• 1 Post
  • 18 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 6th, 2023

help-circle



  • I’ve recently seen a suite that has a ready made setup to compare sections of asm to the original.
    Perfectly matching the full game or even binary isn’t necessary, when you already split the original apart into finer chunks, since you want some better feedback on exactly what sections are wrong.

    For a basic example though, if you compile to an elf for example you can take out the code section and there’ll be no metadata. Actually gcc already builds reproducibly by default, even with the metadata section. It doesn’t add any timestamps nor version info.




  • I recall 0 had a fear around it, in the same way as negative numbers and complex numbers. People didn’t consider it real and refused to use it.

    Zero as a placeholder for arabic numbers was used long before people became comfortable with “a number without digits”; zero was just a placeholder, not a digit.

    I tried finding when zero as a number became used, but found that really hard since everyone instead talks about the digit/placeholder.
    Best I found is number.wiki which states India started using it as a number around 600. The introduction and popularization in europe around 12-1600 had it introduced as purely a placeholder though. “The nine Indian figures are: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1. With these nine figures, and with the sign 0 … any number may be written”