4·
1 year agoOnly the king has more power than this gas executive in a Russian emergency.
I’m pretty confident that the prime minister has a larger role than the king in a “shit hits the fan with Russia” scenario.
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Cake day: September 14th, 2025
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Based on current polling the conservatives would be lucky to get third place. Reform on track to get second or third place depending on the pole, Labour and the lib Dems are fighting for the top spot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election
This graph has the Liberal Democrats at ~14%, the Conservatives at ~16%, Labour at ~20%, and Reform at ~32%.
A Liberal Democrat-Labour coalition might just edge out Reform, but Reform’s also rising, and Labour’s been getting hammered.
EDIT: Though, of course, this is just showing proportions of popular support, and first-past-the-post may cause that to not directly translate to seats.
Organisers are reportedly blaming the mistake on a “printing error” and have since removed the chocolate from the bags
Wait a minute. So the organizers dick it up and get rewarded with a bunch of chocolate? This doesn’t seem like proper incentivization.
EDIT: Also, based on recent polling, isn’t Reform the largest opponent, not Labour?
An estimated 1.4 million adults in Britain have a gambling problem
Put more optimistically, that’s 67.8 million Britons who don’t have a gambling problem.
An original consultation took place during 2018 as part of the previous government’s Child Obesity action, and legislation was finally passed in Parliament in December 2021.
The rules only came into force on Wednesday (1 October 2025).
The legislation was actually passed under the Johnson government:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Johnson_ministry
I suppose that Labour could have passed a law canceling implementation, though.
If you put sugar in granulated or powdered solid form into soda, it’ll create a lot of convection points and the soda will rapidly foam up and lose a lot of its carbon dioxide.
You could use a sweet syrup instead.
The notice reads: “Want Coca-Cola Classic? It’s one glass only.
“Based on new government laws, we’ve had to limit Coca-Cola Classic to one glass per customer.
“Still thirsty? Help yourself to any of our low-sugar fizzy Bottomless Soft Drinks.”
Under the new rules, any soft drinks that are low in sugar, for example ‘Zero’ alternative versions of most popular soft drink brands, can be drunk to one’s heart’s content.
I imagine that manufacturers of artificial sweeteners are in for a good time.
40·1 year agoSacks, the Trump administration’s AI czar and co-host of the conference, stopped Musk mid-answer. “Well, Elon, by the way, could you just publish that?” he asked. “Wikipedia is so biased, it’s a constant war.” He suggested that Musk create what he called “Grokipedia.”
This past week, as the Wikipedia controversy reignited, Musk announced xAI would, in fact, offer up Grokipedia. Soon after, the Wikipedia page for Musk’s Grok was updated. The entry included a brief comparison to an effort almost 20 years earlier to create another Wikipedia alternative called Conservapedia.
Yeah, my initial take is “Conservapedia was pretty much a disaster, and there’s a reason that people don’t use it”.
Like, go to Conservapedia’s “evolution” article.
https://www.conservapedia.com/Evolution
Like, you’re going to have to create an entire alternate reality for people who have weird views on X, Y, or Z. And making it worse, there isn’t overlap among all those groups. Like, maybe you’re a young earth creationist, and you like that evolution article. But then maybe you don’t buy into chemtrails. It looks like Conservapedia doesn’t like chemtrails. So that’s gonna piss off the chemtrail people.
There are lots of people on the right who are going to disagree with scientific consensus on something, but they don’t all have the same set of views. They might all complain that Wikipedia doesn’t fit with their views on particular point X, but that doesn’t mean that they’re going to go all happily accept the fringe views of some other group. And some views are just going to outright contradict each other. You could have a conservative Mormon, Amish, and a Catholic, but they’re going to have some seriously clashing views on religion, even if they’re all conservative. In broader society, the way we normally deal with that is to just let people make up their own mind on particular issues. But if you’re trying to create a single “alternate reality” that all of them subscribe to, then you have to get them all on one page, which is going to be a real problem.
Maybe Musk could make Grok try to assess which fringe group that someone is in and automatically provide a version of truth in Grok’s responses tailored to their preferences. But…that’s not a Grokipedia, because the latter requires a unified view.
looks
For Linux, my off-the-cuff take is that I’m not that excited about it. It means that if you can launch a Unity game and pass it command-line arguments, then you can cause it to take actions that you want. Okay, but usually the security context of someone who can do that and the game that’s running should probably be the same. If you can launch a game with specified parameters to do something bad, you can probably also just do something bad and cut the game out of the picture.
This is why you have few suid binaries on a Limux system (and should never make something large and complex, like a Unity game, suid) — because then the binary does have a different security context than the launching process.
Now, it’s possible that there are scenarios where you could make this badly exploitable. Say games have chosen to trust command-line arguments from a remote system, and that game has community servers. Like, maybe they have a lobby app that launches a Unity binary with remotely-specified command line arguments. But in that case, I think that the developer is already asking for trouble.
