It seems that it agreed with it, as I don’t see anything in the “corrective action” field.

Context:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxuUkYiaUc8

SNL skit: Sexual Harassment and You

Summary: be attractive, don’t be unattractive

I’d assume that at a minimum, someone in the EU somewhere is at least looking into how they compromised the satellite network and re-securing it.

I haven’t been playing competitive FPS games for a long time, but they used to be a dime a dozen. There must be some kind of alternative multiplayer FPS that you could just play instead if you’re not happy with Call of Duty.

Looks fine to me.

Little side question: Will the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on the motherboard work in Arch? From what I could gather, the drivers for it should be in the latest kernel, but I’m not 100% sure.

If they don’t for some reason and you can’t get it working or need some sort of driver fix, can always worst case fall back to a USB dongle or similar until they do. Obviously, preferable not to do that, but shouldn’t wind up stuck without them no matter what.

This was the fourth night in a row when Russian “shahids” flew into Belarus en masse and for the first time in these days the Belarusian Air Force’s duty aircraft was raised. The fighter from Baranovichi took off at about 07:40 in the morning and returned to the base at 08:45.

What’s the navigation system on those UAVs?

kagis

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/25204

The Shahed “kamikaze drone,” known also by its Russian nomenclature as the Geran-2, is more properly classified as a one-way attack unmanned aerial vehicle (OWA UAV).

The original Shaheds employed inertial navigation blocks, manufactured in Canada, that relied on commercially available GPS systems for navigation with a limited CEP accuracy of around 10 to 15 meters. The Russian variants use the “Komet” navigation system, which incorporates GLONASS, Russia’s version of GPS for guidance. This is almost the only component of Russian production in these drones.

Sounds like that system is vulnerable to some form of electronic attack.

EDIT: Unless the idea is that it’s intentional, to try to come from an unexpected direction. If those tracks in the image represent the actual tracks, though, I’m not sure how useful they are. Doesn’t look very effective.

Alexey Pajitnov, who created the ubiquitous game in 1984, opens up about his failed projects and his desire to design another hit.

He prefers conversations about his canceled and ignored games, the past designs that now make him cringe, and the reality that his life’s signature achievement probably came decades ago.

The problem is that that guy created what is probably the biggest, most timeless simple video game in history. Your chances of repeating that are really low.

It’s like you discover fire at 21. The chances of doing it again? Not high. You could maybe do other successful things, but it’d be nearly impossible to do something as big again.

That’s not a completely reliable fix, a third party library could still call setenv and trigger crashes, there’s still a risk of data races, but we’ve observed a significant reduction in SIGABRT volumes.

Hmm. If they want a dirty hack, I expect they could do a library interposer that overrides setenv(3) and getenv(3) symbols with versions that grab a global “environment variable” lock before calling the actual function.

They say that they’re having problems with third party libraries that use environment variables. If they’re using third-party libraries statically-linked against libc, I suppose that won’t work, but as long as they’re dynamically-linked, should be okay.

EDIT: Though you’ve still got an atomic update problem with the returned buffer, doing things the way they are, if you don’t want to leak memory. Like, one thread might have half-updated the value of the buffer when another is reading the buffer after returning from the interposer’s version of the function. That shouldn’t directly crash, but you can get a mangled environment variable value. And there’s not going to be guarantees on synchronization on access to the buffer, unlike the getenv() call itself.

thinks

This is more of a mind-game solution, but…

Well, you can’t track lifetime of pointers to a buffer. So there’s no true fix that doesn’t leak memory. Because the only absolute fix is to return a new buffer from getenv() for each unique setenv(), because POSIX provides no lifetime bounds.

But if you assume that anything midway through a buffer read is probably going to do so pretty soon, which is probably true…

You can maybe play tricks with mmap() and mremap(), if you’re willing to blow a page per environment variable that you want to update and a page of virtual address space per update, and some temporary memory. The buffer you return from the interposer’s getenv() is an mmap()ed range. In the interposer’s setenv(), if the value is modified, you mremap() with MREMAP_DONTUNMAP. Future calls to getenv() return the new address. That gives you a userspace page fault handler to the old range, which I suppose – haven’t written userspace page fault handlers myself – can probably block the memory read until the new value is visible and synchronize on visibility of changes across threads.

