tal
@tal@lemmy.today
- Comment on Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia CEO after alleged affairs 19 hours ago:
I think that technically he didn’t publicly announce who it was, just that he’d been involved in an affair and apologized.
- Comment on We Know 15,579 Websites Are Infected. How Do We Tell Them? 5 days ago:
Too much of the Web just doesn’t work with browsers without Javascript on for me to do that these days.
There was a time when I did browse like that.
- Comment on We Know 15,579 Websites Are Infected. How Do We Tell Them? 5 days ago:
Even here:
github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1895
Lemmy instances with custom emojis allow malicious Javascript
nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-54743
An approved member or a remote federated instance can store such content, and a viewer who renders it may execute JavaScript in the lemmy-ui origin, exposing the viewer’s session and authenticated actions.
- Comment on We Know 15,579 Websites Are Infected. How Do We Tell Them? 5 days ago:
Yeah, he mentioned
security.txtin the article, but complained that few implemented it.I guess that even if someone who apparently does computer security isn’t familiar with it, that Average Joe probably has no idea. Maybe there’s an argument that there should be some sort of browser support for “report problem wirh this page/site” that sends an email to an appropriate address with an URL for the page and comment so that people are more aware of it.
- Comment on We Know 15,579 Websites Are Infected. How Do We Tell Them? 5 days ago:
Why not just send an email to every website?
I could probably try to automate that, but to what email address? I’d have to hit a selection of common ones, info@, support@, abuse@, maybe others?
I’d use “webmaster@”, which is a pretty long-running convention, though I don’t know how many people have it set up. I don’t know if there’s an RFC backing that.
- Comment on A device in the White House is apparently using an unsafe proxy — which attackers could use it 'to reach internal systems' 1 week ago:
Someone in the White House “probably installed a sketchy free app on their phone"
And that’s the White House. I wonder how many situations there are out there where hardened-toward-the-Internet, squishy-on-the-inside home networks have some random kid with an Android phone or something punching holes to let any number of unsavory characters onto the LAN.
- A device in the White House is apparently using an unsafe proxy — which attackers could use it 'to reach internal systems'www.techradar.com ↗Submitted 1 week ago to cybersecurity@infosec.pub | 16 comments
- Comment on Can I stop unwanted shit like this being posted through my door? 1 week ago:
And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist.
Ehhh…is Sherlock Holmes an underdog?
- Comment on Microsoft's Canada timezone troubles leave admins fixing calendars, pretending they're in Bogota 1 week ago:
Posted smugly from Arizona, where Sunday lasted 24 hours.
Yeah, but…aren’t you guys the state that partly does and partly doesn’t do daylight savings time, though?
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Sounds like it.
www.timeanddate.com/time/zone/usa/arizona
How Many AZ Time Zones Are There?
Most of Arizona observes Mountain Standard Time (MST) all year. However, because the Navajo Nation observes Daylight Saving Time (DST), the corresponding DST designation, Mountain Daylight Time (MDT) is also listed here.
- Comment on Can I stop unwanted shit like this being posted through my door? 1 week ago:
Issue 001
Trouble was brewing.
- Comment on "Transfer failed because it did" 🤦🏻 1 week ago:
I though that the book in the series about that “darkness priestess” girl who spent time in those caves of hers was kind of depressing and meh. The Tombs of Atuán, maybe?
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“Atuan”.
I did like the other books in the series, though.
- Comment on UK has 'no authority' over death of woman shot in US 1 week ago:
It’s actually kind of more interesting of a question than I initially thought from the title.
So, not an area of expertise, but from my quick skim;
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Daughter is British citizen
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Father is British citizen (maybe dual American citizen, dunno)
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Father shoots daughter in US; states that discharge was unintentional. Father was apparently drunk at the time.
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A grand jury in US gives a “no-bill” result. It’s stating that the prosecution doesn’t have a viable case and should not proceed. The bar for the prosecution to pass this bar is not very high, and so this result is exceptionally uncommon.
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Mother of daughter goes to US, tries to get district attorney to prosecute anyway. This is apparently technically possible to do. After a grand jury returns “no-bill”, the prosecutor is not prevented from convening another grand jury to attempt to get the prosecution to be approved, but it is very rare for this to happen once a grand jury has returned a “no-bill” result. In this case, the prosecutor is not interested in trying again and is not willing to see the mother.
