kbal

Apropos of nothing, I wonder for the thousandth time what it is that drives otherwise sane people to produce web pages with light grey text on an off-white background.

Went to see what my fedi feed thinks of [latest bad news]. Saw ridiculous cat video instead. Feel better.

You know you're done with Microsoft when you see a screen shot of MS-DOS and think "Oh yeah, I remember when we used to address drives with letters like C:. That was weird."

Act 1: It started with some fun little quests to introduce you to the narrative style. The fights were too hard, so I improved my character stats until I could handle them. It's not easy to know when there's no choice but to go along with whatever is suggested, and when you can do something else, but I guess I got it more or less right.

Act 2: A nice meaty dungeon crawl. My efforts to make my character stronger paid off, the difficulty was just right.

Act 3: Holy shit it's too hard suddenly. One does not level up quickly in my version of Skyrim, maybe that's why. At one point there's an option that suggests you can skip the whole thing, but I didn't take it and would guess it probably isn't so easy. I had to resort to stealth archery and I didn't bring a lot of arrows. Some horror game stuff of a kind I don't normally enjoy, but it was well-executed. It was a pretty long slog.

Act 4: Okay we're in Dark Souls now. Except the boss fights are even longer. I had a legendary weapon, shiny superhero armour, lots of magic resistance, a good healing spell, all the equipment a skyrim paladin could want, and yet even some of the non-boss fights took a lot of time and effort. Hit, dodge, run, heal, repeat. Forever. To be fair I do have the difficulty settings turned up pretty high. I wandered around lost for a very long time. Some of the battles were epic. There was only one area I had a really hard time with: There doesn't seem to be any resisting the tentacle attacks so they were pretty much instant death.

The ending was quite good and made it all seem worthwhile.

Today is the 97th anniversary of the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti.

If anyone has a debian/windows dual-boot laptop and has been waiting until Microsoft's secureboot surprise is defused before booting into Windows, and you don't want to wait any longer, what you need is shim-signed_1.39+15.7-1_amd64.deb from bookworm-proposed-updates.

Congratulations to https://niagaranow.com/ for having the one obvious advertisement that's got through my ad-blocker setup so far this year. It's an actual jpeg banner ad that's hosted directly at their own website. Such wholesome web design for 2024. If I ever want to get my chimney repaired in Niagara Falls I'll know where to go.

The problems on this site were created using neural nets to automatically extract positions for each rank from high-level games where the neural net thought the next move would be instinctive for a pro but might be educational or non-obvious for players of that rank.

Trying to get back into the game a little, and I've just noticed that https://neuralnetgoproblems.com/ is still online! Whole-board positions from real games, asks you to predict the next move. It's really good if you enjoy that sort of thing.

"Sony claims that the values that its programs write to your device's RAM chips are copyrighted works that it has created, and that altering that copyrighted work makes an unauthorized derivative work, which infringes its copyright."

Sometimes one of my crude attempts at parody will be mistaken for sincere. Shamefully unworthy as my attempts at humour may be, at least they're never so distasteful as this prank from Sony which apparently is being taken seriously by the European Court of Justice. Very funny guys, you can knock it off now.

@protonprivacy@mastodon.social My respect for #Proton is diminished little by the addition of a cryptocurrency wallet, much more by the fact that it supports only one of the worst of those currencies. A ton of CO₂ emissions per three transactions is not acceptable.

I asked a big LLM to name some of today's prominent public intellectuals. It put Henry Kissinger, Francis Fukuyama, and Neil deGrasse Tyson near the top of the list. It mentioned several economists who looked pretty boring at first glance (Yanis Varoufakis did not make the list), and a couple of cheesy pop science writers, before finally getting around to Slavoj Žižek. Immediately after that it descended into pure gibberish.

Well here's a linux modding tip: Turn off ESYNC and FSYNC when running DynDOLOD. If it randomly goes wrong in the middle of its hour-long run, that could be the problem.