If you assume that any read of the buffer is sequential and moving forward, then if a page fault triggers on an attempted access at the address at the start of the page, then you can return the latest value of the value.

If you get a fault via an address into the middle of the buffer, and you still have a copy of the old value, then you’ve smacked into code in the middle of reading the buffer. Return the old value.

A given amount of time after an update, you’re free to purge old values from setenv(). Can do so out of the interposer’s functions.

You can never eliminate that chance that a thread has read the first N bytes of an environment variable buffer, then gone to sleep for ten minutes, then suddenly wants the remainder. In that case, you have to permit for the possibility that the thread sees part of the old environment variable value and part of the new. But you can expend temporary memory to remember old values longer to make that ever-more unlikely.

When the market is flooded, any paid title has an incredibly difficult time standing out.

If that’s true, that it’s simply an inability to find premium games, but demand exists, that seems like the kind of thing where you could address it via branding. That is, you make a “premium publisher” or studio or something that keeps pumping out premium titles and builds a reputation. I mean, there are lots of product categories where you have brands develop – it’s not like you normally have some competitive market with lots of entrants, prices get driven down, and then brands never emerge. And I can’t think of a reason for phone apps to be unique in that regard.

I think that there’s more to it than that.

My own guesses are:

• I won’t buy any apps from Google, because I refuse to have a Google account on my phone, because I don’t want to be building a profile for Google. I use stuff from F-Droid. That’s not due to unwillingness to pay for games – I buy many games on other platforms – but simply due to concerns over data privacy. I don’t know how widespread of a position that is, and it’s probably not the dominant factor. But my guess is that if I do it, at least a few other people do, and that’s a pretty difficult barrier to overcome for a commercial game vendor.

• Platform demographics. My impression is that it may be that people playing on a phone might have less disposable income than a typical console player (who bought a piece of hardware for the sole and explicit purpose of playing games) or a computer player (a “gaming rig” being seen as a higher-end option to some extent today). If you’re aiming at value consumers, you need to compete on price more strongly.

• This is exacerbated by the fact that a mobile game is probably a partial subsititute good for a game on another platform.

  In microeconomics, substitute goods are two goods that can be used for the same purpose by consumers.[1] That is, a consumer perceives both goods as similar or comparable, so that having more of one good causes the consumer to desire less of the other good. Contrary to complementary goods and independent goods, substitute goods may replace each other in use due to changing economic conditions.[2] An example of substitute goods is Coca-Cola and Pepsi; the interchangeable aspect of these goods is due to the similarity of the purpose they serve, i.e. fulfilling customers’ desire for a soft drink. These types of substitutes can be referred to as close substitutes.[3]

  They aren’t perfect substitutes. Phones are very portable, and so you can’t lug a console or even a laptop with you the way you can a phone and just slip it out of your pocket while waiting in a line. But to some degree, I think for most people, you can choose to game on one or the other, if you’ve multiple of those platforms available.

  So, if you figure that in many cases, people who have the option to play a game on any of those platforms are going to choose a non-mobile platform if that’s accessible to them, the people who are playing a game on mobile might tend to be only the people who have a phone as the only available platform, and so it might just be that they’re willing to spend less money. Like, my understanding is that it’s pretty common to get kids smartphones these days…but to some degree, that “replaces” having a computer. So if you’ve got a bunch of kids in school using phones as their gaming platform, or maybe folks who don’t have a lot of cash floating around, they’re probably gonna have a more-limited budget to expend on games, be more price-sensitive.

  kagis

  https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/

  Smartphone dependency over time

  Today, 15% of U.S. adults are “smartphone-only” internet users – meaning they own a smartphone, but do not have home broadband service.

