#?.info

Another downside of genAI: the Linux devs are busy removing drivers for anything they think are unlikely to be widely used, because the amount of slop AI reports they're getting is overwhelming them.

Probably not so much an issue with things like old mice controller cards, but we're still having problems with poor support for anything but a handful of wireless cards.

In no particular order:

1. Unreal Tournament (99/2004, maybe even 3)
2. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and Civilization
3. Saints Row 2 and 3
4. Skyrim, heavily modded, and Fallout 4
5. Mass Effect 1

#5games

RE: @jscalzi@www.threads.com

I'm wondering if we should teach our kids COBOL, to pass up generation after generation, until the year 9995 where they can start to use their skills.

Idea for keyboard: Lock keys (Caps lock etc) are actually locks. You need a key to change mode.

Patent pending.

CopyFail results:

On Debian 12 (6.1.158 kernel) PoC didn't seem to work, I got prompted for a password.

On Debian 14 (6.18.5 kernel) got dropped right into a root prompt.

So this is very real. Yikes.

Proof of concept: https://github.com/theori-io/copy-fail-CVE-2026-31431/blob/main/copy_fail_exp.py

Write up: https://discourse.ifin.network/t/copy-fail-732-bytes-to-root-on-every-major-linux-distributions/342

Found a job to apply to today that actually only asked me what programming languages I was familiar with, rather than insisting I have 11 years experience with {arbitrary list of frameworks}. Doubt I'll get the job but nice to see a listing that isn't essentially both ignorant of how computing works and a red flag saying "You'll never develop new skills here".

It's impressive how disastrous gAI, a fraud, has been to crypto, also a fraud.

I guess they're competing for the same hardware, and the conmen who were promoting crypto have moved to promoting AI instead, moving people away from crypto and reducing its value.

I'm just trying to interpret the name of their initiative here:

https://www.salon.com/2026/05/17/tpusas-make-heaven-crowded-revival-tour-is-a-disaster/

Do they mean they're all going to die somehow (but not commit suicide presumably), or are they going to kill us but are acknowledging that we're actually the ones in the right here and therefore the ones that'll go to heaven?

I have one of them there Thermoses that's been on the news. Fortunately I've never used it, largely because we bought it shortly before the pandemic.

There was a time I was reading lots of Asimov, and at the time I was on a classical music kick and listened to a lot of Prokofiev. Now I hear Lt Kije and immediately get transported in my mind to Trantor, Aurora, and Solaria.

Part of my mind goes to odd places from time to time. Like, a feature I've never seen in a programming language is support for genders. Classes could have genders for example. At first I thought you could do it the same way romance languages do: if it has a name ending in 'o' it's male, in 'a' it's female.

But then I thought even further, and because there's an element within the software development movement that's transphobic, we could make the language support, in theory, an infinite number of genders. Just to piss them off. Especially if you got them used to the idea everything was male or female with version 1 of the language (I mean ANSI Q 2026.1)

No, I don't know how it would work, what functionality it might bring, or why or what possible advantage this could have over normal programming languages.

Why?

Just make them cheaper FCOL

RE: @verge@mastodon.social

I'm not asking much, just for the "lock" keys - Caps, Num, etc - to be toggles, not push buttons. Close to 50% of the key presses on them are by accident, and the only reason it's that low is that each accidental press requires one non-accidental press to undo it.

You'd have thought in an era where people spend $400 on keyboards with giant chunks missing, someone would have dealt with that problem by now.

FWIW trying a braised pork recipe. May simplify at some point to see if I can make it easier.

Both the beef burgundy recipe I follow and this one advise frying the meat chunks before cooking. I was wondering if that's strictly necessary. Especially as, with any kind of stew, "sealing in the juices" isn't really a thing that's needed anyway. I mean, you want the meat to take on the flavor of the sauce and vice versa right?

Now, add to that that the consensus is that frying meat does NOT seal in any juices, and... it just seems unnecessary.

https://www.thespruceeats.com/does-searing-meat-seal-in-juices-995432 claims it *is* necessary, and comes up with a slightly convincing argument: that the meat won't brown during its time cooking, and the browning - called, apparently, the Maillard reaction - adds all kinds of new flavors to the meat that aren't there if you don't brown it. That said, most of the pork last night went from pink to white in the frying plan and then other than a few marks, stayed resolutely white for the remainder of the frying process, regardless of how long it went for.

