A joke is a lot like a frog, it can be informative to dissect it, but the patient usually dies in the process.

IT is what you do when you are good with computers and not so much with people. You get really good at making the magic number boxes work for the MBAs and start explaining RFCs or networking protocols so that they fuck back off upstairs so you can go back to digging through log files and pcaps. It’s all just puzzle solving, reading and a crippling fear of social interactions.

It certainly makes sense. AWS hosts infrastructure specifically for the US FedGov. That infrastructure includes systems for the US DoD. So, that makes it a valid military target. And while cyber attacks can do a lot to degrade command and control, nothing DoS’s a server farm like a few hundred kilos of high explosives.

If the thing you are claiming exists does not interact with anything else in any way, how are you proving that thing exists in the first place? It’s basically a circular argument. You make a claim that something exists yet then state that it is impossible to prove that the thing exists. It’s just one big circle of “trust me, bro”. The question isn’t “does it exist?” the question is properly, “how do you know it exists in the first place?” You need to prove that the unicorns exist before expecting people to accept that they exist. Their existence is not a given.

I must have gotten one after the enshitification. I bought a HiSense TV during the pandemic and the unit I got was trouble from nearly day 1. A line of pixels went dead all the way across the screen. I tried to work with their warranty department and they asked for a picture of the problem.

Ok, easy enough. Take the picture and send. They reply, “can you take a picture with better lighting of the bezel?” Ok, no problem. Gerry better lighting, snap picture, send off. They reply, “can you get better lighting on the bezel?” Seriously? Fine, get the TV under really good lighting, take picture, send. “Can you get better lighting on the bezel?” WTF? Ok, I’ll admit I don’t have 50,000 candle power spot lights on it, but this is just obvious stalling. Each round of pictures and request for more is taking weeks.

During this time, the TV OS sees several updates and the underpowered nature of the system is starting to slow. The menus aren’t just sluggish, they are downright unusable. The home screen is now half ads. I finally decided, “fuck it” took the TV to the dump and bought something else.

Thankfully, the TV was only around $500. Not cheap, but the cost of the education in not buying crap didn’t hurt too much.

tl;dr: Fuck HiSense

Got about half way through the article before it became obvious that it’s just “DOOM, DOOOM, DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!” in prose form.

Gaming is changing, which is different from never. I mean, I could bemoan the death of 2d puzzlers ala King’s Quest because Sierra is no more, but there are still similar games being made by smaller studios. We may hit a slump, and the main actors may change, but gaming isn’t going anywhere. AAA titles will continue to mostly be money chasing shovelware, indie titles will continue to be where the real development and experimentation happens. But making games, especially PC games, has become so accessible that even the death of a major studio will amount to nothing more than some IP changing hands. And there is still a lot of money to be made in games, so companies will keep chasing that.

Magazines have been predicting the death of PC gaming for decades now. And yet, PC gaming is still incredibly vibrant. The current RAM shortage is just a hiccup. We’ve had RAM shortages before. If the demand for RAM stays at the current level manufacturers will respond by bringing new fabs online. More likely the AI bubble will pop and we’ll be flooded in used RAM and GPUs. The economy will cycle, hiring will pick back up and markets will move on to the "Next Big Thing"^TM

But ya, a headline of “Markets in down cycle, RAM supply currently constrained by high demand” doesn’t motivate clicks.

Maybe it’s a regional thing, but I don’t think it’s a common phrase. I’ve heard “nothing-burger” a lot, and this may be someone playing off that.

So, MS is exiting the console market to sell HTPCs with an XBox logo?

Kerchoff’s Principle has long been a keystone of cryptographic security. That a crypto system should be secure, even if everything about the system is known, except for the key. This has resulted in robust cryptographic protocols, specifically because the protocols could be open and well researched. This same principle shows up in other areas of security under the axiom, “security through obscurity is not security”. If the security of a system fundamentally relies on the details of the system remaining a secret, then that system is inherently not secure. Having security systems based on open source protocols and software is this working in practice. By having everything open and available for a wide range of researches to test and validate, we can be more assured of the security of a system. Closed, proprietary protocols and software are a risk to organizations. They have no way of knowing if those closed systems are really well designed or a house of cards hiding behind a curtain.

Given the roughly similarly sized drop in Win11 users. I chose to believe that the Win10 jump is from people nopeing out of the Win11 slop.

AI Slop code base. Did Microsoft go open source?

It’s voice phishing. It’s basically a scammer cold-calling a victim and talking them into giving up useful information or doing things the user really shouldn’t do, like entering credentials into a scammer owned web page or adding a new multi-factor authenticator.

This one is a mixed bag. KYC regulations are very useful in detecting and prosecuting money laundering and crimes like human trafficking. But ya, if this data needs to be kept, the regulations around secure storage need to be just as tight. This sort of thing should be required to be kept to cybersecurity standards like CMMC Level 3, audited by outside auditors and violations treated as company and executive disqualifying events (you ran a company so poorly you failed to secure data, you’re not allowed to run such a company for the next 10 years). The sort of negligence of leaving a database exposed to the web should already result in business crippling fines (think GDPR style fines listed in percentages of global annual revenue). A database which is exposed to the web and has default credentials or no access control at all should result in c-level exec seeing the inside of a jail cell. There is zero excuse for that happening in a company tasked with protecting data. And I refuse to believe it’s the result of whatever scape-goat techs they try to pin this on. This sort of failure always comes from the top. It’s caused by executives who want everything done fast and cheap and don’t care about it being done right.