  Reliance on smartphones for online access is especially common among Americans with lower household incomes and those with lower levels of formal education.

• I think that for a majority of game genres, the hardware limitations of the smartphone are pretty substantial. It’s got a small screen. It’s got inputs that typically involve covering up part of the screen with fingers. The inputs aren’t terribly precise (yes, you can use a Bluetooth input device, but for many people, part of the point of a mobile platform is that you can have it everywhere, and lugging a game controller around is a lot more awkward). The hardware has to be pretty low power, so limited compute power. Especially for Android, the hardware differs a fair deal, so the developer can’t rely on certain hardware being there, as on consoles. Lot of GPU variation. Screen resolutions vary wildly, and games have to be able to adapt to that. It does have the ability to use gestures, and there are some games that can make use of GPS hardware and the like, but I think that taken as a whole, games tend to be a lot more disadvantaged by the cons than advantaged by the pros of mobile hardware.

• Environment. While one can sit down on a couch in a living room and play a mobile game the way one might a console game, I think that many people playing mobile games have environmental constraints that a developer has to deal with. Yes, you can use a phone while waiting in line at the grocery store. But the flip side is that that game also has to be amenable to maybe just being played for a few minutes in a burst. You can’t expect the player to build up much mental context. They may-or-may-not be able to expect a player to be listening to sound. Playing Stellaris or something like that is not going to be very friendly to short bursts.

• Battery power. Even if you can run a game on a phone, heavyweight games are going to drain battery at a pretty good clip. You can do that, but then the user’s either going to have to limit playtime or have a source of power.

Assuming that this is the episode and the Factorio dev post that references, I think that that’s a different issue. That dev also was using Sway under Wayland, but was talking about how Factorio apparently doesn’t immediately update the drawable area on window size change – it takes three frames, and Sway was making this very visible.

I use the Sway window manager, and a particularity of this window manager is that it will automatically resize floating windows to the size of their last submitted frame. This has unveiled an issue with our graphics stack: it takes the game three frames to properly respond to a window resize. The result is a rapid tug-of-war, with Sway sending a ton of resize events and Factorio responding with outdated framebuffer sizes, causing the chaos captured above.

I spent two full days staring at our graphics code but could not come up with an explanation as to why this is happening, so this work is still ongoing. Since this issue only happens when running the game on Wayland under Sway, it’s not a large priority, but it was too entertaining not to share.

I’d guess that he’s maybe using double- or triple-buffering at the SDL level or something like that.

my thought was, '“oh am i going to have to do all this myself?” Idk why I would want to spend my time and effort doing what someone in Rimworld does without needing micromanagement.

Not really my cup of tea either.

I don’t think that Stardew Valley is really all that similar to Rimworld. Maybe Oxygen Not Included, Satisfactory/Factorio, Kenshi, or Dwarf Fortress if you’re looking for something similar.

Boost assist for uphill.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/21/

The GAU-8 Avenger fires up to sixty one-pound bullets a second. It produces almost five tons of recoil force, which is crazy considering that it’s mounted in a type of plane (the A-10 “Warthog”) whose two engines produce only four tons of thrust each. If you put two of them in one aircraft, and fired both guns forward while opening up the throttle, the guns would win and you’d accelerate backward.

To put it another way: If I mounted a GAU-8 on my car, put the car in neutral, and started firing backward from a standstill, I would be breaking the interstate speed limit in less than three seconds.

Additional context, highlighting some germane snippets:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_North_Korea

North Korea forbids the possession, production, distribution and importation of pornography. This is punished harshly by the government. Nevertheless, pornography is widespread in the country because people secretly import it, or locally produce it.

Today, pornography is sold openly on the China–North Korea border despite the government’s attempts to curtail circulation. Most of the content consumed in North Korea is produced outside the country, with a significant part of it being Chinese bootleg recordings of poor quality. A locally produced pornographic film typically involves nude or scantily clad women dancing to music.

