• 3 Posts
  • 23 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • I think we can even calculate about how often it happens. My math is gonna be Amerigo-centric because I’m American and so are fortune cookies.

    There are ~3 billion fortune cookies produced yearly in the USA, so 8.2 million cookies are opened per day. There are 292,201,338 PowerBall combinations. That means that there’s about a 2.8% chance that someone opens a fortune cookie that has any given lotteries numbers on it. But wait! There isn’t just one “the lottery”; there are 48 states and territories in the US, and my state (Washington) has four games. Assuming everyone’s state is like mine, and you randomly select a lottery to play, that leaves us with a much more modest .014% chance that on a given day, someone opens a fortune cookie with their lottery number on it.







  • Kinda. What you’re referring to is “decompilation”, which is the process of taking the output of a compiler and trying to reverse-engineer the code that produced it. But decompiled code is really hard to read and modify, because it isn’t what humans wrote, it’s what the compiler translated it into, and that can have some unexpected changes than are mostly irreversible. And, since it’s closed source, if you somehow manage to make a change, you can’t re-release it – you don’t have the license to do so.

    With open source, you see the same code as the maintainers, so it has the high-level programming concepts and good variable names, and you have permissions to fork and release your own version.