I have two:

1. Waves glowing with bioluminescence during a red tide. We didn’t know it would be going on and were just camping by the beach. Walking on it at night, we all saw the waves glowing and weren’t sure it was real. As we got closer, our footsteps in the area where the waves were rolling in and out were glowing as well. Just surreal.
2. A house blowing up. Guy opened a natural gas valve in the house and touched it off. Insulation shot way up in the air and the house itself bowed outwards in basically every direction, stayed standing though. At least until it burned down.

Oh ya, I remember her greatest hit

Unless the romance is central to the game, that sort of focus and depth just isn’t going to be put into it. There is also the issue that the writers in video games have far less control over the main character than they do in other mediums. In a book, you don’t have to worry about your main character deciding to to fuck off for a week collecting all the boxes in a village and stacking them on the town well, just because it’s funny. That main character stays on task and on plot for the writer. There are games where that high level of control is possible, visual novels exist, but that starts to push into the question, “why not just make a book/movie instead?”

Similarly, I think it’s going to be hard for any video game romance not to come off as transactional, due to the nature of a game being a computer program. Imagine trying to tell Romeo and Juliet as a video game. At some point, Romeo and Juliet will need to interact. Romeo arrives at Juliet’s window and professes his love. How does the player interact with the game for that scene? Is it just a cutscene? Or a cutscene with quick time events (press X to woo). Trying to replicate a Jane Austin style story would be even worse. As books about people sitting about in drawing rooms drinking tea and being catty to one another, replicating that in a video game is all going to boil down to dialog trees. Perhaps the first time through it could feel fresh and interesting, but on a second playthrough it’s going to quickly be obvious that the whole thing is really just “pick the right options for a chance at sexy-time”. Maybe we could get a Jane Austin Rouge-like, in that each time you load it up the characters’ personalities change and you really do have to pay attention to verbal and social queues to get anywhere. But even that is still really just “pick the right options for a chance at sexy-time”.

Ultimately, I think video games are always going to be fairly transactional in nature. They are computer programs and are ultimately deterministic. All the interactions you have in a video game need to be planned out, scripted and maybe even voice acted. It’s what makes all the interactions in Baldur’s Gate 3 so amazing. Everything those characters do was planned for, written and recorded. Every comment, every facial expression was planned, written and coded. There is no spontaneity, because there can’t be (maybe with AI, but that’s a different can of worms). That so many little things actually did get covered is amazing. But, the trigger conditions for playing that bit of animation and voice acting will be hard coded. Whether or not a character likes the main character must be a set of numbers stored in memory, because that’s how computers work. Yes, it could be far more complex than just an easily identifiable number. And perhaps hiding those numbers from the player would make it feel less obvious, but they aren’t going to go away.

And all the work which goes into planning, writing and coding those interactions is time spent during development. Going back to Baldur’s Gate 3, wouldn’t it be awesome if some of the NPCs started pairing off with each other? If the main characters isn’t getting busy with Shadowheart, maybe she discoverers an interest in big men who can turn into bears so you come back to camp sometime to find her and Halsin sitting very close together talking softly. This could even have the whole random element where different characters have different crushes/interests each time you play through. That would be neat to see, but it’s going to require a lot of extra development. Unless that’s a feature which starts selling video games, it’s not going to happen. Perhaps this sort of thing will show up in indie games, I wouldn’t expect it in major titles anytime soon.

Pepperidge Farm remembers:

Is there anything we could try to get alternatives to YouTube?

Yes, you can pay for it.

If you want “free” then you’re going to be stuck with the same ads, tracking and enshitification. If you don’t want any of that, you are going to have to crack open your wallet and pay for the privilege. As an example (not an EU one), there’s Nebula which is ad free, owned and operated by creators, free of AI slop and mostly free of the usual dross the youtube algorithm pushes. At the same time, it’s scope is pretty limited (predominantly science and edu-tainment type content). And there is little guarantee that they will survive and/or grow. I personally have a subscription and keep hoping they succeed, but I also don’t expect them to reach anything like the scope of YouTube.

And that sort of thing brings with it another problem: a lack of democratization. One of the things YouTube does is allow nearly anyone to put something up. While the algorithm is hardly kind to new or niche creators, it’s still entirely possible for some random person to start posting cat videos as dramas in three acts, and maybe that takes off. With the siloed services, that’s never going to happen. Maybe they won’t insist on some sort of editorial input, but they are also going to be far more selective in what they platform. So, there is a trade-off to be had.

There is also the BBC model, with a publicly funded service. You’re still paying for it, but it’s not directly controlled by a corporation with it’s shareholders to serve. Though, there might still be the question of opening up the platform for more “niche” creators.

one day when we will hopefully be living in more peaceful times without imperialists

You don’t read much history? Humans have never lived in widespread peace for any length of time. We have evidence of violence between groups of humans well back into the Stone Age. We are not a species prone to peace.