Most games are just not going to be sufficiently hardened to avoid problems if an attacker can pass arbitrary command lines anyway. And as the bug points out, on Linux, you can achieve something similar to this for many binaries via using
LD_PRELOADanyway — you can use that route to make fixes for closed-source Linux games. Windows has similar routes, stuff like DLL injection.It’s possible that this is more serious on Android. I don’t know if there’s a way to pass command line parameters there, and doubt it, but part of the Android security model is that apps run in isolation, and so if that’s exploitable by any local app, that could cause that model to break down.
But on Linux — GNU/Linux — I’d think that if someone malicious can already launch games with arbitrary command line parameters on your system, you’re probably not really in much worse trouble due to this bug than you already are.
7·1 year agoNot a video game, but since I try to reference relevant Threadiverse communities when I can, if you’re not aware of it, you might enjoy !militarymoe@ani.social.
2·1 year agoNot what you’re asking, but I can probably do better.
I’d give decent odds that the issue you’re hitting is the thing that many Fediverse instances are hitting. There have been a lot of badly-written and very aggressive scraper-bots hammering servers all over (the Web, not just the Threadiverse) to try to find text to train AI models. If you’ve seen discussion on Anubis recently, that was aimed at trying to mitigate the load from that.
Many instances dealt with this by disallowing anonymous access. This sucks, because it’d be nice to let people use an instance without logging in, but it did apparently drastically reduce the bot load.
You can probably just pick an instance that doesn’t provide for anonymous access.
goes to Steam, searches for items with tags “Anime”, “Singleplayer”, and “Shooter”, type “Game” to exclude bundles, sorts by “User Reviews”
295 results match your search. 97 titles have been excluded based on your preferences.
That’s not logged in, so I assume that the 97 probably have adult content or something that Valve defaults to not showing, so figure ~400 games.
EDIT: It looks like “Shooter” can also mean stuff like shmups or rail shooters. You may be interested in that, but if not, replacing the “Shooter” tag with the “FPS” (first-person shooter) tag:
Or the “Third-person shooter” tag:
EDIT2: Apparently and obnoxiously, Valve didn’t make search URL links compatible between the mobile version of the site and the desktop version of the site. The above was from a desktop browser. But if you’re on mobile, you can probably recreate the search by adding the same tags.
3·1 year agoHmm.
So for some software, you can just increase the price.
But…I wonder what that will do to the cost of video games. Typically, those are closer to one-off releases, not packages where new releases exist and are regularly purchased or subscriptions are in place.
I’d expect this to increase the cost of maintenance, if there are legal obligations on publishers to monitor, notify, and deploy security fixes for their software and upstream. You’d think that it might encourage vendors to EOL software sooner; pull it off Steam or the like, mark as no longer supported.
Maybe there are some exemptions somewhere that affect those.
I would note that, to pick two examples:
ExpressVPN appears to have California-based exit nodes:
https://www.expressvpn.com/vpn-server/us-vpn/san-francisco-vpn
NordVPN appears to have California-based exit nodes:
https://nordvpn.com/servers/usa/sanfrancisco/
You can effectively choose the state law under which you want to access the Internet.
looks at Ohio meaningfully
Just 1 in 4 Brits think the UK is viewed positively on the world stage, with most wanting their country to play a large role in international affairs, exclusive poll shows
I — American — view the UK positively in international affairs, but frankly, if you’re comparing the UK to its recent history:
The UK itself has grown, but a lot of international influence came from the UK being, globally, at the leading edge of the Industrial Revolution. That’s a discovery-of-fire level event, a pretty rare situation in human history.
That was a major part of the Great Divergence; the UK was highly developed, and pulled wildly more than its weight in per capita terms.
If the bar that a Briton is setting is relative to the UK’s international role over the past couple centuries, that’s a high bar to set, because the UK had extraordinary influence in the world in that period. That’s not because the UK’s economy has become weaker, but because the world has been economically converging; less-developed countries have been catching up. I’d say that the UK definitely punches well above its weight in population terms internationally today, and is probably relatively-engaged. Could it do more? Well, I’m sure it could. But I don’t really think of the UK as especially isolationist. Name another country of 70 million that independently has as large an impact internationally.
Setting aside Trump, I have no idea why people who can apparently be mostly reasonable about, say, cars subscribe to utterly batshit insane views about diet and health and buy into all kinds of snake oil.
I’m not saying that there’s no magical thinking with cars — “my magical fuel additive” or whatever — but I have seen more utterly insane stuff regarding what someone should eat or how to treat medical conditions than in most other areas.
It’s also not new. You can go back, and find people promoting all kinds of snake oil when it comes to health. Some of my favorites are the utterly crazy stuff that came out when public awareness of radiation was new, and it was being billed as a magic cure for everything.
I get that not everyone is a doctor or a dietician. But you’d think that any time you see someone promoting something as a fix for a wide, unrelated range of conditions, that it should be enough to raise red flags for someone, layman or no.
I think that if I were Google, Meta, and Vodafone, I’d go build an app to measure a phone’s lifetime playing video and then promote that as a benchmark. Things that are the path of least resistance to measure tend to get measured more than those that are a pain to measure.
Sounds like there’s potential for even more political gains from even more political theater, then?