I once pirated a book because I didn’t want to get it from another room.
I once pirated a book because I didn’t want to get it from another room.
I pirated a game I legit bought. This was way back in the days when some games had this annoying copy protection where you had to look up words from the manual before you could play. Enter the 3rd word on line 7 of page 28. This sort of thing.
It got old really fast, so I disassembled the binary and saw where it was calling on a random number generator to select the page. I changed just 1 assembly instruction so that the generator would always return 0. Then it said look up so-and-so and the word turned out to be “time”. After that, all I had to do was enter “time” at launch and I tossed out the manual.
That’s a lot of work in the short term to be lazy in the long, and I am impressed
You can disassemble programs like that? and see what’s inside? can you explain like I’m four and three quarters?
Yes. Assembly is barely abstracted from the actual machine instructions, to the point where the process of translating it is easily reversible. Reading assembly code is a thing all on it’s own, though.
There’s specialised software available for this kind of reverse-engineering now, too, if you’re doing something more complicated than just looking for and cutting out a system call.
Yeah. At the lowest level, the CPU reads a program as a bunch of numbers, where each number is a very simple instruction such as “add 2 values together”. Assembly language is a more human-readable version of machine code, where you can see something more like
add r1,r2instead of35397176or whatever numeric code means “add the value in register 1 to 2” for some hypothetical processor. (Registers are where the processor keeps values loaded in from the RAM.)So in my case, if I saw that the program was making some system call to the random number generator and the calling conventions used by the operating system always put the return value in register 0, I could replace the call with something like
clr r0(clear the value in register 0). It’s a pretty simple hack. So the “generator” now always generates zero.These days, programs are often code-signed and if you start messing around like that, they’ll get flagged as malware. But it worked fine back in those open and trusting days.
Isn’t there a way to manually whitelist modified software on your AV, if it’s your own machine?
With modern software, there’s also the problem of just learning whatever weird stack the game is running on, to know where to look.
That’s a good question. It may depend on the platform?
Right now, I’m doing most of my coding on a Mac. I noticed I get into trouble when trying to move the program to another machine. The OS seems to tag the executable with some metadata that runs afoul of Gatekeeper. Removing said metadata seems to get you past that. But that’s for in-house software that has never been registered with Apple or anything. I’ve never actually tried modifying a program that has been registered, so I’m not sure if there are any extra levels to this?
I pirated a game I legit bought.
I would argue that this is not possible.
It definitely is, and I’ve done it several times.
One example is Minecraft, which I legit bought but no longer legitimately own, because when Microsoft took over they forced people to make Microsoft accounts and no longer allow Mojang accounts to be used to authenticate. Because I didn’t make a Microsoft account, I no longer own the game, so now I play a pirated copy because I can no longer legitimately play it.
Another example is some games made by studios that went bust and there’s no longer any legit distributor of the game, so the only copy you can download is a pirated copy.
It’s still piracy if it circumvents the intended method of distribution and validation that you own a licence.
Piracy cannot happen if it’s fair use. And this is fair use (I’m referring to downloading a game you already own, not the thing about dead studios).
Piracy is the intention/result, not the method. If you bought a video game, you own it and are allowed to own a backup of it. How you get that backup is irrelevant
In the first example, it is not fair use, because you don’t buy digital copies of games—you buy a licence to play the game. My Minecraft licence would have been revoked when I didn’t create a Microsoft account. Game companies can impose whatever conditions on a game licence they like (so long as the condition is not otherwise illegal).
And you have case law to back this up?
Case law is specific to jurisdiction. I don’t know where you live, and I’ve not said where I live. The way buying and selling most digital copies of games is through buying and selling licences, though some software you do pay for the download itself rather than paying for a licence. That doesn’t require case law; that’s literally just what it is, like how if I sign a contract I don’t need case law to demonstrate that what I’ve signed is a contract, it just is. Case law adjudicates matters of law which are in dispute, not figuring out whether a spade is a spade.
Yeah just because you say “this is not in dispute,” doesn’t make it true. The reason there appears to be no dispute is because video game companies haven’t brought a suit against anyone for this specific thing. Until then, it’s nebulous and completely up for debate.
