Oh hey, found an old comment:

I admire the concept behind Denuvo.

Programs bounce around between a ton of different code segments, and it doesn’t really matter how they’re arranged within the binary. Some code even winds up repeated, when repetition is more efficient than jumping back and forth or checking a short loop. It doesn’t matter where the instructions are, so long as they do the right thing.

The machine code still tends to be clean, tight, and friendly toward reverse-engineering… relatively speaking. Anything more complex than addition is an inscrutable mess to people who aren’t warped by years of computer science, but it’s just a puzzle with a known answer, and there’s decades of tools for picking things apart and putting them back together. Scene groups don’t even need to unravel the whole program. They’re only looking for tricky details that will detect pirates and frustrate hackers. Eventually, they will find and defeat those checks.

So Denuvo does everything a hundred times over. Or a dozen. Or a thousand. Random chunks of code are decompiled, recompiled, transpiled, left incomplete, faked entirely, whatever. The whole thing is turned into a hot mess by a program that knows what each piece is supposed to be doing, and generally makes sure that’s what happens. The CPU takes a squiggly scribbled path hither and yon but does all the right things in the right order. And sprinkled throughout this eight-ton haystack are so many more needles, any of which might do slightly different things. The “attack surface” against pirates becomes enormous. They’ll still get through, eventually, but a crack delayed is a crack denied.

Unfortunately for us this also fucks up why computers are fast now.

Back in the single-digit-megahertz era, this would’ve made no difference to anything, besides requiring more RAM for these bloated executables. 8- and 16-bit processors just go where they’re told and encounter each instruction by complete surprise. Intel won the 32-bit era by cranking up clock speeds, which quickly outpaced RAM response times, leading to hideously clever cache-memory use, inside the CPU itself. Cache layers nowadays are a major part of CPU cost and an even larger part of CPU performance. Data that’s read early and kept nearby can make an instruction take one cycle instead of one thousand.

Sending the program-counter on a wild goose chase across hundreds of megabytes guarantees you’re gonna hit those thousand-cycle instructions. The next instruction being X=N+1 might take literally no time, if it happens near a non-math instruction, and the pipeline has room for it. But if you have to jump to that instruction and back, it’ll take ages. Maybe an entire microsecond! And if it never comes back - if it jumps to another copy of the whole function, and from there to parts unknown - those microseconds can become milliseconds. A few dozen of those in the wrong place and your water-cooled demigod of a PC will stutter like Porky Pig. That’s why Denuvo in practice just plain suuucks. It is a cache defeat algorithm. At its pleasure, and without remedy, it will give paying customers a glimpse of the timeline where Motorola 68000s conquered the world. Hit a branch and watch those eight cores starve.

Denuvo duplicates code at random, so executables bloat into a Gordian knot.

He did nothing wrong.

“Oi! Have you got a loicence for that soda?”

I think it’s self-evidently silly to blame ancient patterns of bigotry on specific assholes who secretly know they’re wrong.

This card-shuffling behavior, in service to strict hierarchy, has produced organized violence since at least Sulla’s civil war in the Roman republic.

To be clear: this is all that conservatives have ever been. They didn’t suddenly get stupid. They’ve always been making shit up. Some of them do the same thing you’re doing - they go ‘ah ha, this must be a clever move we all pull, despite being total bullshit.’ Nope. The vast majority of them honestly think making shit up is all there is.

The distinction is crucial because we can still teach them that words mean things. Rational argument is a learned behavior.

Heard good things about Pokemon.

Did that help?

‘But bigots of the past were playing 4D chess!’ is a brave opinion to offer.

Nobody invented antisemitism as a clever scheme. It’s always been ad-hoc justifications and libelous story-telling, to bolster the kneejerk conclusions of ingroup supremacists. Rational argument has to be taught - tribalist pretense is instinctive to all people. Grifters emerge to take advantage of them, and spread the bullshit, but that dirt was always in your brain.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

Everything decays into Fortnite.

Hey, publishers? Stop demanding multiplayer-only shooters. They’re either the biggest thing in months or stone dead. It’s a stupid gamble you will reliably lose.

And the one cocksure nose-candy addict who does back the biggest thing in months still won’t make Fortnite kinds of money.

… making the lesser increase seem less gouge-y.

Door in the face technique.

What do you mean “actually?” Religious creeps are most of that category.

Read: bigoted crybullies got the credit card duopoly to fuck us, and nothing on the internet is safe until they’re stopped.

Nothing good is allowed to happen ever again.

They don’t actually care about that. Stop humoring their excuses. They’re just prudes.

Scruffy, the janitor: “Seconded.”

Reasons matter. They inevitably emerge as differences in conclusion. A lot of JK Rowling’s bullshit begins by denying that trans women are women - and given your libertarian bent, I worry there’s some overlap. Rugged individualism does not address gendered sports, or bathrooms, or indeed sexual abuse shelters.

An opinion that sounded progressive a century ago but is now politely-stated bigotry. Actually worse than saying sexual preference isn’t real, but hey, people can fuck who they choose. Talking about transition in terms of chromosomes is a dog whistle on par with rattling off birthrates.

Dysphoria is not societal.

Sartre was optimistic. He believed these people say wrong things on purpose, as a tactic. Like they’re rationally advancing a goal through irrational rhetoric.

I think they honestly believe this is how things work. The word-games are their entire worldview. Ideas aren’t right or wrong, people are right or wrong, and whatever the people on your side say, you have to shuffle cards to justify it. COVID proved they would continue this behavior whilst gargling their own lungs.

And they think it’s all you’re doing, because they think that’s all there is.

The same people insist gender is made-up, and biological sex is the only thing that counts.

Conservatives do not mean things when they say words.