Sexuality is restricted in the conservative North Korean culture.

According to the Criminal Law of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea:

A person who, without authorization, imports, makes, distributes or illegally keeps music, dance, drawings, photos, books, video recordings or electronic media that reflects decadent, carnal or foul contents shall be punished by short term labour for less than two years. In cases where the person commits a grave offence, he or she shall be punished by reform through labour for less than five years. In cases where such a person imports, keeps or distributes sexual video recordings, the punishment shall be reform through labour for more than five years and less than ten years.
— Article 193 (Import, Keeping and Distribution of Decadent Culture), Chapter 6 (Crimes of Impairing Socialist Culture)[12]

The law specifies that viewing such material is also illegal:[13]

A person who watches or listens to music, dance, drawings, photos, books, video recordings or electronic media that reflects decadent, carnal or foul contents or who performs such acts himself or herself shall be punished by short term labour for less than two years. In cases where the person commits a grave offence, he or she shall be punished by reform through labour for less than five years.
— Article 194 (Conduct of Decadent Acts)[12]

The State Security Department is tasked with monitoring illegal imports of pornographic materials. Involvement in illegal import results in the culprit being shot or sent to a kyohwaso (re-education camp) for 10 to 15 years.[14] Executions of several persons accused of watching or distributing pornography took place in late 2013.[15] It is illegal for tourists to bring pornography into the country.[citation needed] Access to “sex and adult websites” on the Internet has been blocked from the country,[16] but in the past BitTorrent downloads of pornography have been detected, likely relating to foreigners residing in Pyongyang.[17] Likewise, North Koreans living near the border with China use mobile phones equipped with Chinese SIM cards to access Chinese porn sites.[18]

When Kim Jong Un’s uncle Jang Song-thaek was executed in 2013, distributing pornography was counted among his crimes.[19]

I wish people had a perverse love of main battleships

You ever seen Drachinifel’s channel on YouTube? He’s into the gun-era stuff, which overlapped a lot with the British Empire’s era.

Ever played the Rule the Waves video game series?

Oh, cool, there is actually a !credibledefense@sh.itjust.works.

Not much traffic, but…

seven stages of anything

Five stages?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_stages_of_grief

https://www.military-ranks.org/decorations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_naval_battles

Most recent three entries as an example:

• August 21, 2024: 21 August - In Red Sea, the Greek flagged tanker Sounion was attacked and exchanged gunfire with two Houthi manned fast attack craft. The Sounion was then hit by three projectiles and set afire before being abandoned by its crew.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_the_Sounion

Two Houthi fast attack craft engaged in a firefight with the Sounion armed guards before three projectiles struck the tanker.

Sounds like that may have been small arms, if armed guards were involved. There was a subsequent boarding action.

• 15 July, 2024 - In the Red Sea, the Panamaninan flagged tanker Bentley-I is unsuccessfully attacked by a Houthi sea drone before engaging in a gun battle with two Houthi manned fast attack craft, which are driven off.[29]

I assume that the sea drone attempted to ram. The attack craft were using guns.

• 5 March, 2024 – Sinking of the Sergey Kotov – Russian Bykov-class patrol ship, RFS Sergey Kotov is attacked and sunk by Ukrainian sea drones in the Kerch Strait.[28]

Probably ramming.

We may, surprisingly-enough, be at more of a knife-fight range than we have for a long time in naval combat, though I suppose one could argue that maybe USVs should be thought of as more like long-range torpedoes or something than watercraft.

autoplay

Submitted videos, which should be what is relevant here, don’t autoplay.

I’ll also add that:

• While the community is not explicitly one devoted to combat videos, it should be pretty clear that that is part of what is here. If someone is going to browse such a community, then they may well get videos that contain soldiers being killed.