Video game manufacturers have lost several emulation suits in the past, and I would not be one bit surprised if that’s the reason why they never tried to go after this in courts.
Bleem! successfully won their countersuit against Sony because of fair use.
It doesn’t hurt that there is this precedent regarding VHS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios%2C_Inc.
Until Nintendo or Sony, etc actually tries to sue someone for doing it, then it’s up for dispute.
Ordered delivery from across the street because it was raining and I didn’t want to…
A friend of mine at least once ordered delivery from the Mexican place that was directly below her apartment. She said the delivery guy was a little confused. She had a lot of depression at the time.
I did that with a pizzeria that was in my building.
Instructions for delivery : Go upstairs.
I wasn’t depressed or anything it was more a little bit of a joke to the delivery man.
We rented an apartment for 5 months after listing our house for sale because we didn’t want to have to clean it and leave the house fora few hours every time someone wanted to come do a viewing.
In our defense… we had a 3yr old, a hairy dog, and were preparing to leave the country permanently, which took 10 months of nonstop preparation on top of working full time, so I still think it was worth the money to save us the extra work. But yeah, probably the laziest thing I’ve done.
deleted by creator
Checked my phone to get the current weather. The alternative was walking a meter and opening the curtains. But then I had to get up.
⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️
Instead of
history | grep whateverYou can just do CTRL+R (in bash at least)
I never remember this when it’d actually be useful
and with zsh and fzf you get a nice fuzzy search window: https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/blob/master/plugins%2Ffzf%2FREADME.md
I SSHed my laptop to turn it off, even though my laptop is not that far away from my bed
I WoL my second computer to turn it on, even though it’s at an arm’s reach (but I’d have to stretch a bit to reach it)
Back in my teenage years, when you used to change TV channel by walking over to the TV and physically pressing a button, myself and two friends (likely all a bit stoned), sat on a sofa opposite the TV, invented a ~3 metre long “TV prodding device” from gaffer tape and “anything we could find within arm’s reach”.
I think we spent about half an hour building this device, rather than any of us standing up, taking a few steps forward and physically pressing the button.
The device succeeded.
It fell apart after a few uses.
Your mom. Sorry if this had been mentioned already, it’s a long line.
Can I take a number? I’m in line for their dad already.
I put off procrastinating.
I didn’t read a book because it was in the other room.
I literally spit coffee reading this lol
Using a state of the art local LLM and an agent to ask it to find all files with a certain extension, because I always forget how to use the find command on linux and I can’t be bothered to read it.
deleted by creator
No that would be just in the current folder, I needed to search recursively
How are you getting a local LLM to read files for you?
Take a look at pi.dev (or similar tools)
I did that kind of thing once, had Qwen-3.5-122B as a fancy find-and-replace because I couldn’t be arsed to write a find and pipe it to sed
I buy new socks instead of washing them.
I remember when my grandfather died, we were going through his belongings and found a drawer full of electric razors. Why did he have so many?!? Then we noticed every one was full of hair, and concluded that he bought a new one every time it filled up rather than emptying it.
Then years later, my parents became snowbirds who went to Mexico every winter, and they stayed with this other family who were locals. They got good at Spanish and one day I guess, my dad was talking to the other dad and they burst out laughing. I asked what that was all about, and he said the Mexican dad’s father also had a drawer full of electric razors, and he never understood why?
Black socks
they never get dirty
The longer you wear them
The blacker they get
Someday, I’ll probably launder them
Something keeps telling me don’t do it yet
Not yet
Not yet
Not yet
Not yet
Are they really cheap socks, at least?
yea they are
I legitimately think my boyfriend does this. That man has more socks than any person needs.
I did the same. I wanted to watch a TV series of which I own the box set but I was too lazy to get the box, put the disc in and go through the menu for every three episodes or so. So I pirated it.
go through the menu for every three episodes
So many providers these days STILL don’t get that the more control you take away the less incentive people have to buy their product. Oh I have to see a mandatory FBI piracy warning splash screen and the speed control is locked at 1.5x max? Jeez it’s a shame you can’t compete with the pirated file that has no nag screens and I can blow through at fucking 20x if I want.