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I was wondering about the FCDO (like…I don’t think that trying to sell the prosecutor on a new attempt directly is the best route). The FCDO actually has a webpage dealing specifically with this sort of event, which rather sounds like they want people to stop trying to get them to get foreign courts to prosecute foreign crimes, and that they normally defer to foreign courts.
gov.uk/…/murder-manslaughter-and-infanticide-of-b…
The legal responsibility and authority (the jurisdiction) for the investigation into the circumstances of the death is most likely to remain in the country where the death occurred. The FCDO’s role does not extend to any investigative activity, and we cannot interfere in another country’s investigative or judicial processes. The FCDO will register UK interests and request updates from the foreign competent authority where appropriate and possible. The foreign country is under no obligation to provide the information requested.
In most cases there is little involvement from, or role for, England and Wales police forces or coroners. A coronial investigation will only take place if the body is repatriated to England and Wales and reported to the coroner, and where the death is violent, unnatural, or of unknown cause.
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A British coroner returns a finding suggesting manslaughter (but I’m assuming that this is just a “this is consistent with manslaughter and one could be charged” finding, since I can’t imagine that a coroner could return much that would be meaningful; whether or not manslaughter was committed would depend on how reckless or something the father was in his actions, and the state of the body wouldn’t provide much information.
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Family goes to local British police force. These guys can liase with the American police where the crime occurred, but otherwise don’t have much of a role, and says that they can’t really conduct an investigation in the US.
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There is a law in the UK that permits prosecution in the UK of a British national who commits manslaughter abroad; father is a British national, so could potentially be subject to this. It sounds like this customarily is not used if the person is tried in a foreign court and acquitted (though this is apparently not a hard legal restriction, unlike an analogous law in the US). It sounds like the grand jury returning no-bill probably would not probably constitute an acquittal.
The Home Office also states that generally, they don’t want to attempt to prosecute people domestically if there’s a foreign judicial process:
gov.uk/…/extraterritorial-jurisdiction-factsheet
Does extending extraterritorial jurisdiction mean that the UK will be responsible for prosecuting relevant offences committed anywhere in the world?
Government policy generally on the jurisdiction of our courts is that criminal offending is best dealt with by the criminal justice system of the state where the offence occurred. If an accused person is not prosecuted in the state where the offence occurred, a prosecution would only take place in the UK if the accused person were physically present in this jurisdiction (following extradition if necessary), there is sufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction and it is in the public interest to prosecute.
So it sounds like:
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Technically, a second American attempt at prosecution with a second grand jury is possible, but would be uncommon subsequent to such a grand jury “no-bill” finding.
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Technically, a British prosecution attempt could happen, even in the event of an acquittal, but would not be normal.
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I don’t know what weight British prosecutors view the impact of a grand jury finding in the US, as the UK doesn’t use grand juries in 2026. It guess it’s possible that the issue hasn’t come up before.
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A British prosecution would probably only happen if the father was physically present in the UK and they believed that they had a viable case; it sounds like he lives in the US, so the UK would presumably have to extradite him.
So my guess is that the UK probably does assert authority to prosecute, but that this is something that would only be used in exceptional cases.
It sounds kind of like, while the article doesn’t do a great job of splitting them up, the mother has tried three different avenues, first trying to get another attempt at American prosecution, second on a “this could be prosecuted in the UK” route and third on a “I have additional information and want more American investigation using this information”.
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- Comment on Anyone else reckon Bethesda will go the way of Bioware? 1 week ago:
Yeah, I thought that Starfield was fine as a game. There are some things I dislike about it, but that’s also true of all their past games too. I had plenty of good hours in it.
That being said, relative to its time, it wasn’t as impactful as the mainline Fallout games.
I sat down to try to figure out the people who were really upset about it, because it’s rare for my opinion to diverge that much from many people. There were a couple “groups”:
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Some people apparently expected it to be a space combat flight sim and were really disappointed in that. On one hand, I get how one could feel that way if one had that expectation. On the hand, I have a hard time figuring out how someone winds up with that expectation. I saw someone disparaging calling it “Skyrim in space”, which…was kind of what I was expecting, but clearly not what they did. I do think that there’s a market for space opera combat flight sims, as evidenced by the amount of money that people have thrown at Star Citizen.
