Good job putting to words one of the core issues I’ve had with using LLM chat for work. Stop trying to design an entire fucking system or solution and just answer the damn question I actually asked, by using natural language to search documentation and existing implementations.

I would tell it to only answer exactly what I asked, but sometimes I do get value from it “exploring” on occasion. It’s just so much damn worse with it than my newest junior co-worker who is known on our team for getting hours deep into tangential rabbit holes before coming up for air and asking seemingly nonsequiteur questions.

Doesn’t help the conversation that some LLM chat systems call minor customization of the prompt making an agent.

Under duress I use CoPilot Chat at work. No, the basic sad customization I did along the lines of “don’t be sycophantic, always cite sources, use these specific official documentation sites as sources before searching outside of them and clearly call out when you search outside them” that customization isn’t making a damn agent, it’s adjusting the prompt and saving those changes you disingenuous marketing fucks!

Smartest might be a stretch

I would expect so given that the Sonic 3D Blast “director’s cut” romhack looked like they may have been building it on top of a source code backup instead of hex-editing or reverse engineering.

Personally, I feel like it’s not too fair to hold that against a known developer where this stuff is attached to their real life identity. I’ve always thought that if I ever did indie game dev that I’d make part of the contract that everything would go open source etc after say a decade. That said, especially for licensed games built by a company instead of one guy solo, the reality of contracts and legality isn’t that cut and dry.

Maybe someday they’ll end up on the open web, but even if they do I’d be shocked if a dev just went “I’m dumping all my dev copies/content publicly with my real name! Come at me lawyers, I ain’t scared!”.

Fair enough. I work in IT but endpoint config and group policy isn’t my area at work, so most of my experience is with my personal computers at home. I at least usually hear the latest bullshit Microsoft is pulling from our endpoint management/config guy.

I should also bear in mind that I stripped down and customized the hell out of the install media before I last installed Windows on any of my devices, and I’ve run a shit ton of other customization/privacy/debloat tools afterwards as well. Usually by examining the policy and registry edits or PowerShell code they run and just picking and choosing parts for myself. Lots of good tools out there, but none I trust to do exactly what I want with no oversight or investigation.

I’d still say that Group Policy is usually the best option for configuration shit sticking though, due to it being Microsoft’s “business side” solution for endpoint config for quite a while now.

Except that these are group policy settings. The stuff they provide to allow businesses to manage their endpoints. Businesses that actually have enough size and money for Microsoft to care. Businesses that can have strict audit and data security requirements relating to things like not allowing data to even brush against something like OneDrive.

To be more direct, the only reason I can’t count the number of times they’ve broken a Group Policy is because I legitimately don’t recall it happening in the past decade.

It’s literally the test run/marketing push for this open source chip. Yes they will be available outside of just being built into the badge. On other forums there are people who pre-ordered the chip (before it was announced to be used in the badge) who are saying they have confirmation their order shipped.

If you work at a company where all of its offices are in the same time zone and you’re time-stamping logs, then it’s more expedient for understanding and placing an event in time against other things to use local time.

Unless everything is already standardized as GMT with offset I guess, but I feel like down that route lies madness.

“I got your email at 20:37:45-7:00” is a few more steps than “I got your email at 1:37PM”.

It’s not a big hurdle, but I try to design for the newest member on the team scrambling in panic rather than a calm cool professional already familiar with conventions.

Now, as soon as we do start dealing with multiple time zones I would just cut my custom time formatting string down to the shorthand to have the scripting language output in the full ISO 8601 format. But until then, being able to easily sort the the date properly and having the time be more human readable is a more “workable” compromise.

Except I can’t get behind the time part of it, personally. I can see the point of doing GMT with the offset if you’re working across multiple timezones, but it’s overkill for situations where you aren’t.

One of the guys who worked on the game made a whole ton of neat retrospective videos on it years ago (Mickey Mania is the US title for it):

• Coder retrospective playlist: https://youtu.be/Lvn0JXV3B88
• Some insight into how some advanced levels worked: https://youtu.be/gRzKAe9UtoU and https://youtu.be/nt-AxAqlrOo
• Director retrospective: https://youtu.be/S33HENoj4GE and https://youtu.be/s11orSs6shM and https://youtu.be/fBk6cbVjxrE
• How the anti-piracy features work, and bypassing them: https://youtu.be/lDgD-_6eZEM and https://youtu.be/kgjQzD8NI48
• Only existing footage of cancelled sequel: https://youtu.be/iBEA9KmPw1I

Gaming Hut and Coding Secrets are great channels by the way. They have a bunch of behind the scenes stuff from a bunch of games, including a bunch of retrospective on Sonic 3D Blast and the director walking through his process of making a director’s cut romhack.