Daeken

There's a difference between a flake, and moving between things that obviously aren't going to work.

Nothing ever gets shipped from him, nothing failed quickly to begin with. ( I don't just mean Alky, either. )

Stop parroting community tropes.

Examples:

Alky

http://daeken.com/daeken-discount-program

https://github.com/daeken/RenrakuOS - 2010

https://github.com/daeken/EveInject - 2009

Quote from his blog:

"""

What have you built and what are you building?

Product-wise, I haven't built much; the biggest thing I've built was Alky, which allowed the conversion of Win32 binaries to run natively on OS X and Linux. It was a marginal success, although it ended up failing later for business reasons.

These days, I'm working on a few things:

Renraku: http://daeken.com/renraku-future-os This will eventually be combined with OpenBAMF/IREctive: Reverse-engineering platform and module store (My primary for-profit project right now)

Books

The Emulator's Handbook: A book on building an emulator from start to finish. There's simply nothing there yet, which is a damn shame -- we need to get people involved here.

So far unnamed: A book on reverse-engineering game protocols and emulating them.

In the future, I'd like to be developing and selling Eyetaps and other hardware around Renraku.

"""

This isn't fail-fast, it's ship-nothing. It only bothers me because he keeps attention-whoring for every little idea he gets and ends up disappointing anybody who thought it was cool.

I first learned about this technique from Cody Brocious' post (http://daeken.com/superpacking-js-demos) about his WebGL demo 'Magister' (http://demoseen.com/windowpane/magister.html). That file has a .html extension, but it's also a valid PNG. In his post, he discusses this technique as well as others.

Cody's goal was to compress already minified WebGL code and achieve some pretty impressive results from a ridiculously small file for a demo contest. He also put the JS loader (which is much smaller than the linked decoder) in a custom chunk on the PNG itself. By doing it that way, you can have a PNG that when renamed also contains a web page and/or more Javascript.

It's an interesting technique, for sure, but I've never been able to find a real use for it beyond the compression. With a content-type sniffing vulnerability or something, it could be an interesting way to deliver content to browsers, but otherwise it's really just a curiosity as best I can tell.

Incredibly relevant: Daeken's Hardware Hacker Manifesto: http://daeken.com/the-hardware-hacker-manifesto

Sony probably has the upper hand legally here. The DMCA seems to be pretty explicit about these kind of this, at least from my non-lawyerly reading of it. Even so, this is quite unprecedented. Apple and Nintendo have both had devices hacked, often by these same people (there's at least two iPhone Dev-Team members there, four members of Team Twiizers, and, of course, geohot), but they never took any kind of legal action.

(Somewhat unrelated, but funny: even Nintendo found out "bushing"'s real name and phone number. I wonder why Sony didn't go through that trouble and referred to him pseudonymously.)

This technique has been around since prior to 2008 at least, the biog entry below introduced the code[1], along with providing a tool to compress your js into an image using ruby [2].

The technique has a legitimate use as a suave compression method and was termed "super packing" in 2011 [3]

[1]http://blog.nihilogic.dk/2008/08/imageinfo-reading-image-metadata-with.html

[2]http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/canvascompress/

[3]http://daeken.com/superpacking-js-demos

Actually, the statistics today are largely better than at any point in history we have statistics for.

Here's a nice aggregate:

http://daeken.com/2014-04-16_Spoiler__The_World_Isn_t_On_Fire.html

There is a shitload of good things going on in the world. You just have to pull your head out of the negativity echochamber present in a lot of Internet communities, most notably parts of reddit.