correct. Any large company sponsoring a cyber attack, if caught, would be nailed to the wall and made an example of. The extreme risks are simply not worth the comparatively small reward of reducing a tiny fraction of piracy.

A more realistic and reasonable avenue would have been to sponsor the companies going after IA for copyright infringement as a result of them loaning out unlimited digital copies of books without DRM.

But Timmy is the king of “rules for thee but not for me”

Because a subset of people are and always will be idiots. Remember: some people think unions exist to steal your money, socialism is communist dictatorship propaganda, and privatization of government services is good for everybody.

Obligatory fuck Nintendo, but I also blame the selfish dumbfucks who keep posting videos of themselves playing unreleased games on YouTube and Reddit. If you want nice things contingent on having software which exists in a legal gray area, don’t openly poke the litigious hornets’ nest.

From a theoretical point of view, emulators of modern consoles may actually be illegal. Under the DMCA, emulation for preservation is protected as a periodically-renewed exemption list defined by the library of congress. But, (paraphrasing) “creating or distributing any hardware or software device—or component of such—designed to circumvent DRM technology” is still illegal irrespective of any exemptions. A reasonable (and bullshit) interpretation of that means that any emulator which is capable of bypassing any DRM features (such as decrypting ROM using user-provided keys) is a violation under the act.

I say theoretical because it hasn’t ever actually been tested in a court. Nintendo v. Tropic Haze LLC nearly gave us the answer, but the latter chose to settle instead.

Because people are technologically inept and buy into the propaganda that kernel-level anticheat is more effective than the alternative solutions.

That’s not the point, though. The point is to use a nominal type that asserts an invariant and make it impossible to create an instance of said type which violates the invariant.

Both validation functions and refinement types put the onus on the caller to ensure they’re not passing invalid data around, but only refinement types can guarantee it. Humans are fallible, and it’s easy to accidentally forget to put a check_if_valid() function somewhere or assume that some function earlier in the call stack did it for you.

With smart constructors and refinement types, the developer literally can’t pass an unvalidated type downstream by accident.

You’re going to need to cite that.

I’m not familiar with C23 or many of the compiler-specific extensions, but in all the previous versions I worked with, there is no type visibility other than “fully exposed” or opaque and dangerous (void*).

You could try wrapping your Foo in

typedef struct {
    Foo validated
} ValidFoo;

But nothing stops someone from being an idiot about it and constructing it by hand:

ValidFoo trustMeBro;
trustMeBro.validated = someFoo;
otherFunction(trustMeBro);

Or even just casting it.

Foo* someFoo;
otherFunction((ValidFoo*) someFoo);

If it were poorly designed and used exceptions, yes. The correct way to design smart constructors is to not actually use a constructor directly but instead use a static method that forces the caller to handle both cases (or explicitly ignore the failure case). The static method would have a return type that either indicates “success and here’s the refined type” or “error and this is why.”

In Rust terminology, that would be a Result<T, Error>.

For Go, it would be (*RefinedType, error) (where dereferencing the first value without checking it would be at your own peril).

C++ would look similar to Rust, but it doesn’t come as part of the standard library last I checked.

C doesn’t have the language-level features to be able to do this. You can’t make a refined type that’s accessible as a type while also making it impossible to construct arbitrarily.

Unless you’re a functional programming purist or coming from a systems programming background, it takes a lot longer than a few days to get used to the borrow checker. If you’re coming as someone who most often uses garbage-collected languages, it’s even worse.

The problem isn’t so much understanding what the compiler is bitching about, as it is understanding why the paradigm you used isn’t safe and learning how to structure your code differently. That part takes the longest and only really starts to become easier when you learn to stop fighting the language.

Of course. Rust isn’t immune to logic errors, off-by-one mistakes, and other such issues. Nor is it memory safe in unsafe blocks.

Just by virtue of how memory safety issues account for 50%+ of vulnerabilities, it’s worth genuinely considering as long as the bindings don’t cause maintainability issues.

Let me know when you find one?

The first directory block is a hole. But type == DIRENT, so no error is reported. After that, we get a directory block without ‘.’ and ‘…’ but with a valid dentry. This may cause some code that relies on dot or dotdot (such as make_indexed_dir()) to crash

The problem isn’t that the block is a hole. It’s that the downstream function expects the directory block to contain . and .., and it gets given one without because of incorrect error handling.

You can encode the invariant of “has dot and dot dot” using a refinement type and smart constructor. The refined type would be a directory block with a guarantee it meets that invariant, and an instance of it could only be created through a function that validates the invariant. If the invariant is met, you get the refined type. If it isn’t, you only get an error.

This doesn’t work in C, but in languages with stricter type systems, refinement types are a huge advantage.

Arrogant hypocrites are a pet peeve of mine. If someone is going to act like progressive technology changes are beneath them and unnecessary, they should be able to put their money where their mouth is.