Perhaps it would have been better to broil the meat? A clue is in TFA: despite the recipe suggesting I need to fry it in oil, TFA says "Since you're not adding oil to the skillet, you don't have to worry about smoke points. This means if you can heat the surface of your skillet to 500 F or hotter, you'll get a better sear on your meat. "

So maybe I shouldn't fry in oil? That'll ruin the non-stick frying pan though. Again, maybe I should broil the meat next time?

Thoughts?

A clbuttic mistake

RE: @owent@mastodon.social

So, any kernel vulnerabilities, local or remote, found in OpenBSD lately? Or is it too obscure for that?

Crossword Pro-Tip: if it's an American lake, four letters, it's always ERIE.

That is all.

Gave up on the WaPo crossword tonight. Anyone else doing it knows why ;-)

Hey BSers, you don't have to post here that BS is down, you can just post regular stuff you would have posted to BS but can't because it's a bad network and this is a good one but you refuse to switch to the good one because ew nerds or something.

I wish I had a solution to elses in nested if statements that didn't involve forcing the use of blocks.

As usual, not mine

Has anyone noticed that the people who have the strongest opinions about buses and their viability (negative, of course) are those who have never ridden one or lived in an area served by a proper bus service?

OK, but what can/do they do about it?

https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-employees-are-starting-to-wonder-if-theyre-the-bad-guys/

It's nearly Saturday.

Is Gentoo still a thing? Do people still compile everything themselves so it's 5% faster?

Never heard of this film format before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9.5_mm_film

Basically nearly 16mm quality but using about 1/2 of the film, by inserting sprocket holes between frames rather than on the sides. No room for audio though, but if you had to go back to film in the 21st century, I'm guessing you'd probably do audio differently anyway.

A tech overlord gets a basic lesson in how foisting a largely unwanted, fraudulent technology that's destroying the planet, the world wide web, knowledge in general, and making it harder to find works of meaning, upon everyone might possibly be slightly unpopular.

...and takes no lessons from it. What a shitty bunch of losers our leaders are.

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/932203/university-of-arizona-students-boo-eric-schmidt-ai-commencement

#ai #llm

Accidentally revealed my politics to my hair stylist today and fortunately she's a Democrat. Well, pretty much guessed from our previous conversations but good to know.

MAGA Republicans are such a-holes right now that I wouldn't put one past being very unprofessional knowing my politics.

(Edited because there are obviously Republicans who are temporarily not supporting their party because they too are disgusted.)

I don't know how effective this would be, but it's still a nice sentiment

RE: @Kroc@oldbytes.space

This search is somewhat horrifying:

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=%22Devuan%22+linux+%22woke%22&ia=web

I thought the selling point of Devuan was supposed to be the lack of systemd (rightly or wrongly) not that it was a reaction against Debian having a code of conduct (which, naturally, the right wing have misrepresented.)

Also someone pointed at a fork of Devuan which is supposed to be the "Anti-fascist version of Debian without systemd" called "AntiX". Yeah. Couldn't they have called it something else rather than implying its selling feature is that they're all really into Wayland?

Anyway. Has anyone forked systemd yet? Maybe to the state it was a few years ago? It was damned nigh nearly perfect then.

There is no such thing as pretending to be a Nazi but secretly being a moderate. No Nazi actually believes their BS, that's the entire core of Nazism.

I'm guessing WHSmiths doesn't sell home computers any more?

A key part of my childhood was spending time after school playing on the demo Spectrum, C64, and BBC Micro they had, plus whatever the other machine was (Atari ST, etc)

#retrocomputing

@nixCraft@mastodon.social I fear two major issues with genAI as affecting real devs:

1. How do they find us and our work, after being drowned in slop?
2. How many companies are going to go bankrupt or have to significantly downsize after they went all in on AI and are now finding it doesn't do what they want, and costs more than they can afford?