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I found one comment on Reddit about someone on YouTube who had a really good hour-long review listing all of the problems. IIRC, “Synthetic Man” was the reviewer. I went and watched it. There were a couple of complaints. One was around the fact that he liked killing a lot of people in Fallout and was upset that Starfield had a lot more major plot people marked essential, to avoid breaking plotlines. Okay, I don’t personally go around killing a lot of major plot characters, but I guess if someone did, it could be frustrating, feel like you’re “on rails”. He felt that Fallout’s world was unique, had an unusual world, whereas Starfield was “generic sci-fi” a lot like the present day. Okay, I guess I could see that, though I have also seen a lot of people criticize the world-building in the later Fallout games as being just a nod to concepts introduced in the first two, that the real world-building happened there. But most of his complaints were kinda of the hard-right variety. Like, he was pissed that women were in authority positions (“of course the President is a woman”). He was angry that there were a lot of non-white people doing things lile running the military, and that there were so many of them. Now, okay, that was kinda distasteful to me, and I was thinking about commenting how you’d expect that in a society with more population movement and such, but it did sorta make me think more deeply about why people liked the Fallout series. Fallout—I believe that the name is something of a pun, refers not just to the radioacrive fallout, but to the social fallout, what a post-apocalyptic society would look like—is kinda a prepper fantasy. Like, society breaks down, and most people die, and the people who come out on top are those who are armed and have the will to change the world. I think that a lot of the appeal of prepping is maybe because it lets people fantasize about a world where there’s a social reset, and the things that make people important or influential in the current world go away and they’re a lot more prominent or relatively better off. And I think that maybe applies to a lot of different things. Marx called religion the “opium of the masses”—you can believe that things that you find unjust in the current world don’t matter. People die and there’s an afterlife and all the unrighteous are punished and the believers—you—are the ones on top. I think that a lot of the appeal of many things is enabling a fantasy like that. But, okay, to stay on track…from that perspective, Fallout was really appealing to some people because it created a fantasy world that they liked imagining themselves in. Starfield didn’t—it imagined a more-or-less progressive extension of our current world. One of the cardinal sins I think a media series can do is to try to change up its demographic. Liie, once you build a userbase, you want to make games that appeal to that userbase. It could be that the creators of the series had, perhaps unintentionally, built a world that had a lot of appeal to a demographic, and then unintentionally shifted it.
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Some people I saw didn’t like the procedurally-generated aspect of it. I think that the procedural aspect, which clearly soaked up a lot of resources, didn’t buy much gameplay. You had infinite planet surface, but no real reson to venture our over it. I think that for games to benefit from procedural generation, the way roguelikes and roguelites do, they really need to have the generated content change the way one plays. The only real “game” aspect to the terrain was finding an outpost location with multiple resources, which isn’t very interesting, or very rarely needing to traverse some more-difficult terrain. That is, the terrain was mostly just cosmetic. I think that what was needed was for the terrain to matter a lot more to gameplay. Maybe enemes act differently around it or utilize it or player abilities are tied to it so that it affects combat. Flip side is, though…while I don’t think that the terrain generation bought much, disn’t create much gameplay, I don’t see as how it hurt things much either. Not much reason to go on a trek through infinite terrain, but not as if you needed to, either.
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The main plot wasn’t great. Yeah, I do agree there. Bethesda had a history of dramatic openings, like Skyrim or Fallout 4. By comparison, Starfield had an underwhelming intro. The main questline was maybe one of the more-uninteresting questlines (though I remember people who didn’t like the main Fallout 4 questline too). I think that Bethesda heard that people liked exploring, by which they meant they liked walking around a handcrafted map full of handcrafted plot, and interpreted it as “I want exploration thematically”, which they didn’t. On the other hand, I don’t really think that the main questline was really the core appeal of Fallout or Elder Scrolls games either, so…shrugs.
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- Comment on UK government’s obesity plan ‘doomed to fail’, MPs warn 2 weeks ago:
The UK government’s promise to reverse rising obesity rates in the next decade is “doomed to fail” without…a new plan led directly by the prime minister
Health Secretary Yvette Cooper had some decided non-fans.
- Comment on Craving a Crimson Skies with modern planes or in space 2 weeks ago:
Crimson Skies was an arcadey combat flight sim with comic-book flavor plot-oriented gameplay and a setting that was…I don’t know what the word is. Steampunk-style “older technology used to build a historically-large and advanced systems”, but using interwar-era technology rather than Victorian stuff. Kinda similar to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Has dogfighting.
If you take out the time of the setting, then I’d think that you’d be asking for an arcadey combat flight sim with an over-the-top plot and maybe really large, fantastic enemies.