• One argument might be “what if someone wants to browse All and click on videos and watch them and finds videos that have death in them morally-objectionable”. I don’t browse All – I think that trying to whitelist makes much more sense than blacklisting – but my personal view is that anyone that does so is implicitly accepting that they’re going to get a firehose of content of all sorts. Some of that is going to be political statements that they don’t agree with. Some is going to be content that might have language that one might find objectionable. Some might be images that one finds repulsive – we have one person on !imageai@sh.itjust.works who rather famously likes making “gross” images. Some of it might just be offensive to various parties, like off-color jokes. A very considerable amount of it might be material that parent might not want their six-year-old seeing, like discussions about sexuality or profanity. Some of it might be religiously-unacceptable to various groups.

  There are a very considerable number of things that some group, somewhere, might object to.

  I do not think that it is reasonable to repurpose NSFW to be a “might not personally like” flag that is placed on anything that anyone out there might potentially not want to see. The scope there is simply too broad. Every group somewhere has their own personal preferences, and has an incentive to try to convert “All” into a feed that matches their personal interests.

  I think that it’s fine to recognize that someone, somewhere, might have different views than someone else, and that one day, having a curation system with finer-grained classification of content added to the Threadiverse – perhaps with someone other than the submitter responsible for adding that variety of tags – that is relatively fine-grained may be a good technical solution. My personal view is that the idea of “taglists” that users or groups can publish and other users can subscribe to, which attach a classification to the content of other users, is a good way to do this. That is, User A submits content. User B – which might be a bot or a group of humans – adds that submitted item to a list they publish with a classification, which might include a recommendation to hide or to bring to the attention of a user or simply to attach a content tag. User C can choose whether-or-not to subscribe to User B’s “tag feed”, and their client perhaps how to interpret that feed. C maybe takes a delay on content visibility to provide time for tagging to be applied to new content. Tag feeds could attach tags to users or to communities. That’s a situation that I think might be workable, scales to an infinite number of content preferences, and permits for fine-grained content classification, without anyone imposing their content preferences on anyone else or requiring submitters or moderators to try to understand and adapt to all forms of content preference around the world.

  In the absence of such a solution, I am comfortable placing the burden on those who want a particular sort of content to do the filtration themselves, rather than just pushing that content to the other side of a wall for everyone else as well.

  I do not think that trying to repurpose NSFW for other content-filtering purposes is a reasonable approach. The intent of NSFW is to let people browse content in public or workplace environments. It is obviously not completely perfect – there is no one set of precisely-identical global norms for what is acceptable in public. But there is enough overlap that I think that it’s at least possible to talk about that as a concept.

I will add one final note. While I personally do not think that repurposing the NSFW flag in this way is justified, and think that down that road just lies an infinite number of arguments with various groups who don’t want to see various forms of content and want their preferences being made the norm for everyone, if the moderators here ultimately decide that doing so is their decision, I would then advocate for a different change. Keep !ukraine@sopuli.xyz’s NSFW flag off…but create a new sister community, !UkraineWarCombatVideos@sopuli.xyz. Move combat video content to that community, and flag that community NSFW, or at least require submitters there to flag a video NSFW if it contains death (or a close view of death, or whatever). Have each community link to the other in the sidebar. That keeps all the content in the former community other than combat video visible under prior rules. I think that there are many problems with this approach, starting with the “infinite groups with their own preferences who will make their own cases to alter the All feed”, and then that there are plenty of news articles that contain non-war-video content and analysis but might also contain war videos…think The War Zone. Not to mention that the content on linked pages might change, something that The War Zone often does with embedded video updates. Many different news sources do not engage in this form of censorship, and are not going to bother segregating their own content. But it’s at least a subset of the problems that the proposed “flag the whole Ukraine community NSFW” approach has.

The original idea of “NSFW” is to not show content that might be problematic for someone at work.

I personally don’t have any problem with violence being visible; an employer isn’t going to care, and nobody’s going to care if I’m viewing a violent video in a restaurant or something. But I’m American. Maybe there are places where there are cultural differences. I would like the option to not show nudity in thumbnails and inline images, but that’s not a factor for war videos. As far as I’m concerned, the community not being flagged NSFW is fine.