Whole-known-network
<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@pervognsen" class="u-url mention">@<span>pervognsen</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://ioc.exchange/@azonenberg" class="u-url mention">@<span>azonenberg</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://chaos.social/@gsuberland" class="u-url mention">@<span>gsuberland</span></a></span> wow!!</p>
<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@whitequark" class="u-url mention">@<span>whitequark</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://ioc.exchange/@azonenberg" class="u-url mention">@<span>azonenberg</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://chaos.social/@gsuberland" class="u-url mention">@<span>gsuberland</span></a></span> The culture of extensive reverse engineering and binary patching to extend proprietary dev tools on Windows has always made me smile. This is one of the crazier examples: <a href="https://gitlab.com/VC6Ultimate/VC6Ultimate" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">gitlab.com/VC6Ultimate/VC6Ulti</span><span class="invisible">mate</span></a></p>
<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://ioc.exchange/@azonenberg" class="u-url mention">@<span>azonenberg</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://chaos.social/@gsuberland" class="u-url mention">@<span>gsuberland</span></a></span> considering that all of the things i've patched were fairly obscure (thunderbolt surprise unplug, fan control for cards used as render offload only) i count this as a win</p>
<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://ioc.exchange/@azonenberg" class="u-url mention">@<span>azonenberg</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://chaos.social/@gsuberland" class="u-url mention">@<span>gsuberland</span></a></span> i don't have anything nearly as cool to report _but_ i have contributed a few patches (source and binary) against NVIDIA source code which they either (I speculate, no formal confirmation) upstreamed, or in one case went "ok, we can't have people applying binary patches from forums with xxd, i'm going to just implement this as a proper feature"</p>
<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://duckpon.de/@0x47df" class="u-url mention">@<span>0x47df</span></a></span> i'm like this basically anytime that's not winter</p><p>i made my peace with it; even with a/c i can't function during the day when it's above 21C</p>
<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@whitequark" class="u-url mention">@<span>whitequark</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://chaos.social/@gsuberland" class="u-url mention">@<span>gsuberland</span></a></span> I figured upstreaming would either blow up in my face or get me a really good relationship with them.</p><p>My mental calculus was that they're a tiny company (like two dozen people or so), I'm a very happy customer showing off their product all the time on my birdsite (at the time), and paying them several thousand dollars a year in support contract fees on top of the... probably around $20K? initial outlay for the seat over the years of upgrades.</p><p>And I'm offering to nearly double the speed of their product and not even asking for anything in return.</p><p>While they would be legally within their rights to sue me for breach of contract, actually doing so would be monumentally stupid.</p><p>So I decided to take the risk and tell them about it.</p>
<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://ioc.exchange/@azonenberg" class="u-url mention">@<span>azonenberg</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://chaos.social/@gsuberland" class="u-url mention">@<span>gsuberland</span></a></span> hahahahaha amazing</p>
<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://chaos.social/@gsuberland" class="u-url mention">@<span>gsuberland</span></a></span> "... so check your email, I've sent you an authorization on company letterhead to keep it up as long as you maintain an active support contract."</p><p>A few months later when I was visiting friends and family on the east coast, I stopped by their offices, only about a 2-hour drive from RPI where I was visiting some former classmates who had settled in the area.</p><p>Had pizza with the VP of ops I had spoken to before, their VP of engineering, my support engineer, spent several hours discussing everything from proposing improvements to the material library (having detailed Dk/Df data for specific cores and prepregs vs just an average for a given material) to looking over source code and discussing more optimization potential.</p><p>Later on I got an NDA for partial source code access, cleaned up my patch more, and upstreamed it. It just released in v19 a few weeks ago.</p>
<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://chaos.social/@gsuberland" class="u-url mention">@<span>gsuberland</span></a></span> He said he looked me up on linkedin and as soon as he saw I went to RPI (where he did his undergrad a few years before me) he knew what was going on.</p><p>Then went on to say "Sooo we've talked to our lawyers, and they say we can't have people going around breaking our EULA willy-nilly. You do realize what you did was against the terms of our license, right?"</p>