Some other people here recommended Ace Combat games, which I haven’t played recent entries of, or Project Wingman, which I have. I enjoyed Project Wingman, and it does have some large aerial enemies, but thematically, I don’t know if it really has that same over-the-top feel. It’s going more for Ace Combat sans all the cinematics stuff. More realistic-theme-but-overpowered, doesn’t have the same focus on plot and characters. Not saying that you wouldnlt have fun with it. Could be close enough.
I think that maybe if it were in space, you’d be talking about something like a Wing Commander successor, and that’s been kind of a void in the last few years. I don’t know if I’d recommend Star Citizen’s or Squadron 42, which another user here has, as they’re kind of a stupendous mess, but it is true that they aimed to be a Wing Commander successor.
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www.thegamer.com/best-space-combat-games/
Using that as inspiration:
I haven’t played Star Wars: Squadrons. Looking at Steam reviews, it sounds like a lot of people say that they have problems with bugs.
I haven’t played House of the Dying Sun. The Steam reviews are better.
X4 isn’t really about an over-the-top plot and instant excitement. The dogfighting isn’t that great. I dropped it pretty quickly, but X3 was mostly about using strafing to throw off the enemy AI’s prediction of where you would be. It’s really more about the scope of the space empire you build up.
Darkstar One I remember being kind of slow, more about RPG-style leveling up your ship.
I haven’t played Starpoint Gemini 2. It sounds like it’s less fighter-centric, from the Steam reviews.
I haven’t played Everspace 2. I did play the original, and felt that it was kind of boring, repetitive, and grindy. Roguelite, not plot oriented, jump into level, kill enemies, repeat.
I think that Freespace 2 and Freelancer are probably gonna be too old for you.
Yeah. Nothing there quite fits the mold. I guess out of what’s there, Project Wingman is probably the closest, but it doesn’t really have quite the same thematic feel.
- Comment on Ofcom outlines ways social media can verify ages of users 2 weeks ago:
It has also acknowledged that “the risk of circumvention cannot be entirely eliminated”, and some children would succeed in bypassing the age checks.
Yeah.
- Comment on Thames Water creditors to vote on emergency £2.4bn loan as cash runs low 2 weeks ago:
Thames Water has previously said that customers will not be on the hook for the interest on the £3bn loan
I mean, there’s no direct liability, but I’m operating on the assumption that the company’s source of income is going to be its customers, and that’s the only way it could repay said loan. So even if indirectly, it’s gotta come from their pockets.
I guess if the government nationalizes the company, then taxpayers might wind up paying for the loan, but aside from that…
- Comment on Keir Starmer's government discussed moving out of 10 Downing Street 2 weeks ago:
The building has been described as a “gloomy, mice-infested, bomb-curtained rabbit warren”.
“bomb-curtained”?
- Comment on Lets find obscure VG OSTs that deserves more attentions 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on Canada: 1 -- UK: 0 2 weeks ago:
I’m generally not a fan of editorialized headlines. If you’ve got a point to make, I’d rather it be made in a top-level comment.
- Comment on [Linux] Unlock the bf16 tensor cores on RTX3090 3 weeks ago:
The install procedure does involve changing some kernel boot parameters, so if you make a mistake it’s possible that you soft-brick your OS.
I mean…just interrupt the boot process at GRUB, and edit the kernel boot parameters to whatever you want, boot into the OS, and then change them back persistently.
- Comment on Uber begins self-driving robotaxi trial in Manchester 3 weeks ago:
streets of Manchester…Europe’s first autonomous taxi service in the Croatian capital, Zagreb.
Zagreb and Manchester are some odd bedfellows.
- Comment on Diaspora, Caves of Qud's first expansion, enters early access in December 4 weeks ago:
Oh hell yes.
- Comment on BBC to force more to pay licence fee with ‘YouTube tax’ 4 weeks ago:
Why would the BBC be allowed to collect money on services it does not provide? This is basically saying “everyone must pay this fee, or unplug their internet”.
I think that it’s because the BBC puts content on YouTube (and I assume either doesn’t have ads enabled or wants more money than they generate).
I guess I could understand someone saying "well, with TV, I have to watch British brosdcast stations, and with YouTube, I don’t, but I’d think that the same would apply to TVs using satellite receivers, and I assume—though I don’t know, don’t live in the UK—that satellite TV users are also subject to the license fee.
- Comment on Ministers preparing to slash heat pump subsidies to fund defence spending 4 weeks ago:
Madeleine Gabriel, a director at the charity Nesta, said: “Bills are soaring again because of high gas prices. Our reliance on gas is the reason we are in an energy crisis, so cutting funding for heat pumps makes no sense.
