bbayles

Well, I knew from looking at a previous game that this development team liked to put Easter eggs on the About menu. That's why I looked there first! https://32bits.substack.com/p&…

This sort of thing seems to have really fallen off after the Grand Theft Auto "Hot Coffee" scandal. Having hidden stuff in a game went from being a fun thing to a potential liability.

Anecdata, but an acquaintance of mine struggled with lifelong anorexia. Severe enough that he was hospitalized a few times. With great effort he could cling to the bottom of the "normal BMI"…

There are short term and long term bonds.

Debt-to-GDP ratio is useful for comparing the debt loads of two countries, but not terribly useful in assessing the serviceability of debt for a single country. That is, suppose two countries both hav…

Michał Zalewski's article on page 42 is very funny.

I've reported a few very serious issues to vendors of widely used tools in recent weeks, and it's been even more difficult than usual to get them to be acknowledged - the teams that respond …

The developer of this tech demo also worked on porting Resident Evil 2 to Nintendo 64. This was quite the challenge - two discs worth of content had to be made to fit onto a single cart. In an intervi…

LLMs are very good at understanding decompiled code. I don't think people have updated on the fact that almost everything is effectively open source now!

I'm sympathetic to this view, but I also wonder if this is the same thing that assembly language programmers said about compilers. What do you mean that you never look at the machine code? What i…

Let's call the person in question Alex. Having to make every new feature Alex-proof made all of the engineers better.

In order to avoid the endless cycle with the QA person, I started doing this: > This forced me to start making my feature proposals as small as possible. I would defensively document everything, an…

I used to work with a QA person who really drove me nuts. They would misunderstand the point of a feature, and then write pages and pages of misguided commentary about what they saw when trying to tes…

There's a typo in the URL here: > If you have a topic in mind but are not sure if it is suitable for Paged Out!, check out the Writing Articles page or contact us It links to `?page=writing.ph…

(channeling Patrick McKenzie) If you have an S&P 500 index fund, you're a shareholder in Microsoft. Call their Investor Relations people, or send them a letter with this description. They wil…

Agree on video games! I recently found a "developer photo insert" Easter egg in an old 3DO game: https://32bits.substack.com/p/under-the-microscope-total-ecl... …

Fantastic game! The same development studio, Sega AM2, recently had a developer reveal that he had put an Easter egg into Fighters Megamix for Saturn. However, he mistakenly introduced a crash bug in …

Excellent - these seem indeed to work. I'll try to figure out what they do. I'll write up the results eventually. I sent you a note about crediting your contribution here. Many thanks!

Wow, nice work! The other missing ones are: A75CA25CF4498F87 8FE0C6AA7CE60CEC B343B58CF0B72493 E0B20BEDFA0AC685 EFCC5A6FD62EC6D8