Mmm…I’d say that high gas bills—if they are high relative to electricity prices—are a good reason not to need a subsidy, because it means that people already have a potent incentive to switch to a heat pump.
You need a subsidy or a tax on something when there is a positive or negative externality, something that isn’t captured in consumer price information, because then purchasing decisions are made without incorporating that externality. You internalize the externality. But…in the case of a high gas bill, price information informing a consumer to switch is present. If they already want to switch on their own…shrugs
Not only that, but in general, for negative externalities, you normally want a tax, and for positive externalities, you normally want a subsidy. The issue with natural gas heating is the carbon emissions, which is a negstive externality. You probably don’t want a subsidy on heat pumps to internalize that, but rather a tax on natural gas heaters.
- Comment on Car bloat is causing parking problems in Singapore 4 weeks ago:
Well, some of them do.
- Comment on Car bloat is causing parking problems in Singapore 4 weeks ago:
Car bloat is causing parking problems in the US too.
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
If this is Linux, I’m pretty sure that you can use RandR (or whatever Wayland’s analog is, if this is Wayland) to crop the visible area to whatever aspect ratio you want. Probably on Wayland the
wlr-randrcommand can do it on wlroots-based conpositors.I’ve done so before on X11 with an HMD that extended into the edges of my visual field, where I wanted everything in the (crisp, clear) center.
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Looks like it:
man.archlinux.org/man/wlr-randr.1.en
--mode | --custom-mode <width>x<height>[@<refresh>Hz] Set output resolution and, optionally, refresh rate. --pos <x>,<y> Position the output with absolute layout coordinates.
- Comment on Why hotter summers are making British potatoes smaller 4 weeks ago:
Probably possible to genetically-engineer potatoes that can deal with drought better, given time and work.
The EU has historically had a pretty anti-genetic-engineering position, but (a) I understand that things have been slowly changing and (b) I don’t know whether Brexit and the TCA permit for broader use in the UK regardless.
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From this Telegraph article, it sounds like the UK and EU are currently negotiating terms, so all this is gonna be in a state of flux, but it gives me the impression that the gene-editing, a slightly-restricted form of genetic engineering, may be getting the thumbs-up.
telegraph.co.uk/…/uk-gene-edited-crops-to-be-spar…
British and European negotiators are close to a deal that would save UK gene-edited crops from an EU ban.
Britain used Brexit freedoms to pioneer the crops, which are more resistant to drought and disease.
In an important breakthrough, two British farmers became the first in Europe to grow and harvest gene-edited crops in commercial field conditions this summer.
- Comment on Bill Gates: People saying AI will create more jobs don’t understand what’s coming 5 weeks ago:
Speaking as someone with what I’d consider to be a pretty decent homelab, I can’t self host the kind of AI that I use for work, not without literally emptying my savings into the hardware and energy needs.
I think we’re at least a decade away from having user-accessible hardware for AI that doesn’t break the bank.
So, for coding, which is what Gates was specifically talking about being doable now, maybe we could corral up the hardware. Like, maybe one could cover specific fields.
There are still going to be issues like power and cooling and hardware cost and whether people who make competitive models are even interested in providing it for home use (since it makes it harder for them to make a return on their model). But set that aside.
As I’ve said before on here, I would say pretty confidently that we will not have local models running to do all of the stuff that cloud is or is being built out to for at least something like four to five years, and that’s if we started immediate, massive buildout of memory fabrication to a much greater degree than we have. The majority of fabricated memory now is going to AI use, and cloud AI hardware will have considerably higher capacity utilization than hardware at home. You’d have to have many times over as much memory being produced to have the same compute capacity at home.
I’m not opposed to doing LLMs or parallel compute at home at all. I have a 128GB Framework Desktop and an XT 7900 XTX that I got to do just that. I’m just saying that we are not going to realistically be able to move all of the stuff in the cloud to the home for at least something like half a decade, and very probably more, because humanity does not have the memory available and can’t build enough memory fabrication capacity for it in that timeframe. It doesn’t matter how much value is being provided by some home user of that hardware or what their willingness is to spend on it if we don’t have the memory. Like, even if every person in the world could produce, to pull a number out of the air, a real $1M in value every year via use of a home AI rig, even if all that demand suddenly materialized out of thin air, all that would happen is that prices would rise sufficiently to make the hardware unaffordable even at those extreme levels. The constraint is on the supply